On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Van den Kroonenberg Award for successful young entrepreneurship, we spoke extensively with former winners. In this episode, Per Slycke, co-founder of Xsens, which won the Van den Kroonenberg Award in 2006, speaks.
Interview: Erik Tissingh & Maurice Essers
Text: Lidewey van Noord
The early years of Xsens
In 2000, after studying physics at the University of Twente, Per Slycke planned to do a PhD at Stanford University in California. To bridge the time between his graduation and his PhD trajectory, he founded a company together with his fellow student Casper Peeters: Xsens.
The idea for Xsens came about when the two decided to participate in a business plan competition of the TOP-scheme. They actually owed their idea to a good friend, Martijn Poort, a fanatic runner. “He was always whining: ‘You guys are such smart physicists, why is there a speedometer for bicycles and not for runners?’ I’m not a runner at all, but I thought it was a fun challenge.”
They came second in the business plan competition. “An indication that you really have a good idea. We thought: that would be fun to try before we start real life.”
As soon as Slycke had submitted his thesis and Peeters had also graduated, they set up a limited company. From a small room at the UT, somewhere at the very back of the corridor, they worked on setting up their company. “We started thinking about GPS and Doppler and all sorts of things. Our conclusion was that an accelerometer on the foot would work best. A kind of pedometer, but just a little bit smarter, because when running you lengthen your stride when you accelerate. The frequency of your steps is therefore not necessarily a good indication of speed. So we worked that out in collaboration with UT professor Peter Veltink, who became our supervisor. We developed a sensor technology to measure movement in 3D.”
It didn’t take long before people joined: the first employees. Due to lack of space, they moved to the BTC building, across the campus. The relationship with the UT and Veltink has always remained close. “Many of his PhDs came to work for us, we came up with a lot of fun research ideas together and we took over some patents from the university.”
Xsens’ speedometer for runners had so much potential that a few major sports brands quickly showed interest. But shortly after its foundation, the company also had to deal with its first crisis. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, those major sports brands no longer dared to do it. “All those parties said: it’s a bit too expensive and risky, we’re not going to do that now.”
Peeters and Slycke took a different path. They offered their sensor technology much more broadly, including to companies and universities focused on research in the field of drones, robots, VR and AR, technologies that were still in their infancy at the time. It worked. “They bought the sensor modules from Xsens for their research and product development.”
Alice in Wonderland
As fun as the speedometers for runners were, Xsens did not have the commercial success they had hoped for. However, they saw that many customers bought their sensors to measure body movements. Until then, human movements could only be recorded with a camera. In itself, that works fine, but it has a major disadvantage: the dependence on lines of sight, which means you are tied to a lab or studio. “If the person is not in sight of the cameras, it no longer works at all. With motion sensors, you don’t have that problem at all.”
Professor Veltink initially developed the technology for the medical world, for example to make movement measurements of people with Parkinson’s or brain damage. If someone had a paralyzed arm, for example, a sensor was placed on that arm and one on a lower and upper leg, but then the customers were often faced with a puzzle: how should they perform the calculations, what about the orientation of the forearm and upper arm, and the elbow angle? The interest in the sensors for measuring body movements caused a brainwave that would ultimately determine the development of the company: Xsens developed the MVN suit, a kind of skating suit full of sensors, with which human movements could be digitized. Film director and producer Tim Burton used the technology for the special effects of his reproduction of Alice in Wonderland. “It was actually a bit too early for us. We had to do all kinds of tricks to make it work, but we did it. That was really cool of course, that we ended up in the Hollywood industry. A lot of other projects emerged from that success.”
NASA also showed interest, they wanted to see how people moved in the spacesuits. And the focus on the medical world also remained. “But Xsens was and is really a technology company. All the different application areas were a challenge, we wanted to make the technology as good as possible for all those different purposes, so that the customers could adapt it for their own area.”
