Sky Gidge

    skygidge@icloud.com

    ADMISSION into the HAX workshop requires a fingerprint scan. No one gets in without an appointment.

    “A lot of people think that we are a makerspace, but we’re not,” said Benjamin Joffe, 38, a partner at HAX located in Huaqiangbei of downtown Shenzhen. “This is a private company and there is some secrecy.”

    HAX is Shenzhen’s oldest hardware accelerator and they want to protect what’s being built behind the tall glass walls. The products that come out of HAX include everything from medical devices to programmable desk lamps, and all lot of them are original.

    HAX was founded about three years ago by a french venture capitalist, Cyril Ebersweiler, who saw opportunity in the speed ideas could be turned into products in Shenzhen.

    Joffe, who is also French, is running things as HAX’s seventh “class” settles in.

    Each class is a group of “teams,” the current class has 15 teams, each developing a product. Teams, made up of a few people, apply to the program online.

    This class has teams from countries including the United States and Canada, and one team from China.

    HAX gives teams access to mentors, a workshop and other resources, along with up to US$100,000. In return, HAX gets a stake in the startup companies the teams launch. (Continued on P3)

    The current HAX class will spend three months in Shenzhen refining their products before heading to Silicon Valley to face media and investors this November.

    But why Shenzhen?

    “There’s no other place in the world that has access to the resources Shenzhen does in terms of actual manufacturing and actual development,” said Mat Mets, the founder and director of Guangzhou-based Blinkinlabs. Mets was part of the second class to go through HAX in 2013.

    “We showed up (to HAX) with six different ideas,” said Mets. Speaking to experts and manufacturers helped Mets narrow the product down to a programmable LED ribbon called BlinkyTape.

    “[HAX] wanted more than a product, they wanted a company they could work with,” said Mets.

    Mets said training on how to talk about his product with potential investors helped a lot, along with the trip to Silicon Valley that let him network.

    “One of our mentors hooked us up with one of the LED manufacturing companies that we ended up using,” he said.

    Not every start-up that comes out of HAX is successful. Two of the start-ups that came out of HAX don’t exist anymore, according to a recent article in the South China Morning Post.

    At the end of the current class HAX will have helped launch 80 start-ups, putting it in the top three most active hardware accelerators in the world, according to Joffe.

    “The teams that come in from Silicon Valley say they get more done in Shenzhen in a single week than they get done in an entire month back home,” he said.