Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enough
Categories: VC, Startup, Design
Summary
Deep tech founders waste engineering talent by micromanaging individual purchases instead of implementing proper budgeting systems—waiting to save $1,500 on a power supply costs far more than $100K/week payroll. Infrastructure decisions compound across teams and require upfront planning, not reactive approval workflows.
Key Takeaways
- Stop approving individual purchases under $3K. Implement departmental budgets instead so $100K+/week employees aren't blocked on tools. The cost of delayed hiring productivity dwarfs any savings from auction hunting.
- Spending review must happen at the budgeting stage, not the transaction stage. Understand your resource buckets upfront so teams trade-off intelligently within constraints rather than waiting for founder approval.
- Deep tech companies (biotech, hardware, robotics) buy thousands of things continuously—PCBs, microscopes, 3D printers, resin. Pure software founders can skip this, but anything else requires procurement infrastructure from day one.
- Hiring talented, expensive engineers means giving them tools without friction. If you're catching them on $3K power supplies, you've lost the optimization game—they'll go somewhere with better logistics.
- The Picasso principle: professionals talk logistics, not strategy. Most startup lessons are local/contextual, but infrastructure and procurement patterns repeat universally across deep tech companies.
Related topics
Transcript Excerpt
My name is Max Hodak. I'm the CEO of a company called Science. Um, we're going to talk a little bit about infrastructure at startups. So, I've spent most of my life working on brain computer interfaces. This is almost 20 years ago now. Um, I started my career as an undergrad working in a lab at Duke. This is from our very first Society for Neuroscience conference. The experiment I was working on back then was if you put electrodes in the brain of a monkey and then give a monkey a joystick and you record the neural activity as it's playing a game. If you make the joystick say go the cursor go sideways when the when they push forward on the joystick which does the brain do? Does the brain represent the joystick or the screen or something else? Um there turns out that there are neurons that d…