Today’s show guest is Ben Joffe, and he’s a general partner at HAX, the number one acceleration engine for hardware startups and the most active hardware investment fund in the world. He’s spent over 16 years in Asia — China, Japan, and Korea — and is now based in Shenzhen. Ben is also an angel investor and active public speaker and writer, always covering hardware trends globally.

In today’s episode, we talk about some of the big trends that he sees sitting front-row seat in China and discusses a new perspective that entrepreneurs should consider when thinking about joining a particular startup ecosystem. Alright, let’s get onto the show.

Jay: Hi, Benjamin. Thanks for joining us on the Jay Kim Show. We’re very happy to have you on.

Ben: Hi, Jay. Thanks for having me.

Jay: Sure, no problem. It’s funny because we are both based in Asia, but right now we are both at odd hours of the day because I know that you’re spending some time in Europe, so we appreciate you taking the time to come on the show. We’ve had a great couple of months with the Rise Conference two months ago in July, and I think there’s a lot of momentum right now in this space and just in early stage of investing in general and in hardware and software. So I’m excited to have you on the show.

Maybe you can give us a quick introduction. Who is Benjamin Joffe, and what do you do for a living?

Ben: Sure. I’m a partner at an investment company called HAX. We’re an investment company, specializing in hardware and IoT early stage startups. We run an accelerator program in Shenzhen and another one in San Francisco, and we try to be a full-stack accelerator to support, basically, startups from the very first prototype all to way up to scaling. So far, we’ve done about 200 investments, and that makes us, actually, the most active in the category.

So more, quickly, about my background. I’ve been in Asia since the year 2000. I’ve worked in Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong, a little bit in Singapore, Malaysia. I’ve been in Silicon Valley on mostly technology.

Jay: Wow. So you’ve actually been in Asia than I have because I only moved here in 2005, despite me being of Asian descent. What brought you over here at the very beginning? Have you always been in tech and always been in hardware?

Ben: Some people, very early on, they know what they want to do. Some other people, it’s more like one thing led to another. I’m more in that category. When I was studying engineering, I picked up Japanese as a minor and corporate strategy, and that lead me… I’m originally from France. When I graduated, I wasn’t too excited about working in France and joining the standard large company or consultancy, and I decided to move to Japan to combine my interest in Japanese, my interest in strategy, and my interest in technology.

So I worked in Japan for a few years, initially covering different technology sectors and then in telecom. And then I got curious about Korea. Then I got curious about China. Then one thing led to another.

Jay: It’s funny. I meet a lot more one-thing-led-to-another guys than I-knew-what-I-was-going-to-do-from-day-one. So you were actually in Japan. I was in Japan in 2003 to 2004, but I was in banking. You were probably there when I was there.

Ben: Yeah. I was there until 2004, roughly, and then I moved to Korea. It was really a special time, and it really opened my eyes on a lot of things because if you were around at the time, you probably remember seeing really advanced mobile phones and great broadband and a bunch of other things ranging from contactless payment, all the things that were already mature in Japan but that the rest of the world was basically yet to discover. They all had brick phones from Nokia and everything.

At the time, everything that was going on in Japan was described as really odd and weird just because Japanese like gadgets. Eventually, it just spread everywhere, was reinvented everywhere. And that’s where you realize that innovation happens, really, all around the world. What’s actually the challenge is to bring innovation from one place to another and find how to adapt it to different ecosystems. So that’s what that taught me, among other things.

Jay: It’s been an exciting decade, decade and a half, of growth globally. But particularly I’m excited about Asia. I started sniffing around the early-stage-startup scene around 2008, 2009, after the financial crisis. The investment bank I was working for went under. So I had some free time. But I remember, at the time, there was no scene here in Hong Kong, for sure. Very, very nascent. And so I spent a lot of time flying back and forth to Silicon Valley, just trying to learn, educate myself on tech and this sort of thing.

It’s come a long way from there, and I’m very excited about that. This is evidenced by things like…Rise this year was huge. It gets better and better each year.

So let’s talk a little bit about HAX and your journey that led you there, I guess. You were around the region for a while. When did HAX start? Were you one of the starting partners or did you join on shortly after?

Ben: I joined shortly after. So HAX started at the end of 2011. The first investments happened in 2012. At the time, I was running a consultancy I had started in Beijing covering researching innovation in digital space across Asia — mostly Japan, Korea, and China. So I had a team of consultants working with me — Japanese, Korean, Chinese — and we were working with intentional clients.

