“It’s way harder than a software company in terms of the number of things that can go wrong,” Ben Horowitz, one of the founders of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and an investor in Lytro, Oculus and Jawbone, said in an interview. “Lytro has a very, very big opportunity to change the world, but there ends up being all kinds of challenges along the way. That’s because hardware is just hard.”

You can divide the tech industry into two main denominations: companies that make code and companies that make devices. For much of the last three decades, software — making code — has been the more attractive part of the industry because software has magical business properties. A company can write code once and make copies for almost no additional cost, which translates into huge profits and novel business models (like advertising or subscriptions). Because software can be updated from afar, it is also more forgiving than hardware; if you make a mistake in your app, you can just send out an update.

Software can also create businesses driven by so-called network effects. The more people that use your software, the more useful it becomes for other users, which leads to incredible growth — look at Microsoft’s Windows, Google’s search engine, Facebook and the Android operating system, each of which has more than a billion users.

But in the late 1990s, around the time Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the calculus began to shift. The rise of the Asian manufacturing industry allowed American hardware start-ups to reduce manufacturing costs through outsourcing. Mr. Jobs also showed that when a company designed all of the components in a device, it could create radically innovative products for which customers would pay a huge premium.

You could argue that Apple is an exception in the hardware business. Most other device companies don’t make much of a profit, and even those that do, like Samsung, constantly struggle to maintain their margins. But the bleak record hasn’t deterred a host of start-ups from trying to mimic Apple’s success.

“Apple has shown how to build successive new categories of hardware hits and have a great margin structure,” said Jason Rosenthal, who took over from Mr. Ng as Lytro’s chief executive last year. (Mr. Ng remains the company’s executive chairman.) “That’s what we aspire to do.”

Image Credit... Stuart Goldenberg

In many ways, Lytro is a testament to the new possibilities for making hardware. Though the company is tiny, with 85 employees, it has managed to cajole some of the world’s largest tech suppliers into providing components for its camera.