Hardware Entrepreneurs Who Brought Difficult Products to Market

Making chips manufacturable. Noyce co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 with seven colleagues who left Shockley's lab, and his 1959 planar integrated circuit, building on Jean Hoerni's planar process, could be mass-produced on silicon wafers. In 1968 he and Gordon Moore founded Intel, with Andy Grove running operations. The hard part was manufacturing yield: getting enough working chips from each wafer to make money. He died in 1990.

Cheap computers through vertical integration. Tramiel, an Auschwitz survivor who started Commodore repairing typewriters in the Bronx, bought the chip maker MOS Technology in 1976, which let Commodore build its own processors. That control of the supply chain made the Commodore 64 of 1982 cheap enough to become one of the best-selling computers ever, with engineers such as Chuck Peddle and Bob Yannes behind the hardware. His ruthless price wars also hurt rivals and Commodore itself.

Cheap and cheerful, sometimes too cheap. Sinclair brought pocket calculators and then the ZX80, ZX81 and ZX Spectrum to British homes at prices far below rivals, with designers such as Richard Altwasser cutting chip counts to the bone and Timex in Dundee doing the manufacturing. The Spectrum launched a generation of British programmers and games companies. Reliability problems and the electric C5 tricycle's commercial failure in 1985 showed the risks. He died in 2021.

From Acorn to ARM in Cambridge. Hauser, an Austrian physicist, co-founded Acorn Computers in Cambridge in 1978 with Chris Curry, winning the contract for the BBC Micro, which Acorn struggled at first to manufacture in the volumes schools demanded. Acorn's engineers Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber designed the low-power ARM processor, and ARM was spun out in 1990 to license designs rather than make chips, a model that took it into most of the world's phones.

The chip foundry. Chang, after decades at Texas Instruments, founded TSMC in Taiwan in 1987 with government backing as a pure-play foundry, making chips designed by other companies rather than its own. Mastering ever smaller manufacturing processes, with enormous investment and engineering discipline, let fabless companies such as Nvidia and Apple exist. The concentration of advanced chipmaking on one island is now a strategic worry.

Thousands of prototypes. Dyson built 5,127 prototypes of a bagless cyclone vacuum cleaner over about five years, then licensed it in Japan when British manufacturers refused it, before launching the DC01 under his own name in 1993. He later moved manufacturing from Wiltshire to Malaysia to cut costs, which drew criticism, and his company's electric car project was abandoned in 2019 as too expensive to bring to market.

Graphics chips without a factory. Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem to make 3D graphics chips for PCs, and nearly ran out of money after its first chip flopped before the RIVA 128 and GeForce succeeded. Relying on TSMC for manufacturing, Nvidia focused on chip design and the CUDA software platform, which turned its graphics processors into the main hardware for artificial intelligence. He remains chief executive.

The first Tesla. Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning founded Tesla Motors in 2003 on the idea that laptop-style lithium-ion cells could power a fast electric sports car, with the AC Propulsion tzero as inspiration and Lotus supplying the chassis. The Roadster's transmission, battery safety and costs proved far harder than planned, and Eberhard was pushed out as chief executive in 2007 before it shipped in 2008. He later sued and settled over credit as founder.

Manufacturing at the edge. Musk, an early investor who became Tesla's chairman and then chief executive, pushed it from the Roadster to mass-market cars, and described the 2018 Model 3 ramp, with production lines rebuilt and a tent assembly line, as production hell. At SpaceX, founded in 2002, he drove reusable rocket boosters that land and fly again. Engineers such as JB Straubel and SpaceX's Tom Mueller did much of the technical work, and his management and politics are fiercely contested.

A $35 computer. Upton, worried about falling applications to Cambridge's computer science course, co-founded the Raspberry Pi Foundation with colleagues and launched a credit-card-sized computer in 2012. Demand overwhelmed the first production runs, and the team moved manufacturing to Sony's factory in Pencoed in Wales to keep quality and price under control. Tens of millions have since been sold to schools, hobbyists and industry, and Raspberry Pi listed in London in 2024.

Crowdfunded hardware. Migicovsky founded Pebble and in 2012 raised over $10 million on Kickstarter for an e-paper smartwatch with a week-long battery, then had to learn mass manufacturing in China to deliver it to backers months late. Pebble sold over a million watches but could not compete with Apple and was sold to Fitbit in 2016. After Google released the software as open source, he revived the watches in 2025.

Virtual reality headsets. Luckey built VR headset prototypes in his parents' garage and in 2012 launched the Oculus Rift on Kickstarter with Brendan Iribe and others, with John Carmack's engineering help, tackling the latency and display problems that had sunk earlier VR. Facebook bought Oculus in 2014 before the consumer Rift shipped in 2016. He was pushed out in 2017 and co-founded Anduril, which builds autonomous defence hardware, a controversial turn.