The Story of Duro: Building the Future of Hardware Development
Twenty years of designing hardware products across telecom equipment, IoT devices, drones, and wearables taught Michael Corr one crucial lesson: the hardware industry was stuck in the past. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, he shared how this realization led to founding Duro, a company reimagining how hardware products are designed and manufactured.
The Engineer’s Journey
Michael’s path wasn’t straightforward. “I actually started out in college studying physics, which eventually turned into computer science, which eventually turned into engineering, and then electrical engineering,” he explains. This interdisciplinary background would later prove crucial in identifying the industry’s fundamental problems.
After spending 15 years in the Bay Area and a stint in Hong Kong helping companies set up manufacturing in Shenzhen, Michael witnessed firsthand how the software industry was rapidly evolving while hardware development remained stagnant.
The Moment of Recognition
The contrast was stark. “Having a background in computer science and having lived in the Bay Area in the mid-2000s and being first hand exposed to what I refer to as that whole software agile renaissance movement, I just had an extreme jealousy about how much innovation was happening in that industry and none of that was really transferring over to hardware industry,” Michael recalls.
The problem wasn’t just technological – it was structural. Hardware development was fragmented across different teams and companies, with data siloed in incompatible systems. “None of them were ever designed to be interoperable,” Michael notes. “They were always designed to be individually operated and manually managed to move the data from one system to the other.”
The Birth of Duro
In 2017, Michael saw an opportunity. More engineers were trying to adopt software practices in hardware development. However, the timing proved challenging. “I think in hindsight, maybe if I win year or two, there would have been a little bit more momentum in the market,” he reflects.
Early customer calls were often confrontational. “I can’t tell you how many calls I had with prospective customers who were yelling at me that what we were providing was not a true PLM, because we didn’t have these buttons or these processes that they had been using for 30 years,” Michael shares.
Finding Their Focus
Rather than compromise their vision, Duro focused on teams going through new product introduction (NPI) – companies trying to move fast and innovate. This strategy resonated not just with startups but also with larger companies like Apple, Samsung, and Google.
The key insight was that hardware innovation was constrained by the high cost of failure. While software teams could rapidly iterate and learn from mistakes, hardware teams faced prohibitive costs for experimentation. Duro set out to change this by automating manual processes and shortening development timelines.
The Vision Ahead
Looking to the future, Michael envisions a world where hardware development becomes as streamlined as software development. “A software developer, even a mid-level developer, they can set up their entire tool chain in an hour,” he notes. “What I’m looking forward to is the day that a hardware team is stood up and the very first thing they do is install their dura account.”
This vision represents more than just efficiency – it’s about enabling a new era of hardware innovation. “Once we kind of reach that pinnacle moment when hardware companies can move in a much faster and lower cost feedback loop agile cycle, that’s when the explosion of innovation is really going to happen in the industry,” Michael predicts.
As software companies increasingly enter the hardware space and bring their agile mindsets with them, Duro is positioned to be at the forefront of this transformation. Their journey shows how deep industry expertise, combined with the right vision and timing, can catalyze meaningful change in even the most established industries.