Sol Reader, cofounded by Ben Chelf and Trae Stephens, is writing an exciting and readable future by putting gorgeous E-ink displays in a custom pair of “glasses” so you can focus on losing yourself in reading.

Read on for my thoughts on consumer hardware being “the next big thing” and why I believe Sol will be a massively successful company.

We (consumer hardware) are so back

I don’t believe it’s consensus among venture capital or the general public yet, but consumer hardware is coming back in a bigger way than ever before.

Apps are becoming less and less utilized, all of our services are going mono-channel, and most folks only use their phone and computers. However, a group of big and small players are just about ready to send the preverbal rock of consumer hardware tumbling down the hill:

• Meta has dumped a ton of money into Oculus and its glasses while Apple is spinning up their suite of vision products

• Earlier this year a variety of AI wearables emerged like S³ feature company Tab

• Firms like Teenage Engineering are breathing new life into vintage products

• Gen Z loves anything analog they can get their hands on

• Case and point with this episode, Sol Reader

Consumer hardware is back and it’s going to eat everything.

This is only the beginning, and it hasn’t even really begun… I’m incredibly excited about this.

We are living in the future! Where are the cool and futuristic consumer hardware products? Most consumer hardware either isn’t timeless design or seems to just tick a product requirement on a big company’s vision map.

Sol Reader however, is one of those rare wow products.

Beauty and culture, design first.

Sol Reader’s technology itself isn’t incredibly novel, it's essentially two e-ink displays with optics. But it’s not always the core tech that makes consumer products great, it’s the experience and feelings they invoke — the Sol Reader delivers on that unspoken promise.

1. It’s beautiful — From a smooth metallic body on the glasses that don’t leave fingerprints easily to a pleasant to hold page turning device modeled after a worry stone, the industrial design of the Sol Reader is phenomenal. It feels like it’s made by a company with a few more 0s on its total funding to date.

2. It’s magical — I got to read with it for 5 minutes while Ben actively filmed me using it, not exactly a focus conducive reading experience… Yet still, I got lost in the Heinlein book I was reading. Reading with Sol Reader transported me to another world, like the way I felt when I used to read books as a kid.

3. It’s promising — The promise of the Sol Reader is simple: you will read more and be less distracted overall. I don’t doubt it. So much so that I convinced Ben to give me an early preorder link so I could buy my own. Thanks Ben :)

I got to film with Ben at their San Francisco HQ as the Sol team was packing up their first batch of pre-orders for shipment, a few things struck me as interesting.

As you enter their space, they had this lovely bit of prose printed on a large trifold display that we open the episode with Ben reading:

Past the display, I found a few standing tables filled with an assembly line where Sol team members jammed out to ambient rock while putting the final touches on a batch of prototypes. It was clear to me that everyone was excited about what they were building, seemingly for their own unique reasons. If I had more time I would have liked to talk to everyone there about what’s got them so excited about Sol and what the first thing they’d read with it would be.

Building a startup is hard, building a hardware startup is like flipping on the “insane” mode on a video game.

A lot of companies fall trap to the intensity of building hardware and compromise on their design in the name of functionality, performance, or minimum specifications.

It’s hard to make something beautiful and highly functional. I believe Sol has achieved both.

There’s a focus on moving fast and figuring out the supply chain needed for mass production, but only because they’ve clearly taken their time to perfect the design of the reader. It’s time to build [lots of Sol Readers]!

Not the founders first rodeo

Sol was cofounded by Ben and Trae Stephens in 2021, but this isn’t the duo’s first time building majorly successful companies.

Ben cofounded Coverity, a company focused on software quality and security, which was acquired for $375M by Synopsys and went on to invest in other companies.

Trae has also had a successful prior career as a partner at the esteemed Founders Fund and co-founder of Anduril, today’s hottest defense manufacturer on the block.

All in all, the duo has a track record of building hard companies successfully. Experience building hard things is an incredibly convincing credential starting out on a new venture.

I couldn’t imagine a better team to build something like Sol quickly and with such incredible quality. I’ll be rooting for the Sol team as they scale to mass production all the while reading more books about founding hard companies all with my own Sol Reader.

Keep on building the future,

— Jason

Filmed in San Francisco, CA | Edited in San Francisco, CA | Composed in Davis, CA