Heroes in Business - Helen Greiner, cofounder iRobot, CEO Tertill Corporation

Episode Date: August 22, 2022

Helen Greiner, cofounder iRobot, CEO Tertill Corporation is interviewed by David Cogan host of the Eliances Heroes Show and founder Eliances entrepreneur community.  

Up in the sky, look, it's captivating, it's energizing, it's Alliances Heroes. Alliances is the destination for entrepreneurs, investors, CEOs, inventors, leaders, celebrities, and startups, where our heroes in business align. Now, here's your host flying in, David Kogan, founder of Eliance's. That's right. And it just never stops. I got to tell you, I have the best job. Why? Because I get to interview the most incredible people. They're making a difference in the lives of others. It could be anything from entertaining others to creating inventions, to hiring, to just making a difference. And you know what? We all have hiring to just making a difference.

And you know what? We all have that ability to make a difference. And that's what the show is about, learning from others. What things can we pick up? What things, instead of reinventing, quote, the wheel, what does it take to really help others? We all have that superpower. And I'm super excited today, too.

And by the way, too, thank you for the feedback. And I'm super excited today, too. And by the way, too, thank you for the feedback we continue to have on, have when I had on recently, the administrator for NASA for the past three presidents and also the CFO of NASA. So please make sure that you go to alliances.com. That's E-L-I-A-N-C-S dot com to check out those past interviews. All right. Well, we have somebody very special. She's made life easier for many of us. And we're going to learn a lot about her today.

And you're going to understand why. Because, you know, it's some of those things that you just don't want to do. But what did she do to create something she saw in need? And she created it. Welcome to the show, Helen Grainer. She is the CEO and chairman of Turtle. Now get this, co-inventor of the Roomba and co-founder of iRobot. She could be reached at turtle.com. Now let me spell that to you. And of course, we'll have it on the link here and posted T-E-R-T-I-L-L dot com. With that, welcome to the show, Helen. Thanks for having me. It's great.

All right. We got to get started. First of all, for those of you that are watching and seeing, you got a really cool necklace. Show us what that is and what the meaning of that is, because it's special. I have a robot as a necklace, as I frequently do, because I love robots. Right. And fact too is, I mean, think about it. You created something that so many people have in their home, right? Of the, you know, the whole Roomba and iRobot moving. And I mean, that's just incredible. But the Roomba. So, I mean, you know, and you've sold so many of those. In fact, too, as I've seen your latest versions when I was at the CES, the Consumer Electronics Show and that, huge crowd there and stuff. What was it like when you finally actually created it and you got the first sale?

Yeah, it was amazing. It was the fall of 2002. And, you know, we had a launch date, we put it on the market, and it sold out for Christmas. And it was truly, truly incredible. We were, you know, we didn't know how it would go when we put on the market. But you know, a lot of hard work went into it. And when we got it out there, people said, yes, we don't want to do the vacuuming. And that's the thing is, is you don't actually know, right, Helen, until somebody who's buying it, who's not a relative, who's not a friend, who doesn't even know you purchase it, right? Right. Well, we did focus groups and we did all

the steps along the way, but you can never tell from that. You can never tell what's going to make it in the marketplace because it depends on so many things. Timing. If we had missed Christmas that year, the holiday season when everybody's buying gifts and stuff, it might not have gone the same way at the launch. Now, I'm going to play something for you here in a second, and then I want you to share with our audience what that means to you. Okay, you ready for that? Here we go. what that means to you. Okay, you ready for that? Here we go.

You're smiling because you know, right? I know, to me. What does that mean to you, the Star Wars theme song? That means R2-D2. Because when I saw Star Wars when I was 11, I fell in love with R2-D2. Because, you know, he had an agenda, he was a character, He saved the universe. But more, he was more than a machine. And I've always wanted to build things that are

really machines, but more than machines to people. Pretty incredible at that age and being influenced. And again, right, who would have ever thought now how many years later and you've created, you know, co-inventor of the Roomba and co-founder of iRobot, very successful. And it doesn't stop there. And now going into, you know, creating something, too. In fact, I want you to steal the thunder. But before you do it, let me just prep our audience here. All right.

