NAMPA, Idaho — America’s largest tech companies are clustered in California’s Silicon Valley and other major east coast cities, but Boise has a growing landscape of high-tech startups that have developed in the last twenty years. Both House of Design in Nampa, a robotics company, and wireless systems development company Cradlepoint are led by former employees of either Micron or HP and have been expanding their workforce and customer base in recent years.
House of Design
Located on the outskirts of Nampa in a nondescript warehouse, a rapidly growing technology company is developing robotics manufacturing solutions for companies nationwide.
House of Design, which began in 2012 with only a handful of employees, now has over 50 designing, programming and assembling robots that can build a wide range of products from medical equipment to shoes and everything in between. Working both on a large and small scale, the company designs the entire automated process to manufacture a product from the ground up.
“If you look at a manufacturing process you can have the people who are process improvement engineers and they’re just going to modify and tweak one small thing over and over, but with our projects every single time it’s brand new,” Shane Dittrich, House of Design CEO, said. “It’s a new problem with new challenges and we get to build it all here on site.”
Dittrich and COO Ryan Okleberry met while working on a project to design and create an automation process for Engineered Lumber plants in 2008. Eventually, they began to work on automating the manufacturing process for solar panels at Transform Solar, a Micron-owned company. When Micron shuttered the company in 2012, Dittrich and Okleberry’s families combined forces to strike out on their own with a company of their own.
“We started and we thought ‘All we need is five people,’” Dittrich said, with a laugh. “That’s it.”
Now the company has grown so much that they recently moved out of the James E. Hogge Business Accelerator in Nampa and into a space of their own. The new warehouse has office space for its more than a dozen engineers of various disciplines, as well as a manufacturing area where the robots the company has designed are assembled and the processes are tested before getting shipped off to a client.
One of the company’s projects included working with footwear company Keen to develop an automated process for stitching together the pieces of a shoe out of paracord. Dittrich said this was a thorny problem to tackle, because the motion of sewing is a difficult one to emulate with robotics.
“It was about ‘How do we use a robot to go through and stitch a shoe together?’” he said. “How do we change the components to help the automation be more successful?”’
Currently, the company is working on automatic construction processes, which would mean components for building homes and other structures would be put together in a factory and assembled on site. By using robots to frame houses and assemble parts of ceilings, floors and other pieces of buildings, Dittrich said, it will both speed up the process by keeping it more consistent and provide better working conditions for those in the construction industry.
In 2018, House of Design almost doubled the size of the company, which Dittrich does not expect to do again this year. But, he said, House of Design will continue to grow as they find more customers and bring in more repeat business.
“Last year we hired almost 20 people, so last year was a huge growth year for us,” he said. “This next year we don’t see as much growth, but for sure we’re going to keep growing and keep getting bigger and bigger.”
Cradlepoint
In the last decade, wireless internet has taken the world by storm and a Boise-based company is one leading the charge on how it can be used to connect people in new ways.
Cradlepoint, a worldwide networking solutions company, provides online networks for private companies, first responders and public transit to connect to each other wirelessly over long distances. CEO George Mulhern said in the past, companies connected their employees in different locations, called the “wide area network” with internet through cables in the ground. Cradlepoint offers products for this to be done wirelessly.
“The thesis of the company was that wireless was going to become much more prevalent,” Mulhern said. “When you think about it, typically anything that can be wireless once you get to the right economic and performance levels, will be wireless.”
The company started in Boise 13 years ago by ex-HP engineers and has since grown to 500 employees, with 350 of them headquartered downtown. The rest are located worldwide, with branch offices in both the United Kingdom and Australia. Right now, Cradlepoint has more than 23,000 customers, who have 42,000 devices in public safety vehicles like police cars or fire trucks to connect first responders to each other and their command staff.
When Cradlepoint first began, its focus was on selling wireless products to consumers. Mulhern said the name of the company came from one of its first products, which was a small cradle that created access to wireless internet if you placed your phone in it. But the market shifted and the company fell on hard times in 2011. Mulhern was brought in as CEO and changed direction so the company could sell its wireless technology to companies instead of individuals.
Since those days, Mulhern said the company has been growing between 20 and 30 percent annually and is looking ahead to a “breakaway” year in 2019 because of the rise of 5G technology. However, two of the challenges the company has had is the lack of skilled workers and investors who are willing to take a chance on a technology company located in Idaho instead of in a major tech hub.
Although the Boise location might make things difficult sometimes, Mulhern said the quality of life in Idaho means there is low turnover.
“There’s a good source (of talent) here, but when you’re growing fast, attracting engineering talent is difficult when there’s a dearth of engineering talent across the country for a lot of the software things we’re doing in the cloud,” he said. “That can be a challenge, but once they come they love it and they stay.”
Cradlepoint may be a high-tech company that does fast-paced work, but Mulhern said being located in a medium-size city gives it a different workplace culture than some of its competitors.
“We have a saying here that is ‘stay humble and stay hungry or you will be,’” he said. “The humility of coming from a smaller town helps us keep learning. Yeah, we’re a small company in Boise, but we’re going to be a global leader and we are growing as the market continues to grow.”
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