Layoffs Reflect New Turbulence at High-Flying 3D Robotics­

3DR Solo quadcopter (Source: 3DR media kit photo)

3D Robotics, the drone maker that began life in Tijuana and San Diego, has been consolidating its operations after stumbling in its bid to go head-to-head against China’s DJI, the world’s biggest maker of consumer drones.

In an interview yesterday afternoon with Xconomy, CEO Chris Anderson confirmed that 3DR has been ­reorganizing to focus its drone business on big companies and other enterprise customers, but downplayed the significance of the high-flying robotic company’s layoffs over the past six months.

The Berkeley, CA-based company is closing its San Diego facility, with three years still remaining on its lease, and has reduced its staff at its Berkeley headquarters and in Austin, TX, where it has pared all but a sales and marketing group led by Colin Guinn (formerly of DJI).

The latest staff reductions, disclosed Tuesday, follow more sweeping layoffs that took place at the end of 2015, when co-founder and president Jordi Muñoz left the company. Anderson met Muñoz after creating the DIY Drones website in 2007 to serve a rapidly growing online community of designers and hobbyists who wanted to build their own drones. They founded 3D Robotics in 2009 with the idea of selling both components and drones.

Last year, 3D Robotics also shifted its manufacturing operations from Tijuana to an outsourced manufacturer in China that was dedicated to high-volume production of the Solo, a ready-to-fly quadcopter drone 3DR introduced last year, targeting what Anderson described as the professional consumer market.

In the latest shuffle, Anderson is shifting away from his operational responsibilities to focus more on the external and strategic side of 3DR’s business, although he will continue to be identified as CEO, according to a report posted last night by MarketWatch columnist Therese Poletti. Anderson did not mention the change in his phone call with me yesterday, or disclose that Jeevan Kalanithi, 3DR’s chief product officer, was named president.

In my interview, Anderson described the organizational changes as something that was part of 3DR’s plan all along. “This is a consolidation we’ve been working on since before October of last year. As we shifted from the DIY era to consumer and to enterprise customers, we ended up with a different organization each time,” he said.

But the company had to change its business model, according to a former 3D Robotics employee who would only talk anonymously. The company was more successful at developing and selling its autopilots than it was at selling drones, but according to this source, “They went down the path of developing the Solo drone” in a challenge to DJI’s prominence in the market for consumer drones. The strategy became particularly evident after 3DR hired Guinn to head sales and marketing, as Guinn was previously the CEO of DJI’s North American operations.

3D Robotics is shutting down its office near San Diego, along the U.S.-Mexican border, with three years remaining on its lease.
3D Robotics is shutting down its office near San Diego, along the U.S.-Mexican border, with three years remaining on its lease.

“They stumbled in their execution of building these vehicles,” the source said. Meanwhile, DJI was developing its new Phantom 3 line as a

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.