Hardware is hard. That's exactly why this summit exists.

The Hard Tech Venture Summit of IEEE Entrepreneurship and IEEE Systems Council it kicked off at SRI International in Menlo Park, the lab where ARPANET, Engelbart's mouse and Shakey, the world's first autonomous robot, were born. A venue that holds more IEEE Milestones than any other organization in the world. Nine. Among them, after the 2023 acquisition of Xerox PARC: Ethernet, laser printing, the graphical user interface.

Don Tan, IEEE Vice President, opened the summit praising the work of the Hard Tech Venture Summit community. He also noted that the IEEE Technical Activities Board has established an ad-hoc committee to enhance its activities in hard tech, focusing on AI adoption in hardware and systems.

Bilal Zuberi, PhD trained by Nobel Laureate Mario Molina, 18 years between General Catalyst and Lux Capital, now founder of Red Glass Ventures, split the world in two: technology risk and business risk. "The world is ready to pay for hardware that works. The question is whether founders can build it".

But Zuberi also warned: deep tech cycles repeat. Boom, abandonment, rebirth. "The YOLO tourists will fail. Hardware requires extreme systematicity". He cited Applied Intuition as a model: while everyone was building full autonomous vehicles, they focused only on simulation software. Today they're worth 15 billion dollars.

Daniel Renner, 34 years across four photonics startups, brought his scars to the stage. "The only one I failed was the one that raised the most venture capital. The three that succeeded were bootstrapped".

The failure was called Agility Communications: exceptional technology for tunable lasers, but no one had stopped to do the math. Ten of their lasers were enough to cover all US data traffic. "It's dangerous to fall in love with technology and lose sight of the business".

He learned the opposite lesson at Ortel, in 1994. A client asked for a fiber optic system to broadcast the Lillehammer Olympics. A two-year project, ten-month deadline. The last two weeks, the team slept in the lab, testing around the clock. They delivered on time. "A talented, motivated team can accomplish the impossible".

Between keynotes, ten startups took the stage - from semiconductors to navigation systems, from power electronics to robotics - pitching to investors from Bosch Ventures, At One Ventures, Samsung Next, REDDS Capital, Monozukuri Ventures and more. Three roundtable sessions gave founders and investors the chance to connect beyond the pitch deck.

For those who build hardware, this is the moment.