SparkFun: Corporate Hero

If there’s a corporate recipe for Plugable Technologies, it’s taking a blend of Linksys, Belkin, Kensington, and mixing in a heavy dose of a secret ingredient: SparkFun.

SparkFun is a true corporate hero – bootstrapping from zero, innovating fundamentally, serving customers fanatically, thinking differently, building locally, selling internationally, staying lean, and growing and succeeding organically.

Nathan Seidle is the founder and CEO of SparkFun, and he’s giving a talk at MIT in a few days. Hopefully some video will make it online for those of us not in Boston. But you can get a flavor of it from Nathan’s recent visit to Vancouver, BC, which is in our backyard.

If you’re interested in starting a business with $0 of investment capital, building a profitable company around open-source technology, designing electronics for manufacturability, or getting your favorite part sold on SparkFun, come join the discussion!

This talk will describe how SparkFun grew from a one man operation, run out of an electrical engineering student’s undergraduate dorm room, into one of the largest companies in Colorado, and along the way enabled engineers, designers, students and hobbyists to build new kinds of electronics. The talk will walk through pitfalls and triumphs, and discuss the creative, technical, and social philosophies underlying the company.

Nathan Seidle is CEO of SparkFun Inc. in Boulder, Colorado, a company he founded in 2003 as an undergraduate student in electrical engineering. The company, which has grown to over 80 employees, provides tools, hardware, and other resources for artists, engineers, prototypers, and hobbyists to “play with cool electronic gadgetry”. He is an accomplished engineer, innovator, and bootstrapping entrepreneur.

Details at SparkFun Visit and Talk at MIT