Building Hardware Companies and Choosing Co-Founders with Michael Hochberg

Michael Hochberg (https://www.linkedin.com/in/hochberg/) is a physicist and a founder of four successful startup companies in semiconductors and telecommunications, including Luxtera, acquired by Cisco in 2019, and Elenion, acquired by Nokia in 2020. He won the highest awards for young scientists in Singapore (NRF Fellowship) and the United States (PECASE), is an author on over 60 patents, and has been involved in the creation of over 30 companies in biotech and applications of silicon photonics.

Highlights:

- In college Michael would tie together clusters of Dell machines to replicate the performance of supercomputers.

- The core of building a successful company in Michael’s view is hiring the best people. The best can solve really hard problems but hiring mediocre people results in even trivial problems being unsolvable.

- Silicon photonics chips are replacing things that could previously only be done in silicon. Data centres and telecom systems are now dominated by silicon photonics.

- There’s a fundamental difference between co-founders and early employees but that line can often be blurred, often at the peril of the founding team.

- Michael says that founders don’t do enough diligence on their co-founders. Companies often last longer than most marriages so it’s important to throughly reference check your co-founders, ask specific and tactical open-ended questions of them, and see them deliver tangible results before you start a company together.

- It’s important to be aligned on what success means to you and your co-founders. Two people may have very different definitions of what “a lot of money” means — that could be enough money to buy a house for one person and $100M for another.

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