On the side, I had started some major investments because I enjoyed a lot working these early-stage startups and founders. The founder of HAX — there’s actually two founders. One is more of an operations guy and the other one is more the entrepreneur who had exited a company already, went IPO. His name is Sean O’Sullivan, and the operations guy is Cyril Ebersweiler. One is American; the other one is French.

And he invited me to help, basically, select startups. One thing led to another. I said, okay, well, II don’t really know anything about hardware. I’m a mechanical engineer by training but really mostly strategy.

He said, “Actually, you understand startups and strategy. Don’t worry about the technology aspect too much because we’ve got that covered. What we need to make sure of is whether the entrepreneurs make sense and whether the business makes sense. That’s where we need help.”

So I started to help first select companies, and eventually, this roped me into the whole program, and I moved to Shenzhen, and I discovered the ecosystem. I was just blown away. What I had seen in Japan was like the mobile revolution. What I had seen in Korea was the broadband, online gaming, and social networking revolution. All those revolutions were eventually very, very local. But in Shenzhen, here was, for the first time, and ecosystem that had really direct global relevance. It was already relevant for big companies for quite a while. It was kind of this secret garden. All the big companies were making their stuff there. But for startups, that was really a novelty to be able to access that supply chain. And that’s what HAX tried to enable.

I felt this was really a chance to combine global ideas, global innovation, global entrepreneurs with the best ecosystems that were, so far, mostly the property of big companies. So I joined. I joined for the fourth batch of the program. It was still very early on. Now we’re about to start the eleventh batch. I would say, at that time, we were doing a lot of consumer electronics, more simpler products, mostly because the ecosystem itself around the world, 2012, ’13…Fitbit was a novelty. Right? But to them, Fitbit is a commodity.

So a lot of things have advanced a lot. The projects we do today, we didn’t even dream of doing them at the time because, first, they didn’t exist. Second, they would have cost a lot of money. But now, a lot of things have changed, made this affordable, faster, and we now do a lot of house tech, a lot of robotics, and a lot of really, really exciting stuff. And I really get a sense that we get to see the future before the rest of the world because the startups we work with have a prototype with three or four founders. And by the time it gets to market to a scale where it’s noticed, that’s going to be three or four years time. The future is not evenly distributed.

Jay: That’s a good point. It’s funny, Ben, when you talk about investing in startups, I think there’s a funny bias for people that aren’t that familiar with hardware. They shy away from it. I’ll just take from my personal experience.

I did a handful of angel investing, and I do a little bit of investing with a partner now, but we don’t do that much anymore. But when we were actively taking on investments into companies, I think it’s just a natural bias for people to think that hardware takes a lot longer to push to market, whereas software, it’s all theoretical, and you can kind of pump up the valuation, and you can hope for a quick win, that someone will pick it up. And I think that’s a naivety of an investor before they actually learn about hardware.

But the cool thing about hardware, I always thought, was it’s hardware. Like, you can actually get a physical product, and I think that’s probably one of the reasons why crowd-funding took off, pretty popular.

Ben: I agree. Hardware is very appealing because it’s tangible. And I think, probably deep down, we’re still kind of ape, and we like to touch things. But also, if you actually want to act in the physical world, there’s no way around. You cannot, just clicking on a app, act on the world. There has to be a physical object. Even when you click to call an Uber, a car comes in. So there has to be some physical manifestation to really have impact on the world.

I think that’s the appeal of hardware. On top of that, you can act on the physical world. You can act on the human body with digital therapeutics. We can talk about that later. But I agree with what you say, that essentially, most people who are not familiar with hardware tend to shy away from it. And for us, it’s both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because it means we have very little competition because people are so afraid of it. And they’re afraid of it because they don’t really have a lot of value-add or cultural or ability to understand what’s going on. But because we’re right in the middle of the world’s biggest component market, the world’s biggest electronic supply chain, and because we’ve done already 200 investments, we learned a tremendous amount. Even normal VCs who do ten deals a year might do one hardware deal per year. What’s the speed of learning when you have that little volume? It’s impossible.

So the benefit for us is that we get great deal flow because of the visibility. We get great value-add because of our location, our know-how, ecosystem, the hundreds of founders that we connect to each other. But the challenge is that, when the startups try to go and raise outside funding for seed or Series A, they have to basically have de-risked their business as much as possible.

