#062 - How a hardware SaaS company wants to help you not get lost in your data during product development, with Michael Corr of Duro Labs, USA

The Hardware Entrepreneur

I had Michael Corr as guest, who is the co-founder and CEO of Duro Labs from LA, southern California. I already had a guest from LA in episode 25, Shaun Arora of Make in LA, the hardware accelerator. Michael is also in a way supporting the hardware ecosystem, but he’s not from an accelerator. He’s helping hardware companies with their developments and he has a product for it.

His product is at the interface between software and hardware. He’s been deep in hardware development, designing and manufacturing all kinds of hardware products for more than 15 years both in the US and outside. Hardware products he has designed range from drones, IoT devices, wearables, telecom equipment, cleantech. His team is coming out now with a cloud-based product.

Many talk enthusiastically about digital manufacturing and that there’s a renaissance in manufacturing, but actually still too many use such “sophisticated” tools as email or simple spreadsheets. How do you avoid miscommunication between teams in design, in manufacturing, inside and outside your organisation? How do you make sure you can keep track of all the data you produce during your development without people working with inconsistent versions of your database? How do you circumvent getting inaccurate data, spec sheets, part numbers, drawings into your design? These are all some of the questions he addresses in this interview. Beyond these, we also talked about other pressing issues for agile hardware development a reality or why we don’t have revision control in CAD design similar to how it exists in software development with git repository.

Enjoy this episode!

Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com

Show highlights can be seen below:

• The solution to a common pain point across various endeavors in designing and manufacturing hardware [4:30]
• Who can benefit from Duro and the variety of problems it can solve that differentiate it on the market [8:12]
• What some of the most used management tools cannot give to today’s engineers that Duro can [16:23]
• How the gap between prototyping and mass production stage is slowing down the hardware industry in its struggle to catch up with the software industry [20:25]
• State of agile development and which companies are making progress in this respect [27:24]
• Stages of the hardware development where agile will have the most impact [35:12]
• Why version management tools aren’t common in hardware development [42:12]
• If you could go back in time in your 20s, what notes would you give yourself? [46:06]
• If you had to name a book, which one had the biggest impact on your entrepreneurial career? [47:43]
• Why and when to be process-oriented [48:49]
• Being in different worlds for development and its challenges [51:08]
• What is the best way to reach Michael? [53:28]