Derek Richardson’s company began with a screwdriver, a circuit breaker and the steady theft of his weekends. He had about 40 light switches to replace. The work took three or four hours at a time, weekend after weekend, for six weeks. Stripping wire is a poor leisure activity. Doing it repeatedly can turn irritation into market research.
The timing was unusually obliging. In 2014, Richardson had a casual conversation with a neighbor who built and remodeled homes. The neighbor explained that builders often steered customers away from smart-home equipment. The technology cost more, made installation harder and threatened to leave the builder with support and warranty problems. Builders did not need another clever device. They needed fewer complications.
Richardson saw the two annoyances as one problem. A switch was too permanent at the moment when buyers were least ready to make permanent technology choices. What if the wiring ended in a common base, and the visible switch could click in and out? A builder could install something simple. A homeowner could choose smart controls later. The wall would not need to be opened again merely because taste, budget or technology had changed.
“There just weren’t any good solutions out there.”Derek Richardson on the smart-lighting market, 2016
An engineer learns the veto
Richardson was equipped to notice the circuitry and the commerce at once. Born in Canada, he studied electrical engineering at Queen’s University, where he also played basketball. He began his career as an early employee at BlackBerry, then spent 13 years at Cypress Semiconductor. His work moved across systems engineering, applications, product development, marketing, sales and management. Later, he added an MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
It is a useful combination for hardware: knowing what can be built, what can be manufactured and what somebody might agree to buy. At Deako, founded in Seattle in 2015, the somebody was not initially the gadget-loving homeowner. It was the homebuilder and the electrician. They were the people who could install the infrastructure across an entire development. They were also the people with excellent reasons to avoid novelty.
This was Deako’s sharper idea. The modular connector was an engineering answer, but the upgrade path was a business answer. It reduced the capital decision at construction and postponed the technology decision until the homeowner wanted it. Richardson was not asking builders to become consumer-electronics retailers. He was giving them a standard base that kept tomorrow open.
In 2016, Richardson and co-founder Alexander Strunkin spent three months in Silicon Valley with Y Combinator. The program pushed them toward a familiar discipline: make something customers love. They returned committed to Seattle, describing the city as a startup ecosystem they wanted to help build. Deako announced $1.8 million in new funding that spring, bringing its total at the time to $3.3 million.
Remaining in Seattle was more than a preference for rain and ferries. A physical-product company depends on a dense web of disciplines that rarely appear together in a software pitch deck: mechanical and electrical engineering, firmware, cloud services, industrial design, certification, manufacturing, sales and field support. Richardson understood the list because his career had crossed so many of its borders. Deako could use the accelerator’s concentration without allowing the accelerator to choose its home.
The company also financed itself like hardware often must: in layers. Richardson described the early mix as bootstrap money, angels and venture capital. A proof of concept unlocked the next conversation. Each round paid for a little more certainty in a business where a prototype on a bench is still a long way from a certified device in thousands of walls. By 2023, Deako had secured access to a $50 million non-dilutive financing facility underwritten substantially on its intellectual property, growth and market position. The switch was small; the machinery required to ship it at scale was not.
Do not dismiss the customer who rejects your category. Their veto may contain the product brief.
Forty switches, three daughters, one button
A platform pitch can sound bloodless until it reaches bedtime. Richardson and his wife have three daughters. When the girls were young, lights had a tendency to remain on around the house. The founder who had spent weeks changing switches could now end the nightly tour of rooms with one command. “Every night I hit one button,” he said in 2018, “and instantly all the lights are turned off.”
That small domestic victory says more about the useful smart home than a showroom full of animated dashboards. The technology earns its place by removing a lap around the house. When the family traveled, the same system could schedule lights to mimic occupancy. Convenience and security arrived through the object people already knew how to use.
Richardson’s own first product tried to do too much. He later called that Deako’s biggest early mistake: the team attempted to simplify ordering, installation and setup all at once, delaying the launch. The correction was focus. Build for new construction. Listen to builders. Make the installation uneventful. Hardware punishes wish lists with lead times, tooling bills and inventory, so restraint is not a mood. It is a survival skill.
His advice to other founders has been equally unromantic: the work will be tougher than imagined, so stay focused and relentless. In another interview, he offered a more personal warning. Do not start alone, or with a partner you do not deeply trust. Richardson had founded Deako by himself, added an early employee as a partner and discovered that talent without established trust could not carry the pressure. Bringing in a lifelong friend changed the equation.
The coach takes support calls
Basketball keeps reappearing in Richardson’s biography. He once played for Queen’s and now coaches the university’s team. Former colleagues describe the same habits at work: ambitious goals, severe prioritization, an appetite for feedback and a tendency to teach beyond an employee’s formal domain. One longtime colleague called him strategic, a teacher and a visionary. Another said Richardson absorbs useful criticism with unusual speed.
The warmer evidence is more concrete. A Deako customer-success employee remembered joining a support team that needed help and finding the CEO taking customer calls. He was the first to begin and the last to log out. The scene is modest, but leadership is often clearest when the org chart stops protecting the person at its top.
“A real leader is thinking about the success of the whole over the success of themself.”Derek Richardson, 2025
There are clues to his temperament away from the office, too. Richardson experiments with a 3D printer and a DJI drone. Both hobbies reward the same loop as a hardware startup: make, observe, recalibrate. His reported favorite Deako team activity was a summer beach barbecue in Seattle, which is a pleasing counterweight to the stern language of focus and execution. Even relentless people require potato salad.
From obedient switches to a quieter house
By 2024, Deako said its products were reaching one in eight newly constructed single-family homes in the United States, across more than 36 states. The company raised a $3.4 million convertible note that July to expand products and operations. It also reported partnerships with large builders including D.R. Horton, Meritage Homes and Toll Brothers. In December, Richardson was included among 20 leaders in Entrepreneur’s inaugural Entrepreneur of 2024 list. Deako entered the 2025 Inc. 5000 at No. 1,351, with 324 percent three-year growth reported by the ranking.
Growth broadened the catalogue. The system came to include dimmers, timers, motion sensors, nightlights, plugs and outlets. Yet the interesting shift is not another switch. In 2026, as Deako marked 11 years, the company expanded its stated ambition from smart lighting toward an intelligent-home platform.
Richardson’s distinction is between a remote-controlled home and one that can anticipate. The first generation made people open an app, set a schedule or speak a command. Deako’s newer direction pairs presence-sensing hardware with local machine learning, aiming to learn household rhythms and respond with less instruction. His forecast is that the interface will gradually disappear.
That is an elegant aspiration and a demanding one. A house is intimate territory. Intelligence must be legible enough to trust, quiet enough to live with and reliable enough that the old wall switch remains an excellent fallback. The goal is not to make a home feel futuristic. It is to let the machinery recede until the result feels ordinary.
Richardson’s story has always moved toward that kind of ordinariness. First, make a dangerous and tedious installation safer and faster. Then let a family turn off every light without touring the rooms. Next, let the house notice the routine. The ambition rises while the desired experience gets simpler.
A decade after those lost weekends, the wall plate still holds the whole argument. Good hardware respects the person who installs it. Good software respects the person who lives with it. A good platform leaves room for the next decision. And a good light switch, however intelligent it becomes, should still deliver one deeply satisfying click.