The Lady and her Robots
One day at a movie theater in 1977, Helen Greiner met the man who would change her life. Like most, he had his flaws. He was too fat. His legs were stubby and his arms were too long. His voice was oddly pitched and flat. But to the 11-year-old girl transfixed by Star Wars , R2D2 was the most beautiful creature in the world. How crushed she was, then, to learn that he was operated by a human and not by some cutting-edge technology.
Since that moment, Greiner, 38, has devoted her life to the development of robotics, "real" R2D2s that can do everything from sniffing out bombs along Baghdad roadsides to exploring pyramids in ancient Egypt to mopping a kitchen floor. iRobot, the company she cofounded with Colin Angle and Rodney Brooks, now does more than $95 million annually in industrial, military, and consumer sales and raised $70.6 million in its initial public offering last month. Not bad considering the three engineers started their tinkering in an MIT graduate lab and financed it with personal credit cards.
Blasting away. Greiner, who is petite and reserved, hardly fits the picture of the charismatic company chairman. Which might explain her admonition that "leaders don't always look like you think they should." She is so shy that she used to become ill before giving a speech. And airplane travel fills her with equal dread. Yet today Greiner routinely talks before thousands without consequence, and she flies at least once a week. "I didn't like these things about myself, so I was determined to change," she says. "I made a conscious effort to overcome them. I decided to never let it stop me."
What drives her, simply, is a passion for robots--the belief that this once futuristic technology can do the deadly, the dangerous, and the drudgery and, most important, can be made practical and affordable. "You'd have to say we were nuts to have believed so strongly in this," says Brooks, the company's chief technical officer and the director of artificial intelligence at MIT. Yet the company has already proved its mass appeal with the success of the Roomba, a vacuum cleaner that has become the bestselling consumer robot in history.
More important, iRobot's products are saving lives. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. Army is deploying 300 of the company's PackBots, 42-pound track-wheeled rovers with arms and antennae that seek out suspicious objects and remove them to safe places for possible detonation. Sensitive enough to sniff out a bomb, they are also tough enough to climb stairs and to survive a drop from 10 feet onto a concrete floor.
Gender conventions suggest that Angle, the company's chief executive officer, would be running the military side of iRobot's business, and Greiner the consumer end. Yet, as anyone who really knows Greiner might have predicted, the case is exactly the opposite. It is Greiner who secures government contracts and networks with generals. Angle recalls the day he and Greiner went target shooting with a military client, a three-star admiral. The weapon of choice was the AK-47, but for safety reasons the automatic function had been disabled. "Of course Helen was the only woman there," says Angle, "and she kept saying 'I want to fire the automatic.' " After much protesting, the mechanism was restored. Greiner blasted away.
Never quit. "Helen is just incredibly persistent," says Angle. "The notion of quitting just never crosses her mind." Once, he says, they were late in delivering a product to a Washington customer; it was a stressful situation that would have been difficult to recover from. Frantic, they arrived at the Federal Express office only to find it closed. What to do? "Helen said, 'Let's go! Let's drive it to Washington ourselves,'" Angle recalls. "So we took turns sleeping, and we got it there, and Helen just charmed the customer."
That kind of purposefulness, by all appearances, started young. Born in London, Greiner grew up on New York's Long Island with her mother, a math and science teacher, and her father, a chemistry major turned businessman. Mathematically and mechanically inclined, she played daily chess with her father starting at age 5 and was programming a Radio Shack TRS-80 computer when she was a preteen. Before long, she was doing her own repairs to her Volvo station wagon with parts she bought at the junkyard. (For "fun," she recently wired her own house for cable and installed a wireless network.)
She sees no disconnect between female sensibilities and the pursuit of mechanical engineering. On the contrary, she works with educators to get more women to enter the field. "Girls think it's geeky, but it's so creative and interesting," she says. "You can build a bridge or a robot or a new computer system."
At MIT, where she also earned a master's in computer science, Greiner met Angle, an electrical engineer with a master's in computer science, and Brooks, who served as her faculty adviser. It was later, when Greiner was working on satellites at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California that Angle and Brooks called her about starting a robot company. Would she come back to Cambridge? "She said yes in about 30 seconds," Angle recalls, "and got in her car the next day."
In the early days, Greiner and her colleagues had developed robots for research. "Back then we didn't know that you had to be more practical," says Brooks. "We just thought this is really cool technology so people should want it." Ultimately, of course, they knew better. A few years later, Greiner says, "I had a personal epiphany. I was de-bugging yet another computer and I knew that this wasn't going to go anywhere unless we got it to another level." That was the end of the credit cards and the beginning of venture capital funding.
Pass the A-1. After 15 years, with all the attendant trip-ups and triumphs of a start-up, Greiner, Angle, and Brooks remain the sorts of leaders who can accept the inherent competition in their roles while fixing hard on a single vision and remaining supportive friends. "We are a work-hard-play-hard place," Greiner says. True to her word, she competes with Angle to learn one new sport a year. She likes kayaking, rock climbing, and paintball and plays right wing on the company ice hockey team. But all of these pale next to snowboarding, a passion she holds close to robotics. "I love the speed, the freedom, learning all the new tricks."
The same adventurous spirit prevails at iRobot's Burlington, Mass., headquarters, a veritable tinkerers' paradise. "The culture of 'yes we can' is very important here," says Greiner. Indeed, the lab resembles nothing so much as Santa's workshop, with young engineers in jeans and T-shirts screwing in bolts, threading wires, soldering metal, and punching keyboards. In a corner, two technologists are coating floor samples with A-1 sauce to test the efficacy of the Scooba, a robotic floor mopper due out next year.
Greiner encourages workers to experiment and expects them to make mistakes. "It's all about teamwork here and listening to ideas because the next great product could come from any employee," she says. She herself spends less time in the workshop today and more doing things like talking to investors, but invention remains her first love. "I like doing the next new thing," she says. "I like the 'what's next?' "
Imagine: robots to rake your leaves and wash your windows; robots to help care for sick people; robots that can roam your house and watch for intruders; robots that sniff out weeds so all farms can be organic. And how about a robot throwing out the first ball at the Red Sox season opener? Greiner can hardly contain her enthusiasm. Maybe that's why she finds nothing inconsistent or unreasonable in the company's ambitious motto, which is posted throughout the building. "Build cool stuff," it reads. "Have fun. Change the world."
BORN: Dec. 6, 1967. EDUCATION: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, B.S. in mechanical engineering; M.S. in computer science. FAMILY: Single. ADVICE: "Listen--to colleagues, to customers, to everyone around you." HOBBIES: Snowboarding, kayaking, rock climbing, and paintball. DIRTY LITTLE SECRET: "I'm not a morning person. And I need eight hours of sleep."
This story appears in the December 19, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.