The role of the University of Twente (UT)
Slycke's PhD at Stanford came to nothing, because Xsens quickly became successful. The UT played a crucial role in the early stages of the company. The TOP-scheme provided a lot of support and opportunities, as did the guidance of business developer Jann van Benthem, with whom the founders of Xsens had a good relationship. "I have always enjoyed working with the UT. Both in the technical field and with the students and employees." According to Slycke, stimulating entrepreneurship and working with entrepreneurs and companies is also something that really characterizes the UT. He knows that more traditional academic institutions sometimes look a bit dirty if your research project is also a business model. "As if entrepreneurs are only in it for the money. That really makes me cringe. Entrepreneurship is often not driven by greed, but by the will to solve a problem. If you want to solve something on a large scale, you have to build a healthy business from it. Otherwise it will remain a nice dissertation with the conclusion: look, I solved something, but no one has ever done anything with it.” Ideas are very cheap, according to Slycke. “I have a thousand ideas a day. But the real question is: what are you going to do with them?” The culture in Twente, in which entrepreneurial students are stimulated, enabled Slycke and Peeters to actually implement their ideas. “We were also challenged in this, we were given a platform.” Moreover, the UT had expertise and the objective to actually put ideas into practice. “At other universities, there is sometimes insufficient realism about the value of intellectual property, for example. A patent in itself is not worth much if you do not have a strategy behind it, and do not invest in a portfolio of your intellectual property. A patent only becomes valuable if you take action and develop it into a prototype or product. Some people think that having an idea and then applying for a Dutch patent already leads to value. ‘There are thirty years of research in it,’ they say. It may be, but without technology, without the application of technology, you only have an idea.”
The Van den Kroonenberg Award
In 2006, Xsens won the Van den Kroonenberg Award for young entrepreneurship. It has been so long since then that Slycke does not remember much about it. “We received a statuette at the time, I do remember that. But where it went… Maybe it is still at Xsens, or Casper stole it. He likes art.”
By the time the company received the prize, Xsens had proven to be viable. They were in the middle of the growth phase, there were vacancies, but they had not really broken through yet. “It was great that we received the Van den Kroonenberg Award. Especially within the UT community and in the region, that award really means something. So we were happy with that recognition, it was an honor to be put on stage for our work. It was also just a nice festive occasion, a moment to share with our wives and family members.” What made it extra special for Slycke was that a good friend of his, Ronny van ’t Oever, founder of Micronit, had won the prize the year before. “He had a year to brag and then we got to go. It was a fruitful time for ‘TN’ers’ (alumni of the applied physics study programme) who became entrepreneurs.”
Slycke says he “doesn’t at all” come from an entrepreneurial family. His entrepreneurial spirit mainly stems from the pleasure he gets from finding solutions that bring together the market and technology. “I see technical solutions as the way forward, you can’t make big steps as a human being without technology. Of course you can also contribute to that as a researcher, but I prefer to do it as an entrepreneur. Maybe I’m just too stubborn to do what someone else says.”
Slycke and Peeters both had their unique qualities that contributed to the success of the company. “Casper is much better at the internal organization of a company, from sales to HR. He is a builder, just like me, but more focused on the organizational side, on the processes and the big picture. I focused on finding the solution to the customer's problem. More the proposition. We were good sparring partners and complemented each other well, and had confidence in each other. We were also friends before we started, so we got along well.”
Peeters and Slycke are still good friends. “He lives a bit further down the road now. So we still see each other regularly.”
Very large companies
In 2010, Apple launched the iPhone 4, the first phone with motion sensors (gyroscopes). “And also the type of algorithms that we had also developed, sensor fusion algorithms, to combine data from those different sensors into a very accurate estimate of the position of the phone, in this case in space. You could then use that for all kinds of applications, such as games, but also VR and AR.”
Other phone manufacturers woke up and realized: we need that technology too. Xsens had focused on two products: industrial applications (anything that moves by itself, drones, robots under the sea, boats, etc.) and human movements (for the medical world and the entertainment industry). But now the company suddenly had all kinds of customers on the line who did not want to buy the sensors, but were interested in the sensor fusion technology.