In addition, you’re right that hardware typically takes more time than software. Even though it depends… For example, I worked in gaming. If you want to make a good game, to make a prototype of a game, you can hack something ugly over a weekend. Then a little bit cleaner prototype is three months. To make a decent game, not a AAA but decent game, maybe a year development and then six months of tuning of the moditization. That’s a year and a half. That’s about the time it takes to build a hardware product, on average.

Actually, if you think of software, it looks easy because when you launch, you’re actually launching a prototype, and then people generally clean up the frontend, and then they do what’s sometimes called the great rewrite where they rewrite the entire backend because it was never built for scale because it would be too expensive to build for scale from day one, in fact. It’s something you don’t see, but it’s happening in the background for almost every startup out there. So they rewrite the entire backend, sometimes multiple times. And that actually means that to get a mature product, it takes also probably one or two years.

It’s interesting, but I’d say with hardware, it’s much more visible. And you have cut-off events, such as when you finish your design for manufacturing, then you have a spec freeze. You can’t change things so easily. There’s stuff you can change when you do over-the-air updates, but the hardware itself is kind of done. And you have to live with it. You can iterate sometimes, make some tunings with different batches, but overall, you have to accept that this is the way it’s going to be for some time.

Jay: That’s a good point, Ben, because you’re raising the standard of your minimum viable product. You can’t just push something out to market that looks bad, aesthetically even, for hardware.

Ben: Absolutely. I think Apple raised the expectations of people. People expect Apple-quality products, even when you’re a tiny startup with three guys and half a million dollars in funding. It’s tough for early-stage guys. And on top of that, it’s not just the design. There’s all sorts of certifications for electronics because hardware can kill. In fact, it’s potentially dangerous, depending on the product. There’s higher expectations, higher requirements. It means it’s a more difficult thing to do, but it also means you have less competition.

When you do a photo app, over night you can have a hundred competitors just do almost the same because your product is very, very out there and visible, unless you have some really complex algorithms in the background. But other than that, a lot of consumerware and consumer mobile, there’s almost no barrier of entry.

Jay: That’s also a good point, although I feel like, because of the opening up of Shenzhen, if you will, and the accessibility now, that time probably has reduced, in the past, for, let’s say, a competitor or copycat to come up and just hack together, if you will, a hardware solution that can compete against an idea that they sell out on the street.

But yes, you’re right. It will take significantly longer, I would think, than pulling together something that’s just software.

Ben: What you said about copycats is a question we get very often, and obviously, we care a lot about as investors. The reality is that, out of all 200 investments, we had almost zero copycats, and the reason is that, for most of them, the complexity is actually in the software. A factory can replicate your electronics, can replicate the form factor of your product, but if you have a robot that does something even a little bit smart, it’s actually quite difficult, pretty much impossible, because there’s science and research that factories don’t have as a skillset. So it hasn’t really been a problem.

The stories you hear about copycats is generally for very, very simple things, like a Fidget Cube or some other reasonably simple products.

Jay: Right. The ones you see on the street peddling around in Hong Kong. So, Ben, maybe you could give some insight to listeners, maybe the aspiring entrepreneurs that possibly are looking for funding from your company, from your fund. What are some of the key metrics or things you look at when you’re investing in a startup? I know that you have an engineering background, but you’re also good at, I’m sure, spotting teams and founders. So there’s a big debate on the founderversity idea, and I think most people lean towards betting on the founder and making sure that he’s someone that the investor can work with. What are some of the things that you guys look for when you’re looking to make an investment in a company?

Ben: I think a lot of investors would tell you very similar things, in that sense that first, the team needs to get your attention. Generally, what gets your attention is the idea. It could be a little bit crazy. It could be a little ambitious. It could be outrageous, or sometimes, what can get your attention is a very high profile founder team that is doing something that might look mundane but is potentially good business. So we’re trying to find the right balance between… Actually, we try to basically get, at the same time, a strong team working on something that makes sense. But the most important for us is the team because now we’re quite confident that, if you don’t come up with a concept that’s totally stupid, we can help you tune it so that it makes sense, as long as initially, we’re targeting a large enough market.

We also like to see teams that have technology that’s not easy to replicate. So these days, we have a lot of roboticists, a lot of machine-learning people. We have medical doctors in teams. So the level, the quality of the teams, have really gone up a lot. It’s basically looking at the same time at the team, the idea, and the market. The prototype is also a good proof of what the team can do because at the stage we’re investing in, it’s only a prototype. So there’s basically no metrics in terms of revenue or usage, generally.

