Two years ago, Opal launched a camera with a tweet. (They were still called tweets back then.) It was the middle of a global pandemic, a work-from-home revolution, and a truly brutal time to start a hardware company — and Opal suddenly had tens of thousands of people signed up for the webcam that Alexis Ohanian, the Reddit co-founder and Opal investor, promised was “mind blowing.” Opal at the time had four employees, CEO Veeraj Chugh tells me, and it took all the company’s time and attention just to ship cameras as fast as it could.
The process of developing its second camera, which is called the Tadpole and is launching today, has apparently been much smoother. Opal has a real hardware team and supply chain now; it was able to go back…
