Start-up: Alpine Robotics: Innovative Toys for Innovative Kids.
Alpine Robotics was established in 2010 and is based in Boulder, CO
Alpine Robotics’ mission is to fuse robotic and digital technology into immersive entertainment experiences that ignite imagination and defy expectation.
Optimized by data and powered by fun, these ever-evolving experiences are changing the way the world thinks about play and unlock the true potential of play and inspire tomorrow’s creators.
Staff Size and types of positions you recruit for now o 180 US employees, 20 international employees
Recruiting needs:
Lots of engineers! – mechanical, electrical, software (app development),
Lots of marketing attention! – B2B, packaging, video team
Challenges with recruiting and retaining staff:
Not a lot of hardware engineers in Colorado (mostly SaaS businesses here)
Have to recruit from allover the country.
Competition in Colorado area – lots of smaller start-ups with great benefits (free food, whole family health insurance) and now competition from Google, Facebook coming to Colorado
Budgets for compensation is limited – Google & Facebook can easily outspend
Used to be able to offer more equity, but more difficult at our current size
Engagement – have a work hard, play hard culture. This means late nights and sometimes weekends. We manufacture in China – this means that engineers often make 2-3 week trips to China to help the manufacturing process.
Areas needing to be enhanced regarding the employee experience
Overall engagement. Morale gets low during product development and gets better once we release a product and see success in the marketplace.
Only produced 2 products last year, so not as many “highs” as if had been able to release more products.
Alpine needs the following skills and capabilities of staff & leadership to grow:
Great talent that can fill more than one role across the board.
Develop junior exec team members into senior exec team members – first “C” level role for 1/2 of the exec team.
Develop engineers into people managers.
We have a product – focused structure where product managers are like “miniCEOs” for their product –
develop their cross functional and business expertise (managing a P&L, etc.)
The Founder and CEO has approached you as the HR Consultant to come up with a comprehensive long-term HR strategic plan to “fix” these problems!
