Building the machine that builds the machine:
By: Joshua Green
Tags: Company Structure, Consumer Electronics, Founders, Growing Teams

Building the machine that builds the machine:

A widely used quote over the last 4–5 years, certainly to those who follow Tesla or SpaceX who I am huge fans of.

But it captures the essence of what I wanted to share regarding building a consumer electronics business. As founders with zero experience building a company, Zach and I have very much enjoyed the challenge of building the company that builds the product. Specifically, I am referring to which functions or teams we hired for and built out at Mysa as we grew from just an idea to multiple products serving tens of thousands of customers.

Back in 2017 I remember us looking at another consumer electronics business that had ~80 people and one product. We could not understand why they needed so many people to ship one product. Oh, how naive we were… haha.

I am sure there are many successful paths here but I thought it would help if I shared our path, what worked well and what we would have done differently.

Order in which teams (sometimes just one person) were formed at Mysa over a span of 3 years:

Software and Hardware Marketing (B2C) Admin Customer Support Finance Core Management Operations Sales (B2B) People and Culture Manufacturing and Supply chain (shared between Hardware and Operations) Utility Relations Product

General thoughts on timing:

It’s funny that Product was the most recent team formed at Mysa when our whole business model is about building and selling products. I think this was possible as myself and Zach were very hands-on on the product side especially in the first 2 years of existence and it was very clear what we needed to build. I think this worked out well for the first couple of years, but we are super pumped to have an amazing product team who are working hard to bring out current and future products to another level!

Admin: we hired an office coordinator as employee #14 and we were pre-revenue. This might sound early but it was definitely the right move. It allowed the rest of the company especially Zach and I to stay focused.

Like so many companies before us, we hired for B2B sales too early. We had raised $700k in B2C pre-orders for our product and then formed a B2B sales function before even launching the product. In hindsight, this was the wrong move as the company wasn’t ready for it, and it diluted our efforts on what was important at that time. ~100k B2C units later we now have a B2B/Industry Partnerships function that is just starting to fire on all cylinders.

People and Culture: Several people said we were too early to hire for this function (at approximately ~35 people) but in hindsight we could have hired for this role 6 months earlier and have still been better off. We might not have found the amazing Head of People and Culture that we did had we hired earlier but that’s a different story. I could talk about People and Culture for a very long time but if I were to sum up why I would recommend starting this function early, say at 20–25 employees, it’s because of the massive upside opportunities, not because of “protecting the downside” as so many people view the HR function.

Manufacturing and Supply chain: Even though the folks on our hardware team had little to no manufacturing experience, they were able to rise to the occasion and work with our contract manufacturer to successfully execute our first 10k units run, 2nd, 3rd, etc. There were certainly bumps in the road and it was certainly not cost optimized, but they learned really fast! 100k+ units later, and on our 3rd new product introduction (NPI) our Operations function is heavily involved in our supply chain and they are doing remarkable work to continuous cost improvements that go right to improve our gross margin on the products. Summarized, don’t worry about cost too much for the first year or so, but focus on learning, and then hire dedicated folks for cost optimization and supply chain robustness later.

I hope these comments help others who are wondering about their path. Certainly every company is different with different considerations when it comes to the order in which they hire for.