But I would say the thing that convinces us the most is if teams have talked to potential customers or if customers are ready to write checks.

Jay: That’s pretty much the bottom line. Right? If customers are knocking on the door, demanding the product, then that’s a pretty good sign. So what is the process whereby a company can… Do they have to go through accelerator in order to get an investment, or do you do just direct investment as well?

Ben: Basically 90+% of all investments are via the accelerator. The reason is that it helps us get to know the teams and also increase the chances of success because they spend time with our team. We have close to 30 people now as a support team in Shenzhen. But they also get to enter our ecosystem and meet a lot of other founders. So in our office, there’s about 100 founders of hardware startups coming from all around the world. You have PhDs in this and that. You have doctors, and you have other teams. Let’s say you do a consumer product, and you’re thinking about doing a kickstarter. Just work around our office in Shenzhen. You can talk to three teams that’s raised over a million dollars. It might sound mundane, but there’s just a hundred such startups in the world. That’s it. Eleven of them came out of HAX.

This is just an example. If you do consumer, you want to do crowdfunding, but anything you need… I have an anecdote, just a funny story. A team was struggling because they were trying to find the right glue for two particular materials they were trying to glue together. So they couldn’t just use super glue, because they needed something that was food grade, no smell, waterproof. So there was all those constraints, and they were basically starting to look into buying tons of different glues to test them with the materials.

And then another team walked by. They discussed during a break. We also have some exchanges where teams share their technical challenges with other teams. Another team said, “Oh, you should talk to our glue guy.”

They were like, “What do you mean? You have a glue guy?”

They said, “Well, we have a team member. We had the exact same problem. So we researched a bunch of glues, so now he knows a lot about glue,” and he was just two desks away. The guy solved the problem in 10 minutes that would have taken days. And that’s just one aspect.

Really, the benefit of Shenzhen and the HAX ecosystem is really all about speed. If you can do a prototype every week instead of one per month, you’ll just go so much faster. If somebody can solve your problem with a 10-minute conversation instead of you figuring it out by yourself or looking online, it goes much, much faster. And really, time is on the essence for startups in terms of time to market, in terms of burn rate, in terms of a competitive advantage. So that’s really the opportunity there, was the ecosystem we built.

Jay: That’s awesome. A glue guy. The most active hardware investor in the world. They have a glue guy.

Ben: You need a glue guy.

Jay: That’s enough of a compelling reason for anyone to want to be a part of that. Being up in Shenzhen, I want to ask you a little bit about what your views on China are. Obviously, Shenzhen, it’s called the Silicon Valley of hardware. It’s very exciting going up there. I’ve been up there a number of times this year, and it seems like every single time I go, it’s just getting more and more exciting. What’s really exciting you about Shenzhen, the scene, China, or maybe any trends that you see in hardware that really excite you?

Ben: I’d say the most exciting about Shenzhen, to start with, is just the energy and the speed. As you mentioned, every month, month after month, it’s getting better. The ecosystem is getting more entrepreneurs, more cool startups. There’s suppliers. The whole supply chain is improving very, very fast. So there’s also pretty good support from the local government to encourage that so that they’re very welcoming to startups. And that’s great.

Overall, in China, I think there’s just an incredible entrepreneurial energy. The country is still growing really fast. There’s now a lot of engineers. The infrastructure for technology are built. You have great mobile networks, great internet networks. So in terms of ecosystem, to deliver services, it’s amazing. And also, because of the incredible resources they have to build physical products, being the factory of the world, it’s actually a really great chance to combine the strengths in software, the strengths in hardware.

Most of the companies in China are targeting the Chinese market, and we do invest in some of those too. But what I find particularly exciting is to see that China is actually giving birth to globally innovative companies, and the frontrunners of that on the software side are guys like Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu. Among the most interesting on the hardware side, everybody knows DJI, but not everyone knows it’s from China, and it’s the global leader in imagery drones, and it’s a really innovative company. I think it’s just a frontrunner. There’s a wave of…it’s a 10 year old company already. The wave that started five years ago hasn’t yet been that noticed overseas and will start to be. And the wave that’s starting this year is going to noticed in three, four years. It’s an incredible, incredible amount of innovation that’s coming out of China.

