Adafruit CEO Limor Fried named Entrepreneur magazine Entrepreneur of 2012

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by weld • 14 years ago

96 65 14 years ago

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chopsueyar• 14 years ago

Congrats Limor!

I still want a Wave Bubble.

weld• 14 years ago

I first met Ada at the Boston 2600 meetup in Harvard Sq in 1992. I think she was 14. Deth Veggie from Cult of the Dead Cow introduced her to me. He said he could tell she was going to amount to something big. Heh. Congrats Ada!

rdl2• 14 years ago

I met her around the same time when we were both hanging around MIT in the summer; I think I was 15 or 16. It was clear then too.

tptacek2• 14 years ago

You've got me beat by 3 years. I think I met her for the first time at Pumpcon. She's also one of the nicest people. I tell my daughter about her all the time (it's no use, she still wants to be an author instead of an engineer).

georgemcbay• 14 years ago

'Sup weldpond?

I first met her IRL at a Boston 2600 meeting too, at the Cambridgeside Galleria. IIRC she was being escorted around by Rogue Agent and Sarah Gordon.

Already knew her on irc +hack/#hack back from when she was 'lem0n', which Deth Veggie still calls her (he still calls me by one of my old handles too).

(I used a bunch of handles back then, on irc mostly gfm or geo)

dhughes• 14 years ago

I've never met her.

vaxdigitalnh• 14 years ago

I love the idea behind this company. I wish her every success. We need more entrepreneurs with this type of vision.

Codhisattva2• 14 years ago

Exactly. (Frustrating that the other thread hi-jacked the attitude.)

meaty13• 14 years ago

Am I the only one who finds the 'maker movement' slightly embarrassing. There are plenty of us before Limor who did the same stuff without the fanfare and movement crap.

This isn't a flame - I'm just surprised that the application of spin managed to produce such a ton of noise.

jamesbritt2• 14 years ago

What do you mean by "same stuff"?

Were you selling kits and tools to people who might not have previously thought of themselves as makers, making it super easy to jump in and get started? This is what I think she's got the attention for.

meaty13• 14 years ago

Yeah I actually designed two kits for maplin in the 90s before they started shipping velleman shit and containers full of Chinese plastic crap.

Everyone sold the tools, kits and parts already. All that had been achieved is the application of hype and turning a bunch of prepackaged modules into a way of excusing the user from having to know what the hell they are doing.

It's turned engineering into painting by numbers powered by social hype.

eaurouge• 14 years ago

Yes, hobbyist electronic kits were available, both in the US and the UK, in the 90s.

CodeCube• 14 years ago

Just because others have come before doesn't negate the fact that someone else may have reached a broader audience through the use of marketing and branding.

danilocampos3• 14 years ago

You're embarrassed by a successful entrepreneur?

Can you explain to me what is embarrassing to you?

Is it the making money part?

Is it the understanding a market and serving it part?

Is it the education and knowledge sharing to better energize and expand the market part?

Is it the persistence, perseverance and timing part?

Is it the creation of a legion of folks who never would have participated had they not been given the encouragement and clear marketplace part?

Is it the successful marketing part?

Or is it some other part that I have failed to mention? We live in a world where people made billions selling tobacco, blood diamonds, sub-prime mortgages and Justin Bieber albums. But even without those, I can see very little embarrassing about an entrepreneur channeling passion into advocacy and sales of products customers clearly value.

meaty13• 14 years ago

Yes I will.

I find it embarrassing in the same way as I find computer science portrayals in movies embarrassing. Hax0r the planet etc...

Making money - selling overpriced modules and branded crap for way more than marginal profit (compared to say RS/Farnell/Digikey) and shipping an identity rather than tools to solve problems.

Understanding the market - actually they created a new market full of flashing LED cube machines and crap which actually performs no useful function other than to make other participants in the marketed identity look cool. About the most intelligent use for all of this I've seen (which isn't served elsewhere) is a computer controlled cannabis farm and that isn't exactly going to serve the intelligence of the person who built it well [1]

Education - there is very little going on there. Every person I've seen jump into this comes crawling to me for advice but then shits a brick the moment something more complicated than a 4 banger calculator is pulled. You know what a complex number is right? What do you mean you don't understand why that 10 ohm 1/4W resistor smoked across a 12v source - do you know what Ohms law is? The answer is usually "no - we just googled and copied the picture".