For those of you that may not be familiar with Turtle, first of all, it's another task. If you thought vacuuming was a pain in the... Exactly. Oh, wait till you hear now what she has created as CEO and chairman of Turtle. In fact, something that we, I mean, I don't know anybody that likes it except those that maybe are being paid to actually do it. So why don't you steal the thunder? What does Turtle sell? The Turtle is a weeding robot. It looks a lot like Roomba, but it lives in your garden, it runs on sunshine, and it does the weeding for you. And it does it with these scrubby wheels that keep seeds from germinating and a high-speed

spinning weed whacker. And if one pokes its head up, it's off with its head. And that's a really effective method of weeding. It's got a solar cell, which means you never have to charge it. It just lives in your garden. And it stays there all year and does the weeding. The one trick is, though, you have to protect, you have to have a boundary around your garden, and you have to protect your small plants

and seedlings with these included row and plant guards. But once the plants are four inches tall or so, the robot's going to detect them, avoid them, and it does a really good job navigating around and getting everywhere in your garden and keeping it weed-free all year. And how did that concept come to be? Well, one of my partners at Turtle was also from iRobot and invented the Roomba. And he was thinking about gardening. And I'm aer myself and you know what can you do to really help people in the garden and it's not planting right it's not harvesting I don't think it's pruning and twining because those things you do once it's the stuff that has to be done every week right and if you miss it for one week you know you go to your garden and it's a it's a

weedy mess we want to do something that's not taking the fun of gardening, but taking some of the scut work of gardening away. So I find, even though I have turtles in my vegetable garden, I still do plenty of weeding because there's weeds all over the place, right? Like in your lawn, in your hedges, like, you know, places that the turtle doesn't run today, maybe one day, but not today. You know, we want to do something that would really help people make gardening even more enjoyable and save their precious gardening time for all the jobs that they don't get to some years, making it, you know, a better garden. Absolutely. And that's phenomenal. Again, we have with us Helen Green Grainer. She is the CEO and chairman of Turtle. You can reach her at turtle.com. That's T-E-R-T-I-L-L.com. Because you're listening, watching me, David Kogan, host of the Alliance's Hero Show. Make sure you check out and go to alliances.com. That's E-L-I-A-N-C-E-S.com because we have many other episodes for you to listen. Plus, you could replay this over and over and over to listen to Helen.

So, Helen, let's talk about this. So, you know, it's so important, like, again, you know, creating and building. And that's what, you know, clearly you have had just a strong history of doing. Apparently, we need to go see certainly more movies and stuff to be inspired by various things. I mean, R2-D2 should have, like, a poster in the back, R2-D2, right? That's what got me. How do you get others involved into the whole thing of robotics? Because a lot of people find it cool, but somebody like me kind of gets frustrated

if I don't catch on to it so quick. And being in building robots and that whole tech part, it's a pretty complex thing. How do you get children more involved into it to build the next type of robots? Well, I think getting them exposed from an early age to technology, having computers around the house, cell phones, robots like Roomba and Turtle.

And, you know, and then the next step would be, you know, when they're at schools uh entering contests like first competition bop ball and you know once kids have built a robot they're not really afraid of technology anymore they start thinking about it as something hey it's not just something i can buy but something i can build and i can't tell you how many people i've hired that have done those kinds of competitions at school and learned how to build things and learn how to troubleshoot things and debug things and, you know, keep going even when the going gets tough, right? You know, so I think getting the kids exposed to technology at an early age is very important. I was myself seeing R2D2, but my dad had brought home a TRS-80, one of the

first personal computers. And, you know, I was hacking games on it when I was a child. That's amazing. Again, yeah. And doing so many cool things in that. I mean, that's just, that's the thing. But then you've also too were able to build a team around you as you're building a team around you now. How do you go about finding, you know, who you're, I mean, compatible working with and who sees the same type of vision that you have. I think it's a matter of encouraging innovation, creating an atmosphere of innovation that you can come up with a new idea. We were eight years into iRobot before we came up with the Roomba. Right. So if we had just stuck with what we were doing, we wouldn't have, you know, the success that we had with the Roomba, right? So if we had just stuck with what we were doing,

we wouldn't have, you know, the success that we had with the Roomba. You know, it's about creating that culture of innovation where ideas can come from anywhere in the organization. It doesn't have to be the CEO or the chairman. It can be anybody or outside of the organization and bringing everything and bringing it together and then really brainstorming what's going to work,

what are the needs people have? And that's what we're able to do at both companies, and, you know, we like to go where the need is the greatest, the skull work. Well, what's so cool, again, even like with iRobot, right, started with the Roomba, but all of these other things developed from that, right, you know? No, no, we actually did a lot of other stuff before the Roomba. We did robots that were toys and games. We did robots for downhole. We did large cleaning robots. We did robots for museums.

We already spoke the robots for the military. There were just so many other robots, but all those experiences, even though a lot of them didn't work out as products, the experiences we gained from them really helped when we were putting the Roomba on the market. robots, but all those experiences, even though a lot of them didn't work out as products, the experiences we gained from them really helped when we were putting the Roomba on the market. And then where do you see as far as with, you know, the company Turtle going? I mean, is this the first product for Turtle? Yes, yes. Well, breeding's been, right? Breeding's one of those challenges that everybody with a home has. And right now we're mostly in the vegetable patch

because you have to have a reasonably flat landscape, reasonably spaced items, but you can imagine all the other areas in your house that you need to weed, like the landscape beds, the foundation beds, the lawns, the hedges. There's so many problems with weeds, the flower beds. And I think it's an area that as the technology develops, we're going to be able to get to more and more spaces.

