robotics, business, and society for a better future
2013/06/10 Leave a comment
Friends, take a look and see what needs to be added. The definitive list of private funding in robotics for 2012 is out, help make it complete by adding a comment if you know of private funding for a robotics company that isn’t included.
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2013/06/10/venture-capital-vc-funding-robotics-2012
2012/08/29 1 Comment
Image: Front Cover; Source: Amazon
If your experience of Moby Dick was that you were constantly aware that you were reading one of the best books of all time that was opening your mind to new ideas if only you could keep your eyes open, you understand. Four Steps to the Epiphany is the great white whale of start-up books for a reason. Although it is not nearly as easy to read as his disciple Eric Ries’s more famous book, The Lean Start-up, it is much more systematic. This books has some profound insights about understanding why some start-ups can do it one way and others need to do it completely opposite.
Instead of abstracting and generalizing the insights, Blank focuses on the issues of managing under extreme uncertainty in their native context. He tackles every aspect of the non-engineering side of the business. Most of the book is about how to systematically eliminate the market risk for your product, this will be somewhat familiar to you if you’ve read the Lean Start-up. However, seeing the original idea and seeing it laid out in full detail, in the context it originally sprang from adds a lot of richness and practicality to the idea. Blank devotes a good deal of time to understanding how to make technology push and market pull work together. He covers when to go for broke spending money to enter a market and when to hold back and let the customers come to you. Most importantly, this comes with some practical steps to discover when to do each. He even covers how to start converting to mature company once you’ve almost made it.
Much like Melville, Steve Blank will say something really profound and insightful, then launch into a description of whaling–er, uh–start-up processes that are needed to implement that idea. This can make the book a tough slog, because reading a process description around bed time can definitely have soporific effect. However, this tough slog is absolutely worth it if your a practitioner in the world of technology start-ups. You can’t hand it to your cousin that works at a big company and expect him to read it. This is meant for the start-up community. If you are a start-up practitioner, get this book and make yourself read it. You will not be disappointed. I expect my copy to become much more dog-eared than it already is before it gets confiscated for some future company museum.
So how does this relate to robotics…
Reading this book will further persuade you that many if not most management teams of robotics companies don’t have a clue. You’ll even be able to look at robotics success stories and realize–wow–compared to software our industry’s state of management practice is pretty dismal. Many successful robotics companies just fell bass-ackwards into their success. Many were product driven companies to a fault that were able to expensively keep trying until they finally hit a success. This is not the same thing as systematically eliminating and consciously balancing market versus technical risk to produce the greatest chance of creating successful business that uses robotic technology to make money and make the world a better place.
We’ve got a long way to go as an industry. Luckily, now that we know that there’s nothing inherently ‘capital intensive’ about the robotics industry we can start addressing why we have so often screwed it up before.
2012/08/01 Leave a comment
source: SEC.gov
My overview of the Firms Behind the Hizook 2011 VC in Robotic List has graciously been published at Hizook.
Bottom line: We don’t have a cadre of dedicated robotics investors, but we can get investment from the industries that serve as our customers.
I wish you all luck in getting some of that VC Cash. …on second thought, no, actually, I don’t–I wish you all luck in signing up major partners who will give you progress payments to complete your product without diluting your investment.
But whatever your situation I hope that you use the appropriate capital structure to make lots of robots, lots money, and lots of good in the world.
2012/07/18 Leave a comment
Be on the look out for a forthcoming analysis of the Hizook 2011 VC in Robotic List on Hizook about the funds that invest in robotics. I’m publishing my research notes here so they don’t foul up the article. Most of this was sourced from company websites, CrunchBase, local media, or whatever I could find using Google with my limited attention span, I think I even remembered to cite a few as I was making this.
The only thing I’d really like to call your attention to, dear reader, is the complete lack of transparency in the private markets. You’ll see that there are places I could find a round, or an amount, or fund but nothing else. A lot of the poor citation is me trying to find a better source. Private transactions have no organized data so if this can be the faintest candle for finding funding for robotics, then I’ve done my job.
As always, I’d love feedback. I’m hungry for data!
2012/07/01 2 Comments
Please allow me to blow your mind and overturn the common sense notion that robotics companies are capital intensive. Comparing profitable, public, U.S. based robotics companies to a diverse basket of prominent public companies shows that robotics companies do not require a lot equipment and property to make successful businesses.
In fact, robotics companies have the least property plant and equipment of any of the companies I selected for comparison–which deliberately included such tech giants as a chip maker, an operating system maker, and a search engine giant. Looking at capital expenditure and depreciation, the robotics companies are again among the leanest of the companies on the list.
