WYZGYZ is going to China!

Well, my new company Portable Scores is going.

A couple months ago WYZGYZ applied for a program in its first year for hardware startup companies. Called HAXLR8R, the goal of the program is to make manufacturing in China more accessible to startups by providing workspace and tools and mentors and experts to ten teams for three months in Shenzhen. After those three months, the participants spend a week in San Francisco and give a demo to investors.

WYZGYZ was accepted for the project on the Portable Electronic Scoreboard. This project has been in progress for a while, and now is a good time to go to China to work on going to production.

In exchange for this opportunity, which includes some startup money, a workspace and tools, help with the logistics of living in China, and access to mentors and experts and investors, I will be giving up some equity in my company. To protect WYZGYZ and the investors (who probably aren’t interested in investing in my freelance consulting work), I’ve started a new company called Portable Scores, and I’m transferring all the scoreboard assets over to that company. The equity I’m giving up will be from this new company, not from WYZGYZ. This will likely be a model I repeat as I come up with new projects, spin them off to separate companies, and grow them.

Over the next few months I’ll be updating a new blog that I created called Engineer In Shenzhen, which will have personal posts about what I’m going through, and advice and articles for other people who are interested in the process and what it takes to work in China and outsource manufacturing.