How did you get into electronics/engineering and when did you start?

I started in electrical engineering at the University of Colorado in 2000. At the time I really didn’t understand what electrical engineering was, and was under the impression that I was always going to be some sort of chip designer. This was way back before I had any kind of comprehension of what I was going to be doing. Then, in 2002, I discovered microcontrollers. I thought, “Wow, you don’t need a full computer; you can program these little things and they can actually do quite a lot!” And at the end of 2002 I blew out my pick programmer. That’s when I started scouring the Internet for a cheaper source, because as a student I didn’t even have money for the first programmer. So when I blew it up I was really in a bind. After searching, I found out that most of the websites in 2002 were very difficult to order from. There weren’t very good pictures, and a phone call was often necessary to place the order. At this point I thought, “Maybe I could do better. Maybe I could start a website that had online checkout, as well as some nice, clean pictures of some electronics.” And off I went!

You were still in school when you started SparkFun?

Yes, I was a junior in the electrical engineering program and it took me about a year and a half to graduate. Once I graduated, all my professors were asking me what companies I was applying to work for, and I said, “Actually, I’m not really applying anywhere. I’m just going to run this SparkFun thing I’ve been doing for the last year and a half.” They were a little scared, but they’ve been very receptive, and now I go back and guest lecture for a few of them.

Can you tell us more about what SparkFun is like today?

It’s turned into a wonderful monster. We are based in Boulder, Colorado—the same town as the University of Colorado. We are now at, I believe, 134 employees. Like I said, it started with just me, and then in about a year and a half I graduated, and decided that I had just barely enough work to hire a friend of mine. I didn’t have enough money to pay him, but I certainly had enough work for him. Luckily, the work brought in some money and I was able to pay him. Then very quickly it became obvious that we needed a third person, and we’ve just sort of scaled up from there. Our building now is roughly 50,000 square feet, so the company has grown to a pretty decent size since it started.

In the early days, were there any particular products or components you started selling that helped you take off?

In the very beginning, while I was an engineering student, I had a fascination with GPS. I really wanted to play with these brand-new, dual-access accelerometers. But when I talked to the company that sold them, they said it would cost me $500-$600 for an evaluation kit. I wasn’t willing to pay for it, nor did I need the entire evaluation kit. I just needed the breakout board—an accelerometer soldered to a little board, with a 0.1” spaced header. They said that they didn’t sell anything like that. So from the beginning, that was sort of the secret sauce to SparkFun. We found these cool technologies, and then made them accessible, for example by providing breakout boards or evaluation boards for the GPS module or the accelerometer. Since then, it’s turned into all sorts of fun sensors and technologies, and we’ve really expanded into a bunch of different fields. As of just the other day, we have just over 2,000 products for sale on the SparkFun website.

How would you characterize your business?

It is a mix. When we first started, we were just a regular distributor. We found cool parts from other people and resold them. Once I graduated from college I actually had the time to design stuff. That’s when the SparkFun products started. First came a breakout board for a USB serial chip, or a breakout board for an accelerometer. Now, here in Boulder we have all of our manufacturing, testing, packaging and shipping all in the same building. So out of those roughly 2,000 products, we design and build about 400-450 in-house. And with the other products, we provide the best quality from the best manufacturers.

What is the work culture like at SparkFun?

It’s hard to describe until you see it for yourself, but for better or for worse I never had a “real job.” So I had no preconceived notions of what the work environment should be like. I made a place where I felt like I would want to work. The work culture here is pretty laid back; there’s certainly no dress code. Also, over time people started asking if they could bring their dogs into work. My response was, “Well I’m not really a dog person, but if it would make you happier and you can take care of your dogs, go ahead and bring them in.” Then the skateboards showed up, then the loud music. So now we have this wonderful culture of controlled chaos. It’s crazy, but it makes for a pretty goodwork environment, and now we have just a bunch of friends working together.

How many of your staff have technical or electronics backgrounds?

I believe that our engineering crew is made up of 13 people, so about 10% of the company. That obviously means that there are a lot of support staff that do the manufacturing, shipping and testing. But out of those in the engineering group, there is a very interesting variety of technical backgrounds. Some come from physics, some from the expected electrical engineering or electrical and computer engineering. We also have one or two self-made engineers who didn’t take the traditional, formal academic route, but eventually showed that they can build some really amazing stuff, which is why we are fortunate to have them working for us.

Are all of your designs part of the open-source hardware movement, or are they proprietary designs?

