Why I Started Crab Labs

Electronics is in my blood. My dad owns a flex PCB fab in LA, my grandfather does too. I grew up around circuits and solder fumes.

I’ve worked at Advanced Bionics on cochlear implants, at Cognita Labs developing pulmonary monitoring equipment, at Canoo developing ADAS firmware, then at Rekovar doing wearable monitors for infants with neonatal abstinence syndrome. I also spent years as a freelancer to pay my way through college.

Across all these experiences, I kept seeing the same pattern: engineering firms promising the world and delivering disasters.

The Pattern

Big promises, excited clients, everyone dives in. Six months later: over budget, behind schedule, product can’t pass basic testing.

The engineers doing the work usually saw it coming. Three layers of managers sat between them and the client. By the time anyone listened, too late.

At a biomedical startup, we hired a respected firmware consulting firm for critical device firmware. Six months and $50k later: barely functional code, no documentation, couldn’t meet basic performance requirements. Had to be rewritten.

Good companies with solid products failing because of bad engineering services.

The Real Problem

Good engineers exist. They’re trapped in broken systems.

Big firms profit when projects drag on - change orders, scope creep, “discovery” phases that proper planning would avoid. The engineers doing actual work can’t talk to clients directly. Management layers exist to manage perception, not solve technical problems.

Nobody wants to say “we don’t know how to do this” because it might cost the contract. So they say yes to everything and figure it out later.

A Different Approach

When you have a technical question, you talk to an engineer who can answer it. No account managers translating requirements through three people who’ve never written firmware.

If we can’t do something well, we say so upfront. If your timeline is unrealistic, we’ll explain why.

We prefer fixed-price projects when possible. Our profit comes from delivering working products efficiently, not billing more hours.

Code should outlast the people who write it. When we’re done, someone else should understand and modify what we built. Standard practices, clear documentation, no clever tricks.

We turn down projects that don’t interest us. We only develop technology that helps people.

Why “Crab Labs”?

I wanted something memorable that rhymed and had an available domain. “Crab Labs” stuck. Sometimes naming is just about finding something that works and isn’t taken.

The Setup

I work out of a 1,000 sq ft lab in Long Beach, CA. Full prototyping setup, reflow oven, oscilloscopes, spectrum analyzer, environmental chamber.