Actually, what’s interesting is that they’re not trying to sell it as a Chinese thing. They’re trying to be a global innovation.

Jay: Right. Yeah, it’s really exciting, I think, as well. And it’s funny how “made in China” used to be a joke and a negative connotation, but we are right on the cusp where, like you said, both on the software and the hardware side where, within and next five to ten years, a lot of these Chinese companies are just going to be at a global standard to the point where they’ll become household names. And I think that’s very exciting to be right in the center of that.

Are there any of your portfolio companies that you are particularly excited about that you’re allowed to talk about?

Ben: Sure. Yeah. Most of them are announced and public. The only group that’s not yet announced is the one that graduated a few weeks ago. We’re having our demo day in San Francisco mid-September, so they will be announced then.

I’d say the most iconic for us at the moment is a true Chinese company called Makeblock. It’s a company that does robots for education. So you can assemble your own little robots. They’ve actually expanded to do even DIY drones that you can program. It’s for a little bit older kids, and this company is doing fantastic.

They came out of HAX about four years ago. It’s a five year old company. Now they have over 400 staff. Last year, I think their sales was about $20 million. They just raised a Series B of 30 million. Devaluation is in the couple hundred million. Most of their sales are actually outside China, and that’s really an exciting company for that because when you look at their products, you actually have no idea where they’re from. You’re like, “Oh, it must be American.”

To me, one metric of quality is can you sell it in Japan. Actually, they just signed a deal with SoftBank to distribute their products in Japan, because Japan loves high quality. They’re ready to pay good money, but they want, basically, over quality. They’re very, very demanding customers. SoftBank saw that this product was a good match. Now they are distributing there. So that’s a really good company. This one is a little bit older type of technologies, not actually super high-tech. They do just a very good combination of hardware and software, and they grew very fast, and they grew very well.

But if I talk more about the things that are a bit more out there in the recent graduates, we have one company that does a brain stimulation device that helps to treat depression. So it’s basically using kind of a 9-volt battery to send low currents to your brain so that it basically stimulates your neurons and lights up the areas that shut down when you’re depressed. So that’s recognized as an effective therapy, but what’s really new about it is that they make a consumer device. They start with depression because it’s a clear pain point, but eventually, that could go into stimulating for other things, including performance, memory, a lot of different things. So that’s one interesting company.

We have number in house tech that are quite exciting. We have also, in digital fabrication, we have a really interesting company called Wazer. You’re probably familiar with laser cutters. They cut with lasers. Those are great for fabrication because you can cut plastic and wood, but you cannot cut hard materials. So what this team has done is they created, basically, a machine that cuts with pressurized water with garnet sand that’s mixed into it. So it can cut anything. It cuts steel. It cuts ceramic. It cuts everything. That’s a desktop size workbench style. They went on Kickstarter. They sold over a million dollars worth of machines. Now they’re preparing for shipping. So that’s a really good tool because it’s so versatile. It means you can work with any material without having to rely on outside factories. So it’s really interesting for digital fabrication.

Jay: Very cool, very cool. Thanks for sharing some of those companies with us. Well, Ben, it’s been a real pleasure having you on. Just a couple of questions as we look to wrap up. You’ve been very insightful today, so we appreciate that. Are there any things that you’re working on personally or at HAX that you want to share with the audience? Right now, I know that you’ve given a lot of talks, and you’re public speaker, and you’ve done a lot of writing and this sort of thing. Is there anything personally that you’re working on?

Ben: Yeah. Actually, I’ve been researching innovation ecosystems for several years. I wrote a few articles on that on trying to understand what really makes Silicon Valley different or what are the opportunities for the locations. Initially, I broke it down in a number of parameters, around market size, capital access, infrastructure, regulations, talent… But a lot of those, you cannot really change. And one parameter eluding me was a parameter I called culture, entrepreneurial culture. People say this culture is more risk-taking, this is more risk-averse. I was trying to crack that aspect because you cannot change the size the size of your market; you can just change your ambitions of what you’re going to target. But if you’re in Hong Kong, if you target Hong Kong, it’s just the size it has.

So what I recently discovered or understood is that people are encouraged to be entrepreneurs, but depending on where you are, there’s more or less risk in doing that. And it’s not just about culture. It’s about what kind of safety nets and what’s the penalty for failure.

