- Fail early fail often
- tell everybody who will listen what you are doing (networking is everything)
- Believe and act on your beliefs despite the doubters
- Make time to help others
When I started my first company in 1989, it was called EXOS. I had no entrepreneurial experience. The one thing I knew for sure was that if you have great people working with you and you ask potential customers a lot of questions you will find something of value that your team can create. Over 7 ½ years we remade ourselves 3 times. We started making robot controllers for robot hands (a very small market) but an easy sale as there was nothing to control them commercially available at the time. Then we got $3M on SBIR grants to research a variety of robot control and force feedback technologies an since I had worked in a medical school, we decided the commercialization plan was to use the technology in orthopedics and rehab (my PhD was in biomechanics). We build an upper extremity measurement and rehab system and sold about $1M worth of them to the only people in the US who wanted to use something other than a plastic protractor to measure their patient’s progress and realized that we’d got most of the market already. We thought that taking the force feedback technology and doing something in the broader market (consumers) would be a good idea. So I told everyone I ran into that we were trying to do that. Then I was at a party for the 5th anniversary of the MIT Media Lab and reached for a chocolate strawberry at the same time as Bob Metcalfe (I didn’t even know who he was at the time) and told him. We exchanged cards and ultimately he led me to Logitech founder Piereluigi Zappacosta who met with us via teleconference, (we had to borrow the use of a local companies conference room) to do it as Skype didn’t’ exist, and told me “if you can make a force feedback joystick for $100 retail we’ll sell a lot of them.” I remember shortly after giving at talk at an industry conference perhaps it was SIGGraph and at that time everyone was building $250,000 virtual reality systems and a few of them had some force feedback. When I said we were going to build force feedback for the PC and bring it in at $100 retail, no one believed me. Initially our engineering team didn’t believe it was possible, but I said we should do it anyway, and it turned out by thinking about the problem differently it was possible. The end result was that we sold the company in 1996 to Microsoft and it was a positive exit after a long and circuitous route
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