Inaugural LA Hardware Meetup

Los Angeles has an incredible tech scene, but it's particularly great for hardware. With world class universities, one of the busiest ports in the country, and a long history with manufacturing and advanced technologies, it's no wonder companies like SpaceX, Faraday Futures, and Ring call LA home.

We're starting this meetup to shine a light on all the incredible innovation in the physical world happening in LA. We'll hear scrappy startup stories, learn about mind boggling technology, and listen to sage words from experienced veterans in the community. Speakers will be founders, engineers, investors, and more.

In addition to speakers, we'll also hear from a different sponsor each month. This one is sponsored by informal (https://informal.cc), a freelance collective for people in hardware and manufacturing. informal pairs companies with expert freelancers that can help develop, manufacture, and sell their products.

For our first event, we'll hear from two LA-based founders helping make hardware less hard.

Here’s the rough agenda for the evening:

7:00 - 7:15pm Mingling on Zoom.

7:15 - 7:30pm Welcome notes from our organizers and sponsors.

7:30- 8:00pm Michael Corr is an electrical engineer who has been manufacturing products all over the world for 20 years. He's currently the CEO and co-founder of Duro Labs (https://www.getduro.com/), a cloud-based product lifecycle management solution for distributed hardware teams. Michael will talk how Duro approaches PLM differently by removing all the friction to get data in and out of a PLM, reliably. He'll be joined by our next speaker to discuss how connectivity and data flow is key to accelerating product timelines and reliability for increasingly fast and dynamic hardware development timelines.

8:00-8:30pm Karan Talati, CEO and co-founder at First Resonance (https://www.firstresonance.io/), previously built up SpaceX’s manufacturing and test automation systems between the critical production ramp-up period between 2013 and 2016. Based on that experience, he and his team built ion, the factory operating system powering many complex production operations for products like electric airplanes, mass-manufactured rockets, and more.

8:30- 9:00pm Open Mic! If you have your own startup, an awesome project, or are looking for work in the hardware scene, now's your chance to share it with everyone. You'll have 30 seconds.

See you soon!