The rapid hard-tech emergence Garrett Winther Contributor Garrett Winther is a partner and program director at HAX, SOSV’s venture program for hard tech. An engineer by training, venture builder by trade, he is bringing hard-tech ventures to life at SOSV, IDEO and MIT. When I joined the team at SOSV’s HAX, a venture program designed to help early-stage hardware founders, my friends in tech shook their heads. Hadn’t I learned yet that hardware is too hard? What they didn’t see was a hardware scene evolving rapidly in contrast to its glacial reputation. The old hard-knocks hardware playbook has given way to a new, vastly more exciting one; emerging to meet civilization-level opportunities, like climate, that software can resolve alone.