About Knilb¶

For twenty years I built connected products, leading both product and engineering. The work ran from circuit boards and contract manufacturers in China up to enterprise cloud software, and from products shipped in volume into homes and small businesses to the building automation and energy systems running commercial and industrial sites.

In all of it, the product was really a system of devices and software, and no single team had built all of it. Even when we designed the board ourselves, it only worked in the field alongside other people's gateways, cloud services, and parts we did not make. The expensive failures were never in one component. They sat in the seams, and finding them meant proving things end to end, sometimes credibly enough that another company would change their design.

Every team rebuilds that capability from scratch, and it stays manual long after everything else has been automated. The real cost is not the effort. It is that when proving a change is safe is slow, the ambitious version of a product quietly becomes the safe one. Software stopped working that way a long time ago. Products that touch the physical world never got there.

Knilb is the early-stage venture I am building to close that gap. I am talking with teams building connected products and taking on a small number of design partners. If that sounds like your situation, I would like to hear about it.

Nate · hello@knilb.com · LinkedIn