Friday, November 18, 2011

Innovation All-Stars

MHT All-Star: Mick Mountz

By Keith Regan

Age: 46
Title: CEO and Founder, Kiva Systems Inc.
Education: Bachelor of Science, MIT; MBA, Harvard School of Business

Kiva Systems founder Mick Mountz nearly became a West Coast entrepreneur. After stints at Motorola, Apple — where he had a first-row seat for that company’s turnaround following Steve Jobs’ return in 1996 — and Internet grocer Webvan, Mountz began putting out feelers for his own startup. His investor, engineering and supplier network led him back to the Boston area, where Kiva has become a leading provider of distribution center automation solutions.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced in your career? The hardest thing was that moment when I decided to make the leap with Kiva Systems. To that point I was on a career track where I was thinking about big companies. It was hard to adopt that change in mentality, but since then we have been able to make a lot of forward progress.

Greatest/favorite accomplishment you’ve achieved in your career? It’s the building of the company and a culture. The fun part is creating an environment where 250 employees want to jump out of bed every morning full speed and come to work.

What drives you? We obviously continue to have growth ambitions, and what drives us internally and gets us excited is changing an industry and coming up with better and simpler and more elegant solutions. Materials-handling automation was a very stale market before we showed up.

Future career goals? We put a beacon way out there on the horizon to get the company to $1 billion in annual sales. It gives us a singular focus, because we know if we keep executing and growing and improving our product and the customer experience, several years from now we can find ourselves in that situation.