Today we’d like to introduce you to Scott Miller.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I’m a mechanical engineer who has always loved robots. While earning my masters at MIT in Ocean Engineering, I worked as part of a team building the RoboTuna. From there, I went to Walt Disney Imagineering R&D where I lead the team that built a full size walking robotic dinosaur powered by a Corvette.
We were based in the Foundry Building off of Third Street in Cambridge. Following Disney, I went to iRobot for 10 years. I lead the technical team that built robotic AI toys with Hasbro and then went on to lead the manufacturing effort for Roomba.
In this process, I had the opportunity to live in China for four years and set up the manufacturing operation that could build up to 40,000 Roombas per week. After iRobot, I co-founded Dragon Innovation, where we are reinventing the way products are manufactured at scale.
We do this through a combination of software and human expertise. We recently were acquired by Avnet, and are leveraging their scale to expand our offerings. I am also a co-founder of Bolt, a VC firm focused on Hardware.
Has it been a smooth road?
As with most startups, it’s been a roller coaster. At times, we’d have our best day and worst day on the same day. The silver lining is that on the “bad days”, we always learned important lessons that would help prepare us for the future.
On the good days, it felt amazing. The struggles were sometimes around needing to close a deal to ensure sufficient cash to make payroll, as well as trying to solve critical technical challenges.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Dragon Innovation story. Tell us more about the business.
Dragon Innovation is reinventing the way products are manufactured at scale. Once a company (of any size, ranging from startups to established public companies) has built a consumer electronic hardware prototype, we can help them prepare for manufacturing, select a great factory, and then move through the new product introduction phase smoothly.
We do this through a combination of our software (Product Planner) and our human expertise. Our approach is to build modern, web-based software that is much easier to use and less expensive than the traditional enterprise software that has been traditionally used in manufacturing.
By providing hardware companies with better tools, we enable them to move at “entrepreneur speed” and gain a key competitive advantage to get to market sooner, at higher quality and lower cost.
We’ve been fortunate to work with many of the high growth consumer electronics companies. We strive to provide transparency and education throughout the process. We are really proud of the success of our customers, and that we have been able to be part of their story.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
Hardware and robotics continue to become democratized. No longer can only large established companies launch high volume hardware products. I’d like to think we lead the revolution at iRobot when we launched the Roomba.
Since then, there has been a growing wave of innovative hardware companies who have been able to scale more quickly than ever before. Examples include Ring, FormLabs, nest, Sphero, etc. In the coming 5 – 10 years, I expect this trend to continue, as better tools and financing become available.
I also see larger companies innovating at a much greater rate, as they have seen what the startups can achieve and realize that they too must innovate or die.
Pricing:
- Product Planner (Software to help hardware companies prepare for manufacturing): $100
- Engineering Sessions (Access to manufacturing experts via Product Planner): $400 and up
Contact Info:
- Website: www.dragoninnovation.com
- Email: beth@dragoninnovation.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dragoninnovation
- Twitter: @dragoninnovate
- Other: http://blog.dragoninnovation.com/
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