A business-minded builder who uncovers how breakthrough products create breakthrough companies.
Forever exploring how innovation fuels growth; not just in revenue, but in impact.
DeAndre Harakas has hosted 42 Episodes.
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Ovul - Finding Product Market Fit in Femtech
October 6th, 2026 | Season 3 | 42 mins 38 secs
Serhii Zatsarynin, Founder and CEO of Ovul, joins DeAndre Harakas and Grant Chapman in person to argue that hardware is not hard anymore, and to explain why the best advice he has for founders is to sell the product while it's still ugly, because paid users and pilot users are not the same people.
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intent - AI Creating New Bottlenecks in IoT Development
September 28th, 2026 | Season 3 | 54 mins 53 secs
Peter Tuszynski, CTO at intent, joins DeAndre Harakas and Grant Chapman to compare notes from both sides of a connected product, and makes the case that AI has not made hardware ship faster yet, it has made it less risky, and that speeding up engineering just moved the bottleneck to QA.
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Epitel - From Research to $26 Million Series B
September 22nd, 2026 | Season 3 | 57 mins 5 secs
Fresh off a $26 million Series B, Epitel CTO and founder Mark Lehmkuhle and Director of Software Engineering and Architecture J Carroll join DeAndre Harakas and Grant Chapman to trace the path from a rodent lab at the University of Utah to a wireless wearable EEG sensor, and why the hardest problem left is not the signal, it is getting people to wear it.
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HoopDee - Started With Software, Ended With Hardware
September 15th, 2026 | Season 3 | 47 mins 14 secs
Roxie Alsruhe, Founder and CEO of HoopDee, joins Grant Chapman and Drew Westrick to talk about going from zero hardware experience to a manufactured product, and why she validated the idea with a PowerPoint and a handful of Amazon parts long before she ever paid for tooling.
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Babba - Heating and Cooling Baby Bottles at Scale
August 31st, 2026 | Season 3 | 47 mins 32 secs
Heating and cooling a baby's bottle sounds simple, but it is one of the hardest problems in consumer hardware. Dan Evans, CEO and founder of Babba, joins DeAndre Harakas and Grant Chapman to unpack the nonlinear world of thermoelectric cooling, the technology he first mastered at RecoverX (acquired by Hyperice) and carried into the baby space. It is part engineering deep dive, part founder's playbook on prototypes, customer feedback, and the grind of fundraising and go-to-market in hardware.
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Special Episode - The AIM IN Summit 2026
August 18th, 2026 | Season 3 | 1 hr 10 mins
The next decade of technology may hinge less on AI itself than on the factories, batteries, and machines that make it real. In this special episode, Grant Chapman goes solo with Ben Wrightsman, founding board member of AMVIC, for a 30-year tour through electric race cars, the battery pedigree behind modern EVs, and the hard-won lessons of scaling hardware, all building toward the upcoming AMVIC AIM IN Summit.
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Lexia Solutions - Giving Everyone a Seat at the Table
August 17th, 2026 | Season 3 | 44 mins 1 sec
What if the most powerful accessibility product in a stadium was not built into the building, but wheeled up to your seat in under a minute? Jeff Runnels, co-founder of Lexia Solutions and inventor of Uplift, joins DeAndre Harakas and Grant Chapman to trace a remarkable arc: from the "blue group" and an undiagnosed learning difference, to a battery-powered lift that gives wheelchair users a real seat at the table, and a business model that makes venues want to provide it.
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Eight Sleep - Building a $1.5B Sleep Company the Hard Way
August 11th, 2026 | Season 3 | 54 mins 22 secs
Your bed may be the most under-optimized eight hours of your day. Sam Kang, Chief Product Officer at Eight Sleep, joins DeAndre Harakas and Grant Chapman to unpack how the Pod heats and cools your bed, why cooling is so much harder than heating, and his framework for latent demand and the art of the MVP. It is part engineering deep dive, part product masterclass from inside a company that has turned sleep into a $1.5B category.
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ohSnap! - The Engineering Behind Invisible Design
August 3rd, 2026 | Season 3 | 51 mins 46 secs
Most mobile gaming accessories feel like bulky, clunky afterthoughts, but ohSnap set out to build a magnetic phone controller that feels like a natural extension of your device. Shafae Ali, Head of Engineering at ohSnap, joins DeAndre Harakas and Grant Chapman to break down the electromechanical craftsmanship behind their products. From mastering tactile snap-fits and magnetic latches to balancing obsessive user experience with cold engineering math, this episode explores what it really takes to build hardware people love to touch every day.
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Alenthia Run - From PT Clinic to Wearable Device
June 29th, 2026 | Season 3 | 43 mins 14 secs
Most runners only get their form analyzed after an injury, in a lab full of motion-capture cameras. Cooper Boydston, CTO of Alenthia Run, joins DeAndre and Grant to explain how his team shrank that lab into a small sensor that lives on your sacrum and reads your running biomechanics on every run. It's part running-science deep dive, part candid hardware-founder story about prototypes, UX, and the long road from "it works" to a product people love.
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Articulate Labs - Turn Everyday Movement Into Physical Therapy
June 8th, 2026 | Season 3 | 46 mins 30 secs
Most muscle-stim gadgets work best when you do nothing. Articulate Labs built the opposite: a wearable that fires your muscles in sync with how you move, turning a walk or a grocery run into real strength training. Co-founder and CEO Josh Rabinowitz and hardware lead Herbie (Larry) Kirn join DeAndre and Grant for a rare deep-technical episode on the device, the science of recovering properly after knee surgery, and the messy, honest reality of funding and selling hardware.
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QCI - Quantum Computing & the Future of AI
June 8th, 2026 | Season 3 | 46 mins 5 secs
Quantum computing, finally explained without the hand-waving. Cesar Martinez Delgado, hardware engineering manager at Quantum Computing Inc. (QCI), joins DeAndre and Grant to break down how quantum machines actually work, why QCI is betting on photonics to make them run at room temperature, and how 15 years of building things, from 3G networks to drones, shaped the hard-won engineering lessons every hardware founder needs to hear.