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Interview: Ask Limor Fried About Open-Source Hardware and Adafruit
With her signature pink hair, MIT engineer Limor Fried has become a force in the maker movement. Last year she was awarded Entrepreneur of the Year by Entrepreneur Magazine, and her company, Adafruit Industries, did $10 million in sales. Limor has agreed to take some time away from soldering and running a new company to answer your questions about hardware, electronics, and Adafruit. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.
Do you intend to take the idea of wearable computing much beyond the eye-candy fashion accessories AdaFruit currently offers? It seems to me that there are opportunities for things like shoes which provide a built-in pedometer, for example.
I've been a follower of your youtube channel for years. I've watched Adifruit grow from a little corner of your apt to a $10mill company.
I loved the old school hacking vids you used to post. Not only were they informative but also gave us a glimpse of what your true passion is.
As your company has grown Ive watched you have to transition more from a Geeky EE who gets to engineer cool stuff to someone that has to deal with the headaches of trying to run a company.
As a ME myself and my wife a CE, we got into engineering because we LOVED engineering. But now that we are 10+ years into our careers, most employers want to push us toward project management or flat out management and we get to do less and less of the "core" engineering we love to do.
Do you find it difficult to balance the "I want to do EE engineering" with "I have a $10 mill company to run"?
Do you miss being an engineer first vs a business owner first? Will you hand most of the business reins over to some MBA type, giving you more time to go back to those engineering roots you love?
How did you get the money to start-up for Adafruit? Did you use VC, if so how did you avoid becoming their indentured servant?
As a happy owner of the Adafruit Blue&White 16x2 LCD+Keypad Kit for Raspberry Pi I have used and modified the software that originally came with this kit.
There are some obvious uses for this kit. Two examples would be displaying its IP address and using the keypad to shutdown the Pi.
However, when I was modifying the software I could not find specific instructions on how to contribute software back to your site. I just checked again this morning (even the FAQ), and, if these instructions exist, I could not find them.
How does one contribute back?
Companies like "sparkfun" and the hordes of china knockoff makers must really take a bite out of AdaFruit's sales figures. I see a lot of times when you come out with a new product sparkfun copies it within a month, and china knockoffs are flooded on ebay within weeks. How does that affect your bottom line when you put all the hard work into designing it and even writing an entire arduino library for your product and then other companies come along and sell a knock off of your product?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.