Our Early Years in Texas
GeckoSystems of Texas, Inc. was founded in Georgetown, a northern suburb of Austin, TX in the late summer of 1997. I used a spare bedroom set up as an office, and an oversize two-car garage to build prototypes.
I recruited several like-minded individuals over the Internet that all believed "it is time for a truly cost effective, and utilitarian personal robot."
We called them Personal Computer Robots, or PCR's. We sold and shipped several to developers under our NDA as "development" platforms to maintain our patent rights at a discount. We even sold and shipped one to the National Defense University. After building and shipping our first half dozen or so, it became very apparent that building these robots one at a time was too expensive and didn't make us much money.
So since we had deposits on another 5 or 6 "development" robots, we went to the local banks to borrow the funds to finance the manufacture of 25+ robots.
Not even Silicon Valley Bank in Austin would loan us any funds to finance building robots that were sold with money down! At that time, we quit soliciting further sales since we could not make any money on them unless we built 25 or more at a time.
The foregoing occurred over a 2-3 year period. Then, my wife's mother lost her live in caregiver, and we needed to move to Atlanta (Conyers), GA to care for her. The move also meant a much more strategic location for GeckoSystems given Atlanta's easy national and international air flight access.