Let’s say I draw a line with a brush on the ground, and I say, “Walk that line. If you step outside of the line, you can start again as much as you want. There’s no penalty.” Eventually, you’ll do it. You’ll be successful. But if suddenly, this is on a beam between two very high buildings, and I say, “Now if you step outside the line, you’re going to fall, and you might break something or die.” That’s basically, I think, what happens in a number of ecosystems. There’s no safety nets. I think Japan is one of those where if you quit your job, and you do a startup, then you become some kind of an outcast. It makes it very, very difficult for you to find a new job. And during the time you’re doing the startup, maybe you don’t also have a lot of regulatory safety nets.

So encouraging people to be entrepreneurs without having understanding of the safety nets around them is kind of, I feel, irresponsible. So as an entrepreneur, if you have a desire to do something, you have to think, “What is the best ecosystem I could operate with that wouldn’t be so punitive for what I do? And how can I surround myself with as many capable people as possible?” Because this is what also is going to help you succeed. The more networked entrepreneurs are the ones who are most able to solve all the problems and learn all the skills they need to learn.

So I think this is something to keep in mind if you’re an aspiring entrepreneur. If you want to learn fashion, you go to Paris. You go to Milan. You go to New York. If you want to do standup comedy, you go to maybe L.A., New York, Montreal. If you want to do movies, you go to Hollywood. And if you want to be an entrepreneur, look at what your current ecosystem is offering you, what kind of support system exists, and what’s the penalty for failure. And if it’s not suitable, maybe consider if there’s ways to access a better one. So that would be my takeaway advice for aspiring entrepreneurs here.

That’s a topic I’m really interested in and care about because I’m from France, and I’ve seen the ecosystem in France change radically in the past five years. It was very risk averse. But about five years ago, suddenly there was a wave of entrepreneurship. There were good role models, supportive regulation, and I think what really changed everything is that big companies started to realize that those startup people were assets to have, to hire. If you hire somebody from a failed startup, they know both sides, they get to know your company, and they know the startup world. So they can help you access [inaudible 00:35:25] from outside. So I think that’s one of the keys to energize the ecosystem is when you start to see more crossovers between corporates and startups.

Jay: Yeah. As an entrepreneur, you know as well as any successful entrepreneur that failure is essential, is necessary, if you want to eventually succeed. You learn the most from these failures. That’s really interesting, the perspective that you look at it, because I think that Asia…and you being here, it’s very fitting for you to be monitoring this because Asia has traditionally always had issues with the fear of failure and challenging authority. And these are two things that are culturally very inherent for Asian entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs. So it will be interesting to see how this all changes. And maybe, hopefully, something like what happened in France happens here, where in five years from now, we’ll be sitting around laughing about it and saying, “Hey, we saw the change happen.”

Ben: The real paradox there is that countries that actually have high growth like China, India, they don’t have a problem with entrepreneurship. They almost too many entrepreneurs. The problem is actually more in developed economies because it’s so stable that people are afraid of leaving their job because there’s a penalty for doing so — if you can’t go back, if you can’t get another job — because the default result of a startup is failure. And because of that, there’s not enough entrepreneurs to provide a support system so that there’s less failures.

So the strange thing is that, because of that, if education ramps up in those countries, but here in China, you would actually end up having more innovation in developing markets because entrepreneurship is more natural because if you join a large company, an established company, you feel that you’re missing out on the action.

Jay: Right. We’re all waiting for that shift to happen globally, but that’s a great point. Well, Ben, thanks so much for your time, man. It’s been really good catching up. Last question is where can our audience listening in find you, follow you, connect with you, maybe learn a little bit more about HAX?

Ben: Sure. For HAX, it’s very easy. You go to HAX.co. As for myself, I tweet @BenjaminJoffe, so just my name. And I also write some articles on Forbes, on TechCrunch around IoT, innovation, ecosystems, things like that. And I also recommend to take a look at some of the videos we put out and some of the presentations. We just released the big report about hardware trends. It’s over a couple hundred pages. We’ve had, I think, about 20,000 visitors so far. It’s kind of an annual report we publish where we share our view of the hundreds and thousands of companies we see and where we think things are heading. So this one can be found either on SlideShare on our account or on our HAX.co/hardware-trends.

Jay: Fantastic. We’ll definitely link that up in the show notes. Great. Well, thanks so my, Ben. We appreciate your insights, and we’ll catch up soon when you’re back in the region.

Ben: Excellent. Well, thanks for having me.

Jay: Alright. Take care.

Ben: Cheers.