The protractor annoyed him. So Wenxin Fang, a teenager in Redmond, Washington, built a better one. His version is machined aluminum, precision-cut, meant to replace the flimsy plastic half-circle every kid has snapped or lost. He started a hardware company to make it. The thing is called the ZeroPivot Protractor.
Please note that some of the images in this article were created with the assistance of AI.
Not an app. Not a subscription. A physical tool for measuring angles in math class, the kind of object you’d think was finished being invented sometime around 1600. A kid looked at it, decided it stunk, and went and made metal. You can read the story over at GeekWire.
A teenager building a machined-aluminum protractor won’t move markets. But it’s a small proof that hardware startups still start where they always did: one person annoyed enough by a bad product to make a better one. Watch the crowdfunding and small-batch tool space, because that’s where the next round of these kitchen-table product companies is coming from, and a $30 protractor is cheaper to launch than an app.
Sources: geekwire.com
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