Hardware Podcasts

#010: From Pebble to Intel: can hardware startups beat the big players?

Coredump Sessions · 11 Jun 2025 · 59m · Episode 11

What this episode covers

Kean Wong, former VP of Software at Pebble and current CTO at Igor, discusses scaling hardware startups against big tech, emphasizing that startups can outpace giants by staying nimble and hiring from developer communities. He details Pebble's strategy of using hackathons and community engagement to recruit talent, maintaining a 6-week release cadence to drive evangelism, and investing 10-20% of engineering effort into infrastructure and automated testing. Wong also explains how he applies these lessons at his current company, Igor, by leveraging AI tools for software development while recognizing their limitations in complex firmware and embedded systems.

Most relevant to

early-stage companies and companies scaling up

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Igor, Intel, Facebook, Palm, Memfault
Products
Pebble
Tools
Cursor, Claude
Also
SwiftUI

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