Crowdfunding The Hardware Revolution
Scott Miller is the CEO of Dragon Innovation, a company whose mission is to help hardware entrepreneurs succeed in every phase of the journey from crowdfunding to manufacturing at scale. Dragon’s services include Crowdfunding and an API for manufacturing. Dragon has helped Pebble, Romotive, MakerBot, Sifteo, Orbotix and over 100 other companies succeed. Prior to founding Dragon, Scott spent 10 years at iRobot and was responsible for setting up and leading the team that manufactured Roomba, Scooba, Looj and ConnectR. Scott is also a General Partner at Bolt, and has served as an Adjunct Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Olin College and taught the Mechanical Design and the Design for Manufacture courses. Scott received his Bachelor’s from Dartmouth and Master’s from MIT.
What inspired you to start Dragon Innovation?
I realized that it’s very difficult to go from a functional prototype to high volume manufacturing, so I launched Dragon as a manufacturing consulting firm. Manufacturing is fraught with “unknown unknowns”, so entrepreneurs don’t even know what to be afraid of and that’s a very scary and dangerous position to be in. A lot of the former iRobot team came over and joined us, and then we worked with about 120 clients or so to act like an API for manufacturing. Once we were able to get to a functional prototype, then we could jump in and do a design for a manufacturer and assembly review, which is a topic that not many people know about. If you can get these steps right early on, you make your life a lot easier. We would sit down with our clients and do a deep dive on their cost of goods sold to make sure that they’ve included all the necessary line items such as labor, mark-ups, packaging, tooling, etc.