At the Nantucket Conference in early May, we had a rousing box lunch discussion about:
Home Runs & Grand Slams: Let's Talk About Building Big Companies in the New England Ecosystem
Colin Angle, CEO, iRobot
Michael Greeley, General Partner, Flybridge Capital Partners
Diane Hessan, CEO, CommuniSpace
Bill Warner, President, Warner Research and Founder, Avid Technology
Much of the discussion centered around how to move companies that are at the "triple" level to the "home run" level. This means crossing the $1B threshold in market capitalization. iRobot is now at about $500M in market cap, so Colin and his company provided a perfect window into the issues facing a company on the threshold of a home run.
As a result of the discussion Colin invited me to iRobot for discussion about the company's future. We had a fascinating talk about how the company got started 22 years ago, with -- believe it or not -- a plan to send a miniature robot to the moon and make a movie about it. They got quite far...they had a plan to sell the data to NASA, they had a producer, and they had plans to launch using a Chinese Long March rocket. Eventually NASA decided to take the rover business in house, and these small robots spawned the Mars rovers. Colin's eyes lit up when he told me that his name is on one of the rovers now on the Red Planet.
This video was taken in iRobot's wonderful "robot museum", which doubles as the entrance hallway once you pass security at the company's headquarters. Although the sign says "don't touch the robots", Colin was able to breach that rule many times, even peeling back the face of an early expressive robot toy.
What's really fascinating here is a story of determination, and a story of learning as you go. The video is 11 minutes long, It's really worth watching. Carl Calabria, who was VP of Engineering at Avid, recently joined iRobot, so I was visiting him as well. It was serendipity that he came on the little robot tour, and that he had his handy, tiny Canon S90 camera with him. (He made special holster for it....he's a photography fanatic.) Carl did a wonderful job of hand-held crane shots and closeups for the movie.
I wrote a blog post recently about backing founders who intend to change the world. Colin Angle is certainly doing just that, and at age 43 with a successful, growing company, he has long path yet to travel. Clearly, iRobot is one our most important home run candidates.