Finally a place to drop the act and write from the first person. Because Fox & Egg is run by one guy: Senne Van Rompaey, that’s me. I’ve worked with hardware startups my whole career in a leading design & engineering agency where I’ve done basically every job imaginable as designer, engineer, project lead, strategist, product manager and director of design & engineering.

But the more I rose through the ranks, the further I strayed from what kept me engaged and I realized I needed to make a change. So I quit my management position and started Fox & Egg to return to the core of my passion: helping consumer hardware startups hit the ground running in the world of product development.

I was born in the Flemish part of Belgium (so I love fries and beer but suck at French) as the second child to a single mom. As a kid I loved to draw “inventions” and filled notebooks with flying cars, drones and even sheep-washing machines! But growing older I learned to put that dream to rest because “inventor is not a real job”. It wasn’t until a high-school art teacher introduced me to the university studies of Product Development, which combined business strategy, industrial design and engineering, that I picked up on my dream again.

During my studies I was always confronted with this image of the “rockstar designer” that made stunning sketches and cool designs. Sadly, I was never really that good at that stuff but excelled in the technical aspects of design and engineering. Suffice to say I stayed even further away from the “fuzzy front end” of design since it was always less concrete than engineering and seemed like a bunch of hot air and needless fluff to me at the time.

This led me to start my career at a leading design & engineering agency — that had a heavy technical engineering focus — where I spent my first years learning the trade as a mechanical designer and later got more involved in project management and internally leading our team of designers. However, a challenge from my boss and mentor would reshape my thinking about product development completely when he asked me to to develop a new set of services for the company to address some of the challenges we faced at a time the “design thinking” trend was picking up steam. We noticed a lot of projects grinding to a halt because there was uncertainty of requirements resulting in endless scope changes and conflicting request by customers that didn’t really know or understand what they needed to build. So we decided to venture back into the unknowns of that bag of hot air known as the fuzzy front-end of design.

With a skeptical mind I attacked the challenge, looking for ways to cut out the bullshit and come up with a streamlined approach that was actually useful. Through intensive study and hands-on experience, I finally realized a fundamental truth: business development and product development are two sides of the same coin. Every technical requirement must be justified by an existing customer need, and the most elegant engineering solution means nothing if there’s no willingness-to-pay from the market. And while for many this might sound as common-place knowledge, you’d be surprised by the droves of entrepreneurs that still haven’t figured that out and believe solely in the power of their own vision, thinking they’re the next Steve Jobs (source: me and the dozens of headaches I’ve had from working with guys like that).

This revelation fundamentally changed my approach to hardware development. Over the past two decades I've guided numerous startups through the complex journey from idea to market.

Over the years I’ve encountered diverse challenges: from helping a smart steamer startup meet tight deadlines through innovative project management and identifying and solving critical component sourcing issues for a hardware crypto wallet, to connecting a molecular beer brewing device startup with crucial expertise in fermentation stability and even co-running an ice cream machine venture as fractional CPO. If I’ve learned one thing, it’s that you can’t dole out strategic advice to a hardware startup if you don’t know how the sausage is made. Strategic thinking is useless without a basis in technical execution coming from years of experience. So today, I help startups navigate this challenge, ensuring they validate their market before they start building too soon and find smart ways to de-risk their journey from concept to successful launch.

On top of that, I’m a self-proclaimed “punkrock bureaucrat”, meaning I enjoy boiling things down to a science in methodologies and process, but I’m constantly trying to break my own rules in the pursuit of faster and better ways of doing things, I firmly believe improvement is always possible and necessary and I love to learn.

If that sounds like a guy you’d like to work with, feel free to reach out!