@LARGEDie-hard disruptors
By Scott KirsnerThe Web was a big smoke screen, an extra-large set of coattails.
The Web was such a disruptive technology - introducing so many new ways of communicating and transacting - that just by virtue of calling your company a Web company, a dot-com, you could lay claim to being part of the revolution. You might have been selling customized arch supports, but if you had a URL, you were part of the Internet economy.
Now, people are wise to those tricks. There's no bandwagon to ride on in 2001. You've actually got to have your own disruptive, well-differentiated technology - something that fundamentally improves the way people do business or live - if you want to get any attention. And you've got to be patient and persistent, because the days of companies going public before their first birthday are gone, and they're not likely to return soon.
Back in 1997, when I was working as a consultant, I was involved in a project with a company called SensAble Technologies, then located in an MIT-owned office building just behind the NECCO factory in Cambridge.
The company had been founded by an MIT student, Thomas Massie, who had invented a device he called the Phantom. The Phantom allowed you to touch and interact with objects that only existed in virtual space. It wasn't a glove; instead, it looked like a pen attached to the end of a Tizio adjustable desk lamp. Grabbing the pen, or stylus, you could sculpt car prototypes out of virtual clay, feeling the resistance of the material against the knife as you carved away. Or you could use the Phantom to perform a simulated surgical operation.
This was truly a disruptive technology - the most significant change to the way humans interacted with computers since the invention of the mouse by Douglas Englebart in the 1960s. But while Phantoms were being snapped up by research labs and universities all over the world, the disruptive technology, circa 1997, was the Web, not touch-enabled computers. SensAble was trying to whip up its own little dust storm right next to a much bigger tornado.
I went back to visit last week. What had been a 10-person company had grown to 67 people, and relocated from Cambridge to Woburn. The hallways were filled with artwork that had been designed using the Phantom. There were also products on display, like Hasbro's My Real Baby (the robotics innards of which were designed by Somerville's iRobot) and a number of World Wrestling Federation action figures.
Over the past few years, the executives at SensAble sat back and watched all the start-ups racing to join the Web party. Like a lot of companies with impressive technologies but no real connection to the Web, they felt like staid neighbors, sitting home, reading, and occasionally griping about the noise.
''One of our investors in particular, I remember him always haranguing us about how we didn't have a clear Internet strategy,'' says Bill Aulet, SensAble's president. ''We came up with something to make him happy.'' But it never distracted Aulet from his real goal: establishing the Phantom as an important new tool for designers, modelers, animators, and artists who used computers.
''When you have a disruptive technology, it takes time to develop a company around it,'' Aulet says. ''You stay off the radar. You have a longer gestation period. But when you do come out, you have a real unique value proposition.''
The new Phantom is sleeker and more compact than the earlier versions. You can do things with it that aren't possible in the real world, like sculpting out from the inside of a block of clay, or undoing the last few strokes of your blade. The package of hardware and software sells for $25,000. Couple that with a $50,000 solid object printer, which can actually produce the objects designed by the Phantom out of resin, wax, or starch, and you've got what the people at SensAble call ''3D desktop publishing.''
''The business case for 3D desktop publishing is that you can get through the design and prototyping stages faster, and get your product to market sooner,'' says Andrew Hally, SensAble's director of marketing.
Aulet explains that he has dedicated himself to keeping SensAble focused on a very specific market - the $5 billion to $10 billion that is spent annually on modeling new products, from detergent bottles to sneakers to Corvettes. When a SensAble employee had an idea for creating software for medical and seismological applications that took advantage of touch, that employee left to spin out the idea as a separate company. Aulet watched Web companies try to do too many things, and serve too many audiences at once, and decided to avoid that.
The Boston area is speckled with technology companies making their own revolutions, rather than tagging along on someone else's. They are the die-hard disruptionists, willing to push their technology until someone finally accepts it. (After all, it took the mouse almost 20 years from Englebart's conception to Apple's successful introduction of it in 1984 with the Macintosh.)
A favorite Internet-era saying was that a rising tide lifted all boats. This tacitly acknowledged that a lot of driftwood, dreck, and floating bits of styrofoam were getting drawn up along with any decent company. The die-hard disruptionists don't need to rely on a rising tide; they're building sturdy vessels with shallow drafts, so they can almost ignore the tides completely - or at least better endure the Fundy-esque market fluctuations we've seen lately.
MicroCHIPS is another company, like SensAble, that is cultivating a disruptive technology and concentrating on the nuts-and-bolts of what it will take to get that technology into the marketplace. MicroCHIPS is designing tiny electronic drug delivery systems that can be implanted in a human being and controlled by a physician.
''People here don't feel that they have to hurry up with what they're doing so we can get through the IPO window,'' says John Santini Jr., MicroCHIPS's president and chief scientific officer. ''Everyone here sees the potential of the technology, and that excites them. It's something that hasn't been done before, it helps people, and it benefits society.''
Santini says that MicroCHIPS's 10 employees have all signed up for a long voyage, not a three-hour tour: ''It's a couple years of hard work, followed by the approval process, and only then do you have a product.''
Aulet says ''Success today is less about being in the right place at the right time with the right idea.'' But that was very often the case during the glory days of the Web revolution - and it went completely against the grain of the Yankee work ethic. ''Now, it's about making your own luck,'' he continues. ''You know the saying, `The harder I work, the luckier I get'? We think that's true.''
Scott Kirsner is a Boston freelance writer and a contributing editor at Wired and Fast Company magazines.