Veeraj Chugh was fed up with webcams. A head of product operations at Uber with a flair for design, Chugh couldn’t stand the quality of the images produced by his computer’s built-in camera. So in 2020, he set out to build a better one. Within a matter of months, he’d quit his job and co-founded San Franciscobased Opal Camera, just as millions of workers were getting used to daily Zoom meetings. Opal’s first product, the Cl, was a sleek webcam that delivered 4K video and cut out background noise. Chugh landed early investors such as Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley.
The thinking behind Opal’s $300 camera was that people would be willing to pay a premium for a well-designed product they’d use every day. Still, launching a startup in the consumer electronics industry was a risky proposition.
“When you’re doing hardware, you have to be pretty good at predicting the future, because you’re building products that won’t come out for