And Helen, talk to us, too, because, you know, as you mentioned about technology, you know, how does the brainstorming like sessions work? Do you working with others? In other words, this is your first version. Can imagine what the second, the third, the fifth other type of versions are going to be. And you're going to look back going, wow, we've come a long way. Like at what point do you go, yeah, we need to improve this part and talk to us on that. We brainstorm all the time. Like there's been lots of ideas that come up every week at Turtle. One of them I'll throw out there, like what if it could scare critters away as well as do the weeding, right?

What if it came awake? And then after that that we take it to folk to um customers and say would you buy this and um unfortunately on that one we haven't had the strongest buying signal but you know everyone says oh yeah we gotta have that it's the same thing for some of the features on moomba um everybody always said well why don't you make it voice activated so i don't have to go push the button. But when I asked them how much they would pay for it, it's like, you know, $5 or less, right? And so really getting that where the price point equals what people would pay for it. And it turns out we were able to do it on Roomba to make

it voice activated. We just had to wait for Alexa to be invented. Fantastic. Incredible. All right. Now I want to ask you about, so you come up with the concept, whatever it may be, then you want to be able to build it. But then the next point is, is going into manufacturing, right? Mass manufacturing. How did you do it? Where do you start? How do you trust to get them to a mass production? We had great experience at iRobot. We were building toys and games with Hasbro, and we learned about Far East Manufacture.

And we actually were, for the first Roombas, we used the same manufacturing facility that we had used with the toys we built with Hasbro. So we had all those connections and we also were confident that they vetted them as a family, a labor, doing the right thing for human rights and labor because we were a very small company and we didn't have the resources to do that ourselves.

So having those breadth of experience in a form of robots that we built, and we could bring all that to bear on the turtle robot and getting it into manufacture. So how's the conversations been? I mean, fortunately, your father had brought home the TRS-88 computer. I mean, who knows, right? You just, everything leads to a path and you wonder, right, what would have happened if he didn't, and you didn't get so involved at, at a earlier age in that. But I love the encouragement of getting children to get into these competitions and that. What other things do you see really that has made it for you to be successful to, you know, come up with these

ideas, roll them out, and yet continue and not stop? What's the prime thing that motivates you? Well, I want there to be more robots in the world. I want life to be easier. I don't like doing chores. I don't like doing things over and over again. I'd prefer to be doing, even if it's hard work, I'd prefer to be doing something for the first time, rather than the stuff that needs to get done every day. And there's so many more opportunities for robots to take that on and help working parents, help people that are, you know, very busy, want to spend more quality time with their children, and just don't like the Scott work. So, you know, I see that as a real motivator, and there's so many other opportunities,

and sometimes you have to wait for the technology to mature before you can take them on. And you were, again, successful earlier, too, with what, was it sci-fi? Is that it? That was after, actually. After, okay. We were successful in that we had robots deployed, helping special forces. They were first tethered robots. We had them flying for weeks at a time. It was eventually sold to FLIR, Teledyne. But it wasn't the hit it out of the park home run that, you know,

that we had with iRobot when I took it public in 2005. Wow. And the future, again, I want to go a little bit more into the whole robotic things. Are there industries specifically now that you see besides home use and other things just in general, really, that robots can make a big difference in like uh yeah well they're making a big difference in um logistics today fulfillment centers when you order something online and it gets to you so quickly that's because the robots are helping out right and i think in the future and there's one thing that we did some of the first um runs at sci-fi at sci-fi works my drone company, we did UPS deliveries for, you know,

some of the first field tests of that technology. I think we're maybe a little bit too early, but it's coming now. So instead of just helping in the fulfillment center, the robots will be able to deliver right to your home and get, instead of waiting, you know, a day or two for a package, have it in 30 minutes. Which is amazing and do you think we'll get to the point where again robots will fully be able to almost communicate with us or they'll be able to understand our words and have I don't know is is it possible for a robot to have like a feeling? I think the natural language recognition has really come a long way and robots can understand

what we're saying. Alexa can understand us, so therefore a robot can understand us, and they can speak and communicate and write. We can program feelings into them because feelings also affect behavior and they're sometimes very useful for humans to have. But I wouldn't go so far as to say that quote-unquote real feelings that the robots really accept with you. Well, incredible. Well, you know what?

There may be doing robots taking over my job interviewing future Helens in the world. Who knows? But I got to tell you, Helen, you've changed the way people clean their floors. Now you've taken the frustration out of the weeds part and stuff and so much more to cope. You're making a difference in the world. That's a hero. Helen Greener, you could reach her at turtle.com. That's T-R-T-I-L-L.com. This has been David Kogan with the Alliances Hero Show.

Continue to stay tuned for more. Thank you so much for having me.