streamline their design and prototyping, enabling them to work through many prototype versions, Wang said.
“The idea is that this [Ansir] would be the initial garage, as it were,” he explained. FabLab, which put on San Diego’s first Mini Maker Faire last year, is housed in the Ansir Innovation Center, so “We have a laser cutter, 3-D printers, and electronics lab benches,” Wang added. Co-Merge offers more of a front-office workspace. And after a startup has completed its final product design, Wang said the HardTech Labs program would help connect the company with a manufacturer in Tijuana or Otay Mesa, the industrial park along the San Diego side of the border.
Derek Footer, a HardTech Labs co-founder who is managing partner of Origo Ventures, said he’s been working to get local manufacturers to discount their manufacturing costs in exchange for an ownership stake in HardTech’s startups. Origo would provide equity funding to startups admitted into the HardTech Labs accelerator. Manufacturers, which contend with short production runs for regular customers, see the program as a way to fill some of their unused capacity and gain new customers.
Manufacturers in Tijuana have established their expertise in such industries as medical devices, aerospace, electronics, and HardTech Labs’ co-founders said they plan to focus primarily on consumer products, medical devices, and robotics.
“We’re starting with a bi-national startup community in Tijuana and San Diego, but we can interface with Asia, Taiwan, and more,” says Wang. He tells me he visited and studied San Francisco’s Lemnos Labs, Haxlr8r, and Highway 1—and says all have focused on manufacturing products in China.
Wang sees advantages in working with manufacturers in Mexico, because they are closer and that makes it easier to get feedback about design and engineering changes that would make products easier to produce.
Wang earned a doctorate in neuroscience at UC San Diego, and was doing research in neural networks and brain computation at the Salk Institute before starting the