Persistence, perseverance, timing? None are relevant.

Marketing - the bugbear of the whole thing. They created an identity which actually serves the participants badly.

Actually you just nailed it - it is equivalent to selling Justin Bieber albums.

[1] Sub-rant - the hacks I've seen people use including twist-n-tape mains cables are going to kill someone one day...

stbtrax• 14 years ago

I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think more embarrassing are characters like Bre Pettis, who take an open source project(reprap) commercialize it, and then proceed to not open source their derived works.

tptacek2• 14 years ago

I think the same thing about Google. We all have 'grep', don't we? Ooooh, look at the big company, running grep on 1,000,000 computers. Give me 1,000,000 computers and I'll run grep on them too! Don't any of you people remember Archie? Google is just Archie with a bunch of movement crap.

xradionut2• 14 years ago

Yeah, there are a ton of us old farts that have been sniffing solder flumes and flipping switches for years. :)

Adafruit and newer companies of this ilk fill a need for us oldtimers and the newcomers. Many of my old sources of various parts and kits are dead, evolved or just didn't handle the transition to the internet well.

meaty13• 14 years ago

The kits didn't survive, but the parts did.

The problem is no-one knows how to use the parts unless they are assembled into kits.

The whole maker movement solves this by making kits, therefore raising the bedrock abstraction for knowledge way too high.

The better solution would be to teach people how to use the parts, which is my problem.

jasongullickson• 14 years ago

Hang on let me pause my Creative Labs Nomad and finish this call on my Palm Treo so I can respond to your comment; oh wait...

Just because something is first doesn't mean it is best. Limor took something cool and made it awesome, and you can be sure that in a generation or two someone else will take her work further.

I grew up hacking on Heathkits and reading Forrest Mimms books and just as Mimms did for me as a child, Adafruit's products turn a new generation on to the fun, creativity and power locked up in understanding electronics.

The fact of the matter is that DIY electronics was fading out by the 1990's in no small part due to the ever tightening noose of proprietary technology and planned obsolecense in consumer electronics. In this environment, Adafruit was able to make soldering sexy and fabrication fashionable; how could anyone find fault in that?

meaty13• 14 years ago

You mean Handspring Treo - yes I had one - a 180g...

No awesome here if you ask me. It is packaged in shiny and shipped out of the door.

Forrest Mimms books were crap to be honest. They were recipe books with very little practical use past stringing together hacks and full of all sorts of errors. Sort of a precursor to this.

I think you were brought up with the electronics assembly culture, not the electronics design culture. The two are very different.

jfischer• 14 years ago

I welcome the maker movement and I'm glad that what I did as a kid is now cool.

I got my start in engineering by reading the manuals of my father's HeathKit projects and by building a simple computer using a Z80 and a few other chips that I got through mail order and Radio Shack. Back then, having a personal computer was much less common and I could imagine building something roughly comparable to what was on the market (Altair, Apple II, C64,...). A generation before me tinkered with Ham Radio.

Today, HeathKit is out of business and Radio Shack sells overpriced consumer goods. Our electronics is now much more sophisticated and there exists a much wider gap between what one can do from on their own vs. commercial products. I think there was a dry period after the rise of PCs and before the maker movement, where there wasn't much opportunity for a hardware hobbyist. Limor and others like her are coming up with really interesting projects that are still relevant in today's world. I appreciate their re-imagination and invigoration of this hobby and hope to get my son interested when he's a bit older.

phodo• 14 years ago

A bit of Schadenfreude? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude

Be happy! A rising tide raises all ships (boats / skiffs / rafts / swimmers / floating bathtubs).

jdale27• 14 years ago

A bit of Schadenfreude? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude

You might want to actually read the first sentence of the article you just linked to. meaty is not experiencing "pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others".

