In 2014, I left Teehan+Lax along with Peter Nitsch, to found a startup we called Wattage. 

The vision for Wattage was a future where anyone could manipulate matter. Where we needn’t settle for the generic, mass-produced things that currently line store shelves. A future where we can easily upgrade our old devices instead of throwing them away. Or reprogramming them to do entirely new and useful things. 

We wanted to make it so creating and selling hardware was as easy as writing and publishing a blog post. You shouldn’t need to be an electrical engineer or an industrial designer to create electronic devices. Nor should you have to worry about supply chain or distribution if you wanted to sell them. We believed it was possible to eliminate all of that complexity, so the average person could easily create highly customized hardware without any electronics know-how, all within their browser.

Or at least that was the plan. We set out with ambitious plans but after a year of development, we ran out of cash and shut down the business. I did manage to secure a deal that allowed us to return our investors’ money, so while we didn’t exactly birth a unicorn, at least it wasn’t a total loss. 

It was a learning experience to say the least, which I wrote about when we announced the closure.