The Indelible Bonobo Experience

After nearly 20 years, SensAble’s acquisition by North Carolina-based Geomagic—the price wasn’t disclosed, but was rumored to be just a few million dollars—is an unceremonious ending to one of the most intriguing companies of its era. (via Xconomy, /.)

• That’s because “Sensable” would be SensAble Technologies, the Woburn, MA-based maker of touch-based computer modeling and design systems. The venerable New England firm started back in 1993 and went on to pioneer all sorts of applications in 3-D modeling and haptics technology—a field of human-computer interfaces that involves touch feedback, sort of like the kind you feel in modern video-game controllers and smartphones.
• Yet even more compelling than the company is its founder, a young engineering whiz from MIT named Thomas Massie. Over the years, that whiz kid developed many other passions besides building computer interfaces and running a tech company. Things like energy independence. The pursuit of individual liberty. Faith and family. And guns—lots of guns.
• Now, in a stunning move to those who knew him in Boston, he is running for Congress in one of the most heated races around the country. He has been endorsed by U.S. Representative and presidential candidate Ron Paul (R-TX) and his son, Senator Rand Paul—both prominent figures in the conservative Tea Party movement. The Republican primary in Kentucky is next Tuesday, May 22, and as of last week polls showed Massie in the lead. Since the county is predominantly Republican, if he wins, he will be the presumptive favorite to represent Kentucky’s 4th District in the U.S. House of Representatives.
• But to this day, SensAble’s technology is used in a wide variety of industries to design cars, toys, shoes, jewelry, and other products; to simulate surgery for training purposes; and to do research in touch-based computer interfaces. One far-out application would be to use the system for remote surgery: a surgeon could potentially use a pair of tele-operated Phantom-like devices to treat a patient thousands of miles away, receiving touch feedback so he or she could feel what’s going on. Recent use cases also include using the system to touch and manipulate 3-D ultrasound data, and to design bone implants for injured soldiers.
• Over the years, SensAble raised more than $40 million in venture capital ($32 million on Massie’s watch) from the likes of Advent International, Acer Technology Ventures, HLM Venture Partners, and North Bridge Venture Partners. The firm had between 60 and 70 employees at its peak and was written up by big media outlets. “The time at SensAble was the greatest time of my life. We were changing the world,” says Aulet, who now directs the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship (and is an Xconomist).
• Meanwhile, Massie was starting to feel like his work was winding down at the company. “At some point, SensAble, I think, became a market application exercise,” he says. “What I brought to the company, more than anything, was the mechanical invention, and then seeing the birth of the software that went with it.” He was also thinking about the next phase for him and his family. “I thought at some point in my life, after taking some time to farm and build my house and raise my kids, that I would go back into sort of an ‘ideas factory’ company, that I would start something like that,” Massie says. “The venture capitalists really wanted us to focus on a single idea. They don’t really like an ideas factory.”
• That year, Massie and his family moved back to Lewis County, Kentucky, which he calls “the freest place in the world.” They bought 1,200 acres of land, and Massie ran a farm and began building a house. But not just an ordinary house. It stands 46 feet tall, is made of timber from the trees on his property and stones from his creek, and is reinforced with steel “so termites can’t get to it,” he says. The Massies draw water from their own well. The house generates all its own electricity from an array of solar panels. “It’s designed for two generations of neglect. Our house will withstand that,” Massie says.
• As Massie writes on his political website, “I’m a decade-long concealed carry permit holder and Class III firearms collector. When I was twelve years old, my father bought me my first gun, an H&R .410 shotgun. In the course of hunting in the woods of Kentucky, he taught me the great responsibility that comes with ownership of a firearm. Now that I am a father of four, I enjoy teaching these same lessons to my children through hunting and target practice.”
• But things have not gone smoothly for Massie in office—and that’s just how he wants it. “When you’re stalking waste within a government office, it’s like every rock that you turn over has a snake under it,” he says. Massie has been targeting waste, fraud, and abuse, starting with questioning electric bills, phone bills, contracts, and fees for things that don’t apply anymore. Like the county being charged rental fees for property that had long been sold, paying for phone lines that had been disconnected for years, or buying stuff from a magistrate’s store. He has upset a lot of entrenched powers, but has gained support from the masses for it. And he says that in his first nine months in office, he cut enough waste to pay his own salary for three years.
• Interestingly, Massie also was inspired to run for office by something he heard during his MIT days. John Sununu, the former New Hampshire governor and White House Chief of Staff for George Bush, Sr., came to campus to speak (he’s an MIT alum). “He implored us as engineers to get involved in politics. Maybe that stuck in my brain for 20 years and popped out recently,” says Massie.
• Massie recalls Sununu saying, “We need more engineers and fewer lawyers” in politics. As Massie explains, “Lawyers are taught to take a position, whether it’s right or wrong ideologically, and defend it—to go collect facts to support it. Whereas engineers are taught the inverse of that, they’re taught to collect facts and then come up with an answer based on the facts. He said, ‘That’s the kind of thought process we need more of in government.’ On the stump, that’s what I’m trying to convey, that we need more problem solvers in Washington, DC.”
• At a Tea Party rally in Kentucky last year, Massie told the crowd, “Even a bad day on the farm is better than a good day in the rat race.” That was after an ice storm destroyed his five-mile cattle fence, and he had to chase cows all over the county (and then rebuild the fence). But now he’s in the biggest rat race of his life, fending off opponents who are “spewing venom and untruths” in their negative ad campaigns, he says. So why do it?
• His political views didn’t appear out of thin air either. Back at MIT, when Massie and his wife were running SensAble in its early days, he was told they owed the IRS $40,000 in taxes, plus quarterly estimated taxes, off a profit of around $120,000. “Mind you, we’re still wearing the same sneakers we showed up as freshmen with. We probably didn’t have $5,000 of operating capital sitting in the bank account,” he says. “I was trying to grow the company by bootstrapping. But what I realized is the tax code punishes bootstrappers.”
• So now Massie would support what he calls “quicker, if not instant, amortization of capital equipment investments. Instead of tying up all that capital in a company that’s trying to grow, let them take that depreciation right now.” He says he’d also support changes to the federal tax structure that encourage business owners to repatriate capital to the United States.