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

When I was in high school I joined the Amateur Radio club, I built a radio from a kit that we purchased from a company called Heathkit, I talked to high school students in Vancouver Canada and Hawaii and Texas and Puerto Rico on that radio, for 'free' with no Internet. I say all that not to brag but to relate how it changed me. I went from a kid living in what was the small town of Las Vegas to talking to people all over the place with a piece of gear I built from parts. That changed my thinking permanently from "people could build something to do ..." to "I could build something to do ..."

I was truly sad that as my kids were growing up the world was actively conspiring to keep the knowledge about how things work away from them. In the US at least there is a tremendous amount of narrative that rides along on the 'don't try this at home' meme. Silly stuff like learning to build campfires and sharpen a pocket knife, and stuff like changing the timing of your vehicle's ignition. The problem with that is that kids believe it. They start believing its somebody else's job to invent the new things, to think outside the box, and to do stuff.

Into that sadness walked folks who said "You know, I'm going to make stuff you can tinker with." "I'm going to sell kits for people to make silly things and amazing things and I'm going to provide all the information they need to modify or improve or destroy them." They needed a word for people who did stuff like that. "Do-er" never caught on, "Hobbyist" was to generic, "Hacker" got sideswiped by the media, "Nerd" and "Geek" were epithets, so somebody started calling these folks "Makers" in the sense that they made things. And its wonderfully non-specific so people who "make" fabric are just as much makers and people who "make" technology gizmos.

Over the last 10 years the pendulum has swung back a bit and folks like Limor have helped that effort. That folks would embrace that and push back against those who would protect the status quo of not letting you know how things work, sometimes it requires a noisy and brash "movement."

People are much more motivated when they are told "No you can't know that" it seems.

wglb• 14 years ago

Judging from the comments, yes, you are.

meaty13• 14 years ago

Judging by the ratio of upvotes to downvotes, I think there is a divided opinion which needs discussing. I'm open to both sides of the argument.

helmut_hed• 14 years ago

There's a great deal of value in popularizing, mass producing, and otherwise making technology accessible to the general public. And it's real work, too - it's just not the strictly technical stuff we all love, but solving other problems like organization, publicity, fundraising, etc. etc. Presumably that's why her award is "Entrepreneur of the Year" and not "Circuit Hacker of the Year". IMO it's worthy of celebration.

noonespecial• 14 years ago

What does it mean when I discover that the things I've been doing forever have suddenly become a "movement"?

I was right all along.

(Perhaps if the movement gets big enough, my son won't get bullied and called a freak for tinkering like I did. Sounds like win to me.)

tricky_t2• 14 years ago

"There are plenty of us before Limor who did the same stuff without the fanfare and movement crap."

That's true. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any way for people to buy your kits and learn from your vast engineering knowledge, so they've all started giving their money to someone else. Whose fault is that?

Talk is cheap. Consider putting your money where your mouth is.

MichaelAO• 14 years ago

Well done! I've enjoyed putting together a few of the kits from Adafruit. My favorite (not the most technically challenging) is definitely the "tv-b-gone". Taking that thing into a bar in my college town has provided a lot of laughs. There maybe some room to be critical towards the fan fare of the maker movement, but all in all it's a positive step towards individuals becoming interested in science/technology.

AceJohnny2• 14 years ago

While sold by Adafruit (among others), the TV-B-Gone was designed by Mitch Altman [1], who's as cool a frood as can be.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Altman

davidrudder• 14 years ago

The DIY electronics movement is entering an incredible phase, similar to what happened to the Internet during the post-boom decade. Companies like Amazon, Google, Twilio, WordPress and others made it easy for non-techies to build awesome applications. Now projects like Arduino, Electric Imp, Little Bits, and Raspberry Pi are doing the same for electronics. You can make a great project without needing to be an electrical engineer. The Internet gave the masses the power of communication and information. DIY electronics are giving the masses the power to build the world around them. Adafruit (and sparkfun!) are bringing that incredible tech to the world.

Adafruit CEO Limor Fried named Entrepreneur magazine Entrepreneur of 2012

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