After working on hardware teams in various capacities for 6 or 7 years, I&#x27;m not surprised. Startups need momentum - especially massively successful startups. And hardware, at this point in time, isn&#x27;t something that you can easily build momentum with.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I don&#x27;t think this is because of any inherent difference between hardware and software. Sure, the requirement to physically build something adds a bit of a delay, but computer simulation is so good these days that the actual building bit is pretty infrequent. Plus, turnaround time is usually pretty short - two weeks lead was pretty standard for the shops I&#x27;ve worked with and at.<p>No, the problem IMO is that frankly, our software is shit. The end users of, for example, Solidworks, aren&#x27;t the people paying for the software, so there&#x27;s no direct market feedback. Mechanical design software was some of the earliest software ever written, and it&#x27;s been some of the slowest to change. The hiccups are negotiable if you&#x27;re working serially and alone, but the second you want to do parallel development on something, or to collaborate with anyone else, you&#x27;re stuck throwing workaround after workaround on an already slow process. And then there&#x27;s the catastrophic state of CAM software, BOM integration, inventory management, keeping the books on all that... everything is its own walled system, nothing talks to anything else, and everything sucks. I&#x27;ve spent literally days before duplicating information between Arena and Solidworks drawings -- and they even actually have an integration.<p>I&#x27;m wholly convinced hardware unicorns are so rare because the toolchain we use to build hardware is so bad. It stays bad for historical and short-sighted economic reasons. That is to say, the whole situation is ripe for change. And it&#x27;s not hard to do, either: I coded up 85% of an MVP for a solid model merge tool that would make solidworks files more or less git compatible in just a month or two. If you want to play with that, it&#x27;s a hacked-up VBA macro called smgimport&#x2F;smgexport available here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Badg&#x2F;SolidworksUtils" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Badg&#x2F;SolidworksUtils</a>. I have a lot of thoughts on how to do this right. If you&#x27;re working in this space and want advice, I&#x27;m happy to help.