The only companies that had such low numbers for CAPEX and depreciation had their assets tied up in very long term investments like real estate and aircraft manufacturing facilities. Also, most of the robotics companies are still growing and may have their capital expenditures boosted as a percentage of revenues by their anticipated growth. Take a look at the trend line.
Now what people may mean when they say that robotics is ‘capital intensive’ is that the marginal cost of goods sold for a robotics company is greater than $0/per unit that consumer web applications have–but if that’s what they mean they should come out and say it and not be sloppy in their reasoning.
Angels, VCs, and other investors are you paying attention? Big plays are going to be made on relatively small bets.
| As a Percentage of Revenue | ||||
| Ticker |
Company |
PPE | Depreciation |
CAPEX |
|
Robotics |
||||
|
IRBT |
iRobot |
6.81% |
2.42% |
3.05% |
|
ISRG |
Intuitive Surgical |
11.31% |
1.68% |
6.79% |
|
AVAV |
Aerovironment |
7.24% |
2.76% |
4.61% |
|
CGNX |
Cognex |
9.86% |
1.72% |
2.43% |
|
Robotics Median |
8.55% |
2.07% |
3.83% |
|
|
Robotics Average |
8.80% |
2.14% |
4.22% |
|
| Diversified | ||||
|
GOOG |
|
25.33% |
3.68% |
9.07% |
|
MSFT |
Microsoft |
11.67% |
3.95% |
3.37% |
|
T |
AT&T |
84.50% |
14.50% |
15.87% |
|
INTC |
Intel |
43.75% |
9.52% |
19.93% |
|
XOM |
ExxonMobil |
45.96% |
3.34% |
6.63% |
|
BA |
Boeing |
13.55% |
2.12% |
2.36% |
|
D |
Dominion Resources |
206.34% |
8.96% |
25.40% |
|
AA |
Alcoa |
77.82% |
5.94% |
5.16% |
|
DIS |
Disney |
38.99% |
4.50% |
7.32% |
|
HD |
Home Depot |
34.54% |
2.39% |
1.65% |
|
Diversified Median |
41.37% |
4.23% |
6.98% |
|
|
Diversified Average |
58.25% |
5.89% |
9.68% |
|
Some notes on the analysis:
-Data comes from the companies last 10-K filing. Some companies include different things in revenue (where possible I tried to exclude revenue from a financing arm), in deprecation (some include amortization of intangible assets), and capital expenditure (Intuitive, for example, includes the acquisition of intangible assets).
-I wanted to look at a diverse basket of public companies and tried to pick companies that might be similar in some ways to robotics companies but whose earnings would not be unduly influenced by robotic related income. For example, I excluded offshore oil field services companies because they were too close to being robotics companies, but still not pure enough to get a good view of the diversified company. I did include Disney (which does anamatronics), Boeing (which has a UAV making subsidiary), and Google (which has a robotic car division) because I thought the revenues contributed to the these companies by robotics related activities had no material impact on the financial metrics. However, their tangential involvement in robotics speaks to their similarity to robotics businesses.
-Future analysis should look at some other places where capital use can be buried. For example, Cost of Goods Sold can hide capital that is employed on the companies behalf further up the supply chain. It is possible that current assets like inventory may also need to be higher for robotics companies. Also, we should compare total assets and liabilities to the revenue generated to similarly sized public companies to see if there is a substantial difference.
2012/06/19 1 Comment
Inspired by getting a second e-mail about Grishin Robotics, I was parsing the VC data from Hizook to see who actually does invest in robotics. I was surprised to see that there are firms that actually make multiple investments in robotics.
1) The Foundry Group has invested in both Orbotix and the Makerbot. This makes some sense in that this is the Techstars crew. They get consumer technology and nerd culture Makerbot and Orbotix both cater to the maker / gadget-lover / nerd-cool market with consumer products. Although I’m sure that both companies have possibility of being onto something much bigger whether that is distributed 3D printing changing manufacturing or augmented reality games changing the way that we think about the world, they are both at this point in the toy / hobby market.
2) Draper Fischer Jurvetson shows up once with Heartland Robotics (now Rethink Robotics) and once again through their ‘Midwest’ affiliate Draper Triangle on Aethon‘s latest raise. You’ll notice that both of these are practical, safe around humans, commercial applications with predictable, well understood businesses as the customers of these robots.
3) Bezos Expeditions also shows up as an investor on Hizook’s list twice. He (they?) splits the difference by investing in Makerbot Industries and Heartland/Rethink Robotics. I guess you could deduce a theme around making stuff, but I think that it might have more to do with personal relationships or just what Jeff Bezos thinks is cool as shit. I know this post is full of links, but take a look at Bezos Expeditions. Their portfolio is a space company, a fusion company, a 10,000 year clock with no commercial purpose, and a bunch of other really cool stuff that might scare the bejeezus of a regular VC–along with some relatively conventional investments like Air BnB.
