Print
Email
Print Edition Stories
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Net Gains
Entrepreneurs, investors talk robotics, collaboration at Nantucket Conference
By Galen Moore
MHT's Michelle Lang: Local tech execs tackle the Boston Marathon
Interactive map of Bedford's Crosby Drive tech hub
Brendan Lynch talks about MIT $100K
We all know what’s wrong with New England’s venture economy: We’re too tight-lipped. Not enough sharing here. Odd then, that Nantucket should be the place to break the stereotype. Stoic Quakers keeping themselves on the island, making venture returns in whaling. Yet at the Nantucket Conference last Thursday through Saturday, the 150 entrepreneurs and investors who gathered there were anything but taciturn.
No one knocked the all-star lineup of speakers and panelists, but you got the feeling most of the entrepreneurs, investors and others would have been happy to spend the entire conference in one long, open-ended powwow. Unlike most cocktail receptions, people seemed interested in helping solve one another’s problems.
Matt Lauzon, co-founder of Paragon Lake Inc. and a first-time entrepreneur, put it best, saying that anyone at the conference could have been a panelist. Between panels, conversations broke out on fundraising, right-sizing for a downturn, recruiting and other challenges facing startups. “People were being very open and honest,” Lauzon said.
The agenda of sessions embraced investing, selling and advice for CEOs. Two sessions focused on growing sectors in New England: robots and video games.
In the first, iRobot Corp. (Nasdaq: IRBT) co-founder Rodney Brooks gave a fireside chat on the future of robotics. In the second, a gaming panel with Quick Hit CEO Jeffrey Anderson, 38 Studios CEO Brett Close and Rockstar Games studio president and mad scientist Ian Lane Davis focused on Massachusetts’ strengths as an emerging region.
Brooks predicted that as baby boomers age, our population will become top-heavy with seniors. They’ll need services from lawn care to home health care, but there won’t be an adequate younger population to perform those tasks. That will mean fast-growing opportunities in consumer robotics, he said.
Brooks didn’t want to talk much about Heartland Robotics, his new company, despite the best efforts of two reporters to get him to do so. The company is focused on innovating robotics in industry.
Without the base of military customers the robotics cluster enjoys, it may be a while before Massachusetts game developers can go Grand Theft Studio on Los Angeles — but Anderson, former CEO of Turbine Entertainment, said he’s convinced that Boston is accumulating a better pool of talent than other gaming hubs.
Davis agreed, saying state government policy has contributed. Davis, who founded Mad Doc Software in 1998, continued at Rockstar when the Take Two Interactive (Nasdaq: TTWO) subsidiary bought his company in 2008. Changes in California state labor laws have required studios to pay animators and developers overtime — making it cheaper to run a studio in Massachusetts, he said.
These two panels are only a sample of some of the bright discussions that went on. A fuller view can be found on Twitter, where participants posted liberally under the hashtag #ack09. This year, conference organizers made the event, heretofore held “off the record,” fair game to bloggers, tweeters and reporters — prompting one shrewd observer to wonder if anything is ever off the record anymore.
To run down the entire conference would be too long-winded for the web, but these are a few of the highlights I took away. Robots, video games, and a collaborative culture: I bet the first generation of Nantucket entrepreneurs would have been proud to see it.
Comments
If you are commenting using a Facebook account, your profile information may be displayed with your comment depending on your privacy settings. By leaving the 'Post to Facebook' box selected, your comment will be published to your Facebook profile in addition to the space below.
RSS Feeds
