Space Dirt🚀 Interviews: The Founder Five, Matthew Haber

The Founder Five: Matthew Haber

Welcome to the Space Dirt’s interview series, The Founder Five. Basically, I email a hard tech Founder or CEO 7 questions, they answer 5, and I publish the answers.

This is my way of celebrating the people changing the hard tech world. If you’d like to be interviewed, reach out.

This interview is with Cofactr’s Co-Founder & CEO, Matthew Haber.

Cofactr gives its customers full-service electronics procurement. In other words, authenticated components delivered to your dock or manufacturer, on schedule, with complete traceability.

Matthew has a diverse background in engineering, technology leadership, and design with a focus on helping hardware teams working in new and emerging spaces. Prior to Cofactr, he co-founded and led an R&D, product design, and experiential technology company called BeSide, ultimately exiting through a private-equity-backed strategic acquisition.

Space Dirt: Tell us about your background and what inspired you to start this company. What was that “aha” moment?

Haber: Cofactr came out of a company Phillip Gulley and I ran together before this — a Brooklyn-based design and engineering studio called BeSide Digital. We worked across hardware, software, and media for companies like Zoox, Google, Cadillac, Samsung, and Crowdstrike. Different industries, different scales, but the same pattern kept showing up: the software side of manufacturing had evolved into something genuinely powerful, and the hardware side hadn't kept up. The tooling, the processes, the infrastructure — it was lagging by a decade or more. That gap is where Cofactr started.

We didn't arrive at the current company in a straight line. We actually launched as a contract manufacturer for circuit board assembly. It didn't take long to realize that skilled assembly wasn't the problem anyone needed solved. The real friction was upstream — in procurement, in supply chain visibility, in the logistics layer that sits between a team's intentions and their actual production timeline. So we pivoted toward that instead.

What Cofactr does now is build the infrastructure layer that hardware manufacturing was missing. Better data and actionable intelligence. Real communication between enterprise systems and the teams using them. Procurement automation.

Specialized logistics support. Warehousing that lets companies scale without losing control. The mental model I keep coming back to is what AWS did for software deployment — it didn't change what engineers were building, it changed what they had to manage themselves in order to build it. That's the analog for physical component management. Our customers — engineering, procurement, and manufacturing teams — end up with actual visibility into their supply chains, real leverage over cost and risk, and fewer of the errors and delays that come from stitching together disconnected systems.

The aspiration was always to make hardware manufacturing as agile as software development has become. We're building toward that.

Space Dirt: Why did you choose Long Beach for your first West Coast space?

Haber: Our first warehouse was in Brooklyn because that's where we were when we started the company, and honestly, it made sense at the time. A lot of our engineering team is still based there. But from pretty early on, customers were asking us for a West Coast presence. It wasn't just a nice-to-have; for a lot of them, it was a real operational gap. We took it seriously. We actually went out and polled our customers directly — where do you need us? — and the answer was clear: LA area. So that's where we went.

We landed on Long Beach, and it turned out to be a better fit than we could have planned. A significant portion of our customers and partners are within a 30-minute drive of that warehouse. For a business built on fast, reliable fulfillment, proximity matters. Long Beach has proven that out.

Space Dirt: What’s your approach to building your team and company culture in the hard tech space?

Haber: We hire people who've actually been in the room — engineers, operators, and operators who've worked in aerospace, defense, or advanced manufacturing and already know what's at stake. That's intentional. A smaller team of people who've lived these problems moves faster and produces better work than a large team that's still figuring out what the customer actually needs.

We're not a company where someone learns on the job what ITAR compliance means, or why a single component shortage can halt a production line. Our customers are building things that genuinely matter — flight systems, defense programs, life-critical hardware — and they operate with a level of rigor and seriousness that we think any partner supporting them should match. That standard isn't aspirational for us. It's a baseline. When a customer's program depends on you getting it right, there's no acceptable version of "we're still learning the fundamentals.”

Space Dirt: What trends are you seeing in your industry that have you most excited?

Haber: Something structural is happening in electronics right now that I don't think gets talked about enough. The biggest shift since distributor consolidation in the 1980s.

Major component suppliers are moving toward direct sales. Large manufacturers are pulling the supply chain back in-house instead of handing it off to EMS providers and distributors who treat it like a black box. And both startup hardware companies and established aerospace and defense primes are arriving at the same uncomfortable conclusion: just-in-time was always a bet, not a strategy — and somewhere along the way, a lot of manufacturers quietly handed control of their own destiny to someone else's logistics infrastructure. When the supply chain breaks, that bet gets called. We've watched it happen repeatedly.

Cofactr was built around exactly this problem — the idea that manufacturers should actually own their supply chain, not rent access to it.

So, watching the rest of the industry work its way to the same conclusion we started with? It's validating, honestly. Where I think this goes is straightforward: manufacturers end up with real visibility, real control, and real leverage over their own supply chains. Not a portal. Not a dashboard someone else controls. Actual ownership of the inputs that determine whether their programs succeed or fail.

Space Dirt: What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received as a founder, and what advice would you give to someone just starting their hard tech journey?

Haber: There's a saying I keep coming back to — not something anyone told me directly, just one of those things that turns out to be true the longer you're in it: people overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate what they can do in a year. It sounds simple. It's actually pretty hard to internalize when you're in the middle of building something.

A lot of the real challenge of being a founder — especially in hard tech, where the timelines are long, and the feedback loops are slow — is staying honest with yourself about what's actually achievable within a given window. Not optimistic. Not pessimistic. Honest. Because if you overestimate how fast something can move, you start reading early friction as failure. You second-guess the direction instead of the pace. You make course corrections that weren't necessary and miss the ones that were. The companies that make it through the hard parts of building in this space are usually the ones that figured out how to stay the course without losing their grip on reality — and that starts with being clear-eyed about time.

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-Erik

Erik Stiebel
Founder and Vice President
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