Since about 2004, I started writing tutorials, releasing the firmware and posting the schematic saying essentially, “If this product isn’t tailored to what you need, here’s the firmware. So if you need it to do something different, go ahead and make it happen.” We release stuff in the public domain mostly so that our customers can tailor it to their needs. In the past two to three years there has been a big push toward this new open-source hardware movement, which we really like. I see it as a clear explanation of what you’re going to get. So whenever a customer downloads one of our products and says, “Oh okay, this is marked with the open-source hardware logo,” the customer now knows that he or she is going to get the engineering design (EAGLE CAD) files. It’s all very open, and we encourage customers to take what we give them to modify the products for themselves, or even resell them for profit.

Can you tell us about the community and the people around SparkFun?

When I started SparkFun, being an engineer myself, I really expected to sell products to my fellow engineering students, and maybe some other people in Colorado. Of course, I (thankfully) grossly underestimated the demand. Our customers come from every walk of life. We see some really exciting orders coming from big institutions such as Carnegie Mellon, Stanford and even NASA. We also see a lot of orders from just regular folks that have some sort of problem, whether it’s their cat door, or a Halloween costume they are trying to build. These folks have really creative ideas, and come up with some really interesting solutions that I, as an engineer, don’t even come up with. So our community is this mixed bag of really exciting people doing all sorts of really wacky things.

Besides selling products, what do you do to encourage interest?

Recently we actually had an open house at SparkFun, which was really fun. We had about 650 people come through the front gate, and we just sort of said, “Here’s what we do, and here are some of the projects that we’re working on.” We gave building tours, had a big tent with some music, and had a bunch of tables set up for people to bring their own projects that they wanted to show off. It was a great chance for a lot of people in and around the area to show off some of their projects. We had one of the SparkFun employees show off his balloon satellite, which was basically a weather balloon attached to some high-definition cameras and tracking devices. He captured some amazing footage from an elevation of about 100,000 feet. Along with that, bunches of other people were showing off their projects as well, like robots and other electronics. It was all really neat.

We often open our doors to the public for somewhat of a classroom environment. We inform people about upcoming events or courses on things like e-textiles or soldering, for example. The idea started a few years ago when I was teaching a surface mount soldering course at the university. It became apparent to me that our customers also really wanted to learn about surface mount soldering. From there it got a little bigger and more complex, and now we have a department of three people that make up the “Department of Education.” They are responsible for taking SparkFun out into the educational world. I would love to change the way that electronics is taught at the pre-university level.

We’re very open about the educational information we provide, and it’s all available on the SparkFun website. We’re working on broadcasting videos of the classes and tutorials as well, but that is still in the works.

What should we expect to see from SparkFun in the near future?

As I mentioned before, one of our main goals revolves around education. We’re trying to come up with low-cost kits that kids as young as eight years old can play with. We have a couple kits already that include some LEDs, a coin cell battery holder, some needles and some conductive thread. This all comes with a piece of fabric that kids can sew it all to so they can create this thing that lights up. It’s a tool that can lead into further education about electronics, voltage and current.

Another kit we’re working on is more for high school students. It’s sort of a logic gate puzzle. Students can put it together and learn about logic gates.

On the other side of the spectrum with regard to company goals, we are really trying to package up more of our products for retail. So whenever customers go into a brick and mortar store, we want to have approachable electronics that are more attractive to customers with less experience.

Are there particular types of businesses you’re targeting for this?

The ideal market that I would love to get into would include young, elementary school-level kids. So ideally our products would end up in educational toy stores to spark the interests of kids.

Other places where we would like to see SparkFun products sold are places like museums or university bookstores. These are more of the types of avenues we are looking at.

Can you tell us about Arduino? How has it impacted your business?

I believe it was in 2005 that Tom Igoe of New York University told me that SparkFun should really carry the Arduino board. I looked at it, and at the time it was just a through-hole kit. I explained that, to me, it looked like just another development board. Then about nine months later, Arduino came out with a fully assembled USB version. And Tom Igoe again said to me that we should carry the board. He said that he’d been using it to teach his students and that they really liked it. So I agreed to carry it, but it took me about a year or two to really see the value in it. I realized that whenever you’re teaching someone or trying to build a project, you don’t want to have to worry about how to initialize the UART or how to get the I2C protocol to work, because that’s a really bad pitfall. Arduino has been so successful, and has been a game changer for people that have a bigger project and just need a little board to control some basic inputs and outputs.

Are you still involved in product development and design, or is the business so big that you are no longer able to put your resources into that?

I have to wear my business hat more and more, which kind of pulls at my heart strings. I do still get to play and build electronics about four or five hours per week. But for the most part, engineering is its own department. They don’t really like it when I get in there and start messing with things, but I do still get to play with some of the parts that we build, and I get to have some input in the new products that we’re coming out with.