Haha we've got a long way to go before that happens!
hey fearless leader, what do you think the future holds for Spark?
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@zach, great to have you in AMA, what will the position of Spark in the area of Internet of Things in coming years
Hi Zach,
Can you comment on the status of getting the Electron PTCRB certified as an end product for low volume startups?
Thank You
My goal is to do whatever's necessary to enable the next generation of connected products (i.e. the Internet of Things). Our business plan basically looks like this:
- Find a group of people who want to make "connected products" but are facing roadblocks
- Eliminate the roadblocks
- Repeat
The Spark Core and the Photon were our first generation, where the "group of people" that we recognized is engineers, artists, designers, students, and teachers who wanted to make "smart home" products.
The Electron is the next generation, where the "group of people" is generally the same (engineers, artists, designers, students, and teachers), but the products are different: now they're remote, mobile, and mission-critical connected products (where cellular makes more sense).
I don't know what's next, exactly; we've got enough on our plate now with the Photon and Electron, but as you guys face roadblocks, let us know what they are so we can help take them down!
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We're still learning here so I don't have a final answer yet. However I am fairly confident that we will be able to provide a certification path that says "If you use the Electron with our SIM card and follow our design guidelines, your product will not require any further certifications of any kind."
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@zach - What has been the hardest decision youâve had to make in the past year?
Where did you get the nickname âSalt and Pepperâ from?
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Moving our headquarters from Minneapolis to San Francisco. It was the first time that we had to make a decision where the best interests of Spark were not perfectly aligned with the best interests of the people who work at Spark. That was super hard to do, I did not handle it as well as I could have, and I learned a lot about being a CEO from the experience.
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How does the âsupport teamâ at home feel about the whole Spark business? I know itâs quite time consuming, and youâre working weekends as well. Arenât they ever like âcouldnât ya put that internet-thingy of yours away for a moment?â
Could you give us some guidance on how to approach IFTTT to build a channel for a product based on Spark?
I would imagine that we will need to provide them some Spark APIs with a specific core ID key. However, how do you envision this working when each customer creates its own account with access to only its own products, but our team still needs access to all of them. Would there be a âproduct IDâ key or something like that?
Very much so! On the plus side, I get to bring my dog to work, so my wife is super happy that little Hunter gets love from our team during the day.
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Hi Zach,
What do you think of people saying you have to work in a company to get experience before starting a company, did you ever said that to yourself?
And as a founder of a hardware startup, what do you think is the most important thing to start working on for hardware/products startups?
I thought he was talking about my support team! I was like⌠âHey Buddy! Save that for my AMA!â then I felt stupid because he was not talking about the Spark Support Team at allâŚ
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We're still working this out. We'll be releasing some new 'fleet management' tools pretty soon that will give people the ability to create an 'organization' and 'products' - super useful if you're scaling up. We'll use these tools to provide integrations with other web services like IFTTT and Works With Nest, but we haven't totally worked out the details with IFTTT (they currently still require a lot of manual work to set up a channel).
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I think that there's a lot one has to learn to be a successful entrepreneur, but there's no better way to learn to be an entrepreneur than to try being an entrepreneur 
As for your second question, the hardest problem facing every hardware start-up is building out the supply chain. There are a lot of other problems (marketing, sales, tech, etc.) but manufacturing is hard, and everybody has to figure it out. It's also a barrier to competition, so it's not necessarily a bad thing. But if you're thinking about where to focus your energy/resources (at least at the beginning), supply chain for sure!
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What does your typical day look like? You get up, your completely Spark-enabled smart house wakes you up further� Then what?
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