Outsource the mature, insource the uncertain is very true. A lot of startups outsource precisely the part of the system they understand least, but that is oftentimes the worst possible decision.

I'm mostly curious how much of that revenue is actual ARR, which is to say contractually recurring. It is pretty dang rare for a hardware company to have nontrivial ARR.

I think Clearmotion has a very interesting technology and product (ride stabilization), but let's paint a full picture here: the company was founded in 2009, took on $370 million in funding, and only recently landed large contracts (a $1 billion dollar deal in 2023 with Chinese auto manufacturer, Nio).

I'm sure they were in a constant struggle for survival and had to "move fast" to stay afloat, but their technology is more than a decade in the making.

Nice read but falls into a vast reductionist trap, a lot of survivorship bias dressed up as design philosophy or strategic bets. The context of decisions made decades ago != now, people were working under different constraints etc. Trying to frame the avionics example as the "subtractive" innovation is the most egregious, transistors were over 1000x times smaller, weight wasn't even a consideration.

According to the draft Wikipedia article for this company that hasn't been published because it is not yet considered sufficiently noteworthy, this company has existed for 17 years, built their first production facility in 2023, and first delivered working units into real cars last March. That doesn't strike me as moving all that fast. It also says they acquired the Bose product they're shitting on in this article for doing things wrong.

If it works, it works, but I really wish companies and founders would just be honest about how and why they succeed when they do, instead of everything needing to be the constant projection of a desired image.