Two new executives from local robotics companies are joining Bevi, a Boston-based maker of water dispensers that allow users to create a variety of custom drinks.
The company announced on Thursday that Bob Doucette is Bevi’s new COO; he comes from Amazon Robotics (previously Kiva Systems), where he was VP of global operations and logistics.
Also, Thomas Allen joined Bevi as vice president of hardware engineering from Boston Dynamics, where he was an engineering leader. Boston Dynamics is a Waltham-based, SoftBank-owned company that periodically uploads new videos of its robots to YouTube.
In an interview with BostInno, CEO Sean Grundy said that Bevi is not a robotics company, but a hardware company. Between the two spaces, he noted, there are many parallels, including the fact that Bevi builds its physical machine. These similarities, combined with the fact that Bevi's machines are past the ideation and testing phase, played a huge role in attracting such talent.
"We found that candidates in the robotics were just impressing us the most," CEO Sean Grundy said, speaking of the hiring process. "We found that robotics has done an incredible job of recruiting really intelligent people and giving them exposure to everything from R&D to manufacturing."
Initially, Grundy was skeptical if they could poach someone from a robotic company. He asked himself, 'Why would anyone be willing to leave a firm like Boston Dynamics, where robots are doing backflips?'
Turns out, attracting candidates from that environment was possible because some people get bored by the long product development cycle. They all want quick results and would prefer a product that is faster to build and ship to check out its design in the field.
"We found that it is possible to convince people to leave [robotics companies], especially if those are people that would like to see more action," Grundy said.
In the case of Bevi, action in the field was directly linked with the challenges of scaling the company. In the last two years, Bevi has grown from operating in three states to thirty. And, things didn't always work out smoothly.
"Frankly, we were really struggling to keep up with the scale," Grundy said. "We were losing track of opportunities, we were losing track of orders, we were collecting a lot of data but not really using it."
With too many things falling into the cracks, Grundy realized they needed people who know how to scale and build teams—something that both Doucette and Allen have experience with.
Specifically, the company hired Doucette from Amazon Robotics because he had dealt with challenges from both manufacturing and ongoing implementation in the field. As for Allen from Boston Dynamics, Bevi's expectation was to find someone who had been through the full lifecycle of a hardware product and was also technically strong.
The addition of Doucette and Allen means that four out of eight members of the company's executive team joined in the past seven months. In December, the company recruited the former director of sales at LogMeIn, Todd Johnston. And in April, it hired the former head of finance at real estate tech company Placester, Chad Kelly. That brings Bevi's total headcount to 80 employees.
