I'm definitely all in 
At this point, I don't think we're likely to "fail" per se - we've already been successful, after all! Now it's just a question of how well we grow. Right now we're on track to build a company like Arduino - a viable business focused on providing prototyping tools for people who need them (engineers, designers, students, artists, hobbyists). The question is: can we do more? Can we provide a platform not just for development but for supporting products in production? And can we solve enough problems there to build a viable business? If we can't, we've already succeeded, in my opinion.
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Did you like electronics all your life or did it start later on?
Your profile says you do a little bit of everything - engineering, design and business. Which do you prefer? Are you more comfortable in the lab or in a boardroom?
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Great questions @punknubbins! Here's the story behind the scenes:
Carriers treat hardware like ours very differently from phones. You've basically got two paths: high-bandwidth plans for handsets/tablets/computers/hotspots, and low-bandwidth plans for everything else.
The economics between the two different businesses are very different, and in order to make money in both areas, carriers charge differently. The low-bandwidth plans are much cheaper to start out, but they cost more per MB.
Most of the applications we're focused on don't have any media (images, audio, video). Just short messages. That's what our platform is optimized for, and so it makes more sense for us to focus on low-bandwidth M2M plans than high-bandwidth plans. This means that people who create these low-bandwidth applications will spend less money on a monthly basis so long as their application fits within the constraints (short, relatively infrequent messages rather than streaming media).
Because of that, if you're streaming media, you should not use Spark. It's the wrong platform (at least today). It's not what our stuff is designed for. That will probably change at some point in the future, but for now we'd rather solve the problem really well for some people than solve it just okay for everybody.
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Later on! Here's my first-ever Arduino prototype, which I built in January 2012:
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I love love love doing front-end web design. My favorite days are the days that I write code. Unfortunately as we grow, those days are becoming more rare, which is the right thing for the business. Honestly, I love my job, I love that I get to do this stuff everyday, and I am happy to do whatever it is that lets me keep doing this forever
How did you roll into electronics? 
I was in business school when I started Spark. I was in a "new ventures" class where I was supposed to write a business plan, and I was working on Spark at the time. So I wrote a 40-page business plan (as did everyone else), but unlike everyone else, I started building prototypes. I was really annoyed at people with an MBA attitude where they feel like there's supposed to be two founders: one business, and one engineering, and therefore as a business person you don't have to know anything about engineering. Obviously people should specialize, but I wanted to be a competent engineer on my own, so I started building prototypes. Over time, I became a mediocre electrical engineer (and I only got there because of some spectacular mentorship from @AndyW, one of our advisors), a mediocre developer, and a pretty decent designer. I still do a lot of our front-end web design and development.
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Thanks for your reply. It is disappointing to hear. The kick starter compares a 4Gig $40/month plan, that works out to $.01/MB, to your $3+1/MB plan. This is several orders of magnitude more expensive. Someone is being taken advantage of here, not trying to be rude as it is probably spark as much as it is us, but this doesn’t seem like the game changer that your previous low cost solution were.
So you are still personally involved into the development and not only managing it?
You're thinking about it per megabyte instead of total cost; the total cost is much much cheaper for these types of applications, which is what really matters.
And honestly, I don't think we're getting fleeced. There is a fixed cost of adding a device to a network, and if they just charged the same rate per megabyte as they do for the high-bandwidth plans, the carriers might not be covering their own fixed costs.
@zach, you clearly have a mind of innovation and revolution, something I would call an “entrepreneur” mindset or simply put: a leader who is willing to take risks to bring things to the next level. Is this something that you always had since young age or did you work on that? To get to where you are now, would you say they were it opportunities that presented on your path or opportunities that you created?
According to github, I've made 553 commits in the last year, so I guess I'm still doing development
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good question and it's something I've been asked a few times recently. I am definitely "willing to take risks", but why? I think it's not that I'm more or less risk-averse than anybody else, but rather that I perceive risks differently, and I find that most of the time the downside of the "risk" isn't actually that bad.
Consider the decision to start Spark. I was in business school, my friends were all getting jobs making six digits a year as consultants, and I decided to start a company instead. Was that risky? Well, I didn't want to be a consultant (I did that already). If I wasn't starting a company, I would've wanted to be a Product Manager at a company like Google. Except they never would have hired me into that job, because I didn't have any tech experience. So starting a company felt like a small risk to me; if I was successful, then I got to run a company (woohoo!) and if I was unsuccessful, then at least I would have "tech experience" and could get a job that I really wanted. All I'd give up was 1 or 2 years salary, and that's not really any worse than going to grad school (where you also have to pay tuition!).
So in conclusion, I'm very eager to take risks, but it's mostly because I don't think the risks are all that scary
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Say Shia LeBeouf is hunting you like an animal in the forest. He is faster than you, stronger than you, and in his native habitat. You are smarter than him though. How do you escape Shia LeBeouf???
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Hi Zach, two questions:
I know that Kickstarter has been a major source of funding for Spark, but ignoring crowdfunding, when did you start looking for external financing?
Did you had certain milestones that Spark needed to hit before reaching out to the next funding source?
Decepticons.
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In the summer of 2012 I raised $25K from a dean at my graduate school who was an angel investor. that gave me funding to put together the Spark Socket kickstarter campaign. We then got another $25K from HAXLR8R (the incubator we did in Shenzhen), which funded the development of the Spark Core. A month before the Spark Core went live, we raised $250K from angel investors. The Core got us $568K, most of which went to manufacturing, but some of which went to hiring. We raised another $300K from Lion Wells Capital (@avidan on our forums was our lead investor) just after the Spark Core campaign, and that got us through delivery of the Core. The finally we raised our Series A in the summer of 2014, which is where we were now.
Basically our funding vs. milestones looked like this:
- $25K friends and family: concept, no team (just me)
- $25K incubator: concept, small team (3 people)
- $250K angel investors: concept, small team (4 people)
- $300K seed round: market traction (Kickstarter), small team (6 people)
- ~$4MM+ Series A: market traction, product delivered, larger team (11 people)
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Zach, Do you think we will see a Spark IPO in the next year or two ?