I hope that when Grishin Robotics makes investments, it becomes the kind of investor that signals to follow-on investors that companies it chooses are solid and likely to become profitable. We need more people entering the business of robotics and investing in robotics if this technology is going to reach everyone it should. I commend Dmitry Grishin on putting his money where his convictions are.
2012/05/30 Leave a comment
Travis Deyle at Hizook has some widely cited data about venture capital activity in robotics. I’ve sorted his data to make a cluster comparison.
https://robocosmist.wordpress.com/robotics-clusters/
Observations:
robocosmist 
East Coast Chauvinism in Robotics: Time to Face Facts, Silicon Valley is Kicking Our Ass
2012/06/24 by Robert Morris Leave a comment
A cleaned-up version of this article became my first post on Hizook. http://www.hizook.com/blog/2012/06/25/east-coast-chauvinism-robotics-time-face-facts-silicon-valley-kicking-our-butt#comment-971
_______
I have lots of love for Pittsburgh in particular, but it really pisses me off when people on the East Coast repeat a bunch of falsehoods (See #8) about how Boston and Pittsburgh compare to Silicon Valley and the rest of the world. Many people in Pittsburgh and Boston—including people I call friends and mentors—smugly think that the MIT and CMU centered robotics clusters are leading the world in robotics. This is demonstrably false.
If leadership in robotics means forming companies, making money, or employing people, then Silicon Valley is crushing everyone—no matter what the Wall Street Journal editorial page says about their business climate. I’ve previously published an analysis of the Hizook 2011 VC Funding in Robotics data that shows that the Valley gets 49% of total VC robotics investment worldwide.
I’d now like to add an analysis of U.S. public companies (see bottom of the page). Basically, the ‘Pittsburgh and Boston are the center of the robotics world’ story is even more ridiculous if you look at where public robotics companies are located. Silicon Valley is crushing the other clusters in the U.S. at creating value in robotics and in building a robotics workforce in public companies. (A forthcoming analysis will show that this true worldwide and if you include robotics divisions of public companies not principally engaged in robotics such as Boeing and Textron.)
77% of the workforce at public robotics pure plays is in Silicon Valley companies. An astounding 93% of the market capitalization is headquartered in Silicon Valley and even if you exclude Intuitive Surgical (NASDAQ:ISRG) as an outlier, the Silicon Valley cluster still has twice as much market capitalization as Boston.
The public companies that I deemed to meet the criteria of being principally engaged in robotics, that they had to make and sell a robot, and not have substantial value creating revenues from businesses not related to robotics are listed in the table below.
The one company that I believe might be controversial for being excluded from this list is Cognex (NASDAQ:CGNX). However, while trying to do decide on whether to include them, I found their list of locations. They have three locations in California including two in Silicon Valley. That means that this ‘Boston’ company has more offices in Silicon Valley than in Boston. I’m not an advanced (or motivated) enough analyst to find out what the exact employee breakdown is, but combined with the fact that they make vision systems and supply components rather than robots, I elected to exclude them. I acknowledge that a similar case could be made about Adept (NASDAQ:ADEP) that just made a New Hampshire acquisition, but I have decided to include them and count them towards Silicon Valley. I do not believe that either of these decisions, substantively impact my finding that Silicon Valley is the leading cluster when it comes to public company workforce and value creation.
I’m hoping the people who are spreading the misinformation that Silicon Valley has to catch-up to Boston and Pittsburgh will publish corrections. I believe that this is important, particularly because I want to see Pittsburgh reclaim its early lead in robotics. So many robotic inventions can trace their heritage back to Pittsburgh, it is a real shame that Pittsburgh has not used this strength to create the kind of robotics business ecosystem that one would hope.
It is impossible for communities to take appropriate action if they do not understand where they stand. I hope that this new data will inspire the Pittsburgh community to come together and address the challenges of culture, customer access, and capital availability that have been inhibiting the growth of Pittsburgh’s robotic ecosystem before they lose too many more aspiring young entrepreneurs—such as me—to the siren song of California.
1,100
463
20%
2%
183
43
3%
0%
768
577
14%
2%
174
135
3%
1%
1,924
21,840
36%
88%
619
606
12%
2%
429
1,110
8%
4%
171
13
3%
0%
5,368
24,787
100%
100%
Filed under Clusters, Commentary, Economics, Finance, Public Companies Tagged with Boston, business, California, Clusters, drones, economic, Equity, financing, hizook, market capitalization, New England, Public Securities, robotics, Silicon Valley, Stock, VC, Venture Capital, workforce