When littleBits customers first experience their "Aha" moment, their excited feedback jumps through the 100-person company's Chelsea, New York, office via an internal Slack channel called #the-moment."When Nasa JPL engineers use Amazon Echo to drive their littleBits-powered Mars Rover..."
"The best investment I've made since my retirement. Just yesterday, I constructed an earthquake warning system – today I will be working on my thunderstorm warning system..."
"If I could say how passionate I am about your mission: THIS PASSIONATE! Well, way, way, WAY more than CAPS can ever hope to express..."
littleBits is an open-source kit of electronic modules that snap together with magnets in a way designed to let anyone prototype or play. The "moment" – when pressure sensors, motion triggers and servo motors are suddenly transformed into magic – is currently being discovered in 3,000 schools, and among 230 local enthusiast communities that the company calls "global chapters". And for founder and CEO Ayah Bdeir, that's all part of her mission: "To unleash the inventor in everyone."
"We're trying to trigger an attitude shift, even a personality change – that moment when someone goes from being afraid or intimated or thinking, 'I'm not technical', to thinking: 'Wow! I made that happen'," Bdeir explains. "Their eyes open up. We have parents writing us love letters – saying my daughter wanted to be a Hollywood actress, now she wants to be an engineer; or entrepreneurs who say we enabled them to prototype their idea and raise money. We want to empower young and old to feel creative, confident and active, and to be inspired and empowered by technology. There's such a big opportunity to build a company that democratises invention."
Bdeir, 33, had a transformative moment of her own. Born in Montreal, she grew up in Beirut, where her curiosity led her to take apart her toys to understand how they worked ("I developed a reputation – don't put your stuff near Ayah or she'll break it open"). Her parents nurtured that curiosity with chemistry sets and electricity kits; but she was also influenced by her three sisters, all designers. These two worlds came together at MIT Media Lab's Computing Culture group. "It was, 'Wow, if you combine design and engineering, that's a very powerful tool.'"
After graduating she spent a couple of years in China, worked in finance, and then became a fellow at New York's Eyebeam art and technology centre, where she had the idea for a modular electronics kit. In 2009, she took a booth at a Bay Area Maker Faire. A queue formed: parents, kids, teachers, designers. "There were hundreds of people. A young girl had been playing with littleBits for hours, and her mother made me pretend I was closing up my booth. I thought, 'There's something really powerful here with education and kids.'"
Since then, littleBits has raised around $60m, moved into wholesale distribution to Europe, Asia and beyond, expanded the number and complexity of components, launched a $300 STEAM kit aimed at schools, built a teachers' course, and created after-schools programmes. The company has postponed "optimising for profit" for now, to invest in continued rapid growth. But this is a proudly for-profit VC-backed business. "Making money is important," says Bdeir. "Money is freedom for a company." And this one happens to be aligned behind a mission. "That mission has been hugely helpful," she says. "It's attracted to our team people who believe in a higher purpose, beyond profit; people who are empathetic, willing to put in the extra time to make something work; people who otherwise we couldn't afford; people who are not sabotaging each other. If your aim is only profit, that's what you're optimising for. If your aim is mission, you can't screw somebody along the way. "With a startup, the highs are very high, and the lows are very low – what lifts you up is the mission, seeing the impact of what you're doing. Unless you feel in your blood that what you're creating needs to exist, you will not have enough fuel to take you through."
Is there ever a conflict between profit and mission? "Yes, of course," Bdeir says. "At one point it was a conflict between focusing on keeping retail costs down and building out the profit line. If you're only mission-driven, you'd place dropping costs first to make it more accessible. But early on we had to focus on growth and on appealing to wealthier consumers."
Bdeir worries that too many early-stage entrepreneurs who seek her advice are more interested in starting a company than in what the company is going to do. "They talk of plans to build bizarre mashups of companies – Twitter meets Facebook for chickens, or whatever... It's not meaningful, it's not necessary. Entrepreneurship is now glamorous and sexy, but it's very difficult. Unless you are obsessed by a problem, then you should not start a company.
Some of the smartest people in the world would have so much more impact if they'd join a startup that's solving real problems. Watching the US election campaign, you know the determining factors driving people to vote are some of the most basic unmet needs – around education, healthcare, housing; yet we have the most advanced technology available! "The best-case scenario is when you make a profit and have a purpose. It feeds your head, your heart and your pocket. There's no better way to live your life."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