During that period, serial entrepreneur Job Elders joined Xsens. He was already on the Supervisory Board but was now given a position within the company as Strategic Business Developer. He was responsible for the expansion into the consumer electronics market. “If really big companies are interested in your technology, they often want exclusive access to that technology. That’s when you’re talking about a takeover. That’s why we brought in Job.”
Xsens then focused on a third ‘business unit’: the sensor fusion technology that made motion sensors suitable for mobile phones and other consumer electronics applications. Ultimately, that became intellectual property and also the reason for the takeover. Google, among others, used it for the Pixel phones and VR headsets. It was the moment when, after fourteen years, all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. According to Slycke, you partly have that in your own hands, you force it at a certain point. But partly it just happens. “As a company, we also had a near-death experience of course, with those speedometers for runners. But we continued to innovate and adapt. Sometimes product developments take too long, or they fail, you have customers who want all sorts of things, strategy discussions, it really doesn't always go smoothly. But we were on top of new developments in the market and that made it a lot of fun." According to Slycke, an entrepreneur must be stubborn and really believe in what he is doing. "Otherwise you give up far too quickly. On the other hand, you must always dare to be honest: if you see that something is not working, you have to stop, and not keep trying endlessly."
Takeover by Fairchild
In 2014, Slycke and Peeters sold Xsens to the legendary American company Fairchild Semiconductor in Palo Alto, California. Peeters left the company after the takeover, Slycke moved with his family to the United States to continue to lead Xsens from the management team of Fairchild. The plan was to put Xsens technology on a chip and Slycke believed in that with complete conviction. He found working for a large corporate very educational, but the most important lesson was that it was absolutely not for him. “Especially not those political games, and there was a lot of sawing off of chair legs, including mine. I didn't like it at all. And at the same time it was also cool, how seriously everything was taken, the enormous amounts of money. And of course I always knew: if I really don't like it anymore, I can just leave here.”
In 2016, Fairchild was acquired by ON Semiconductor, and then Slycke also left the company. “We had just done a super cool project with Google for VR glasses, but ON Semiconductor eventually decided to sell our business unit. The focus of the company drifted away from innovation of motion sensors, so then I saw no future for myself in the company and I left.”
With Ignazio Aleo, a colleague at Xsens, Slycke started a new company: Moveshelf. That develops an information system for motion analyses for hospitals. Slycke is co-founder of Moveshelf, but now mainly has an advisory role. “We are now making good progress and are always looking for the best software engineers.” Slycke lives in The Netherlands again. “We lived in California for over three years and we considered staying there. It is of course very beautiful there and as an entrepreneur you have many opportunities there. But we came back for our children. We would rather see them grow up in Europe.”
Cleaning robots
In 2020, Slycke founded Loop Robots in Delft. The company focuses on the market of cleaning companies in hospitals and aseptic cleanrooms in the pharmaceutical industry and develops cleaning robots that disinfect rooms, for example. The shock of the pandemic made a lot of innovation possible. Slycke is a full-time director at the startup. “Building such a company with a small team is a great time, that is really great fun. The longer you exist, the bigger you get, the more inevitable it is that at some point you get a bit into a rut.”
He ended up there because a group of technicians had developed a robot and were looking for an investor. There was only one problem: they were so focused on the technology that the robot could do all sorts of things, but had no real application. Nobody needed it. “I told those guys: this is really nothing at all, I am absolutely not going to invest in this. But then they couldn't continue.” Slycke sat down with them and proposed a different approach, with a reduced club and much more focus on a specific application that would add value. “That became SAM by Loop, a robot that cleans. The advantage was that there was already existing robot technology that could also be CE-approved, so we had a robot driving around in hospitals relatively quickly, that also got paid to work. A good basis for further developments.” In addition to his work for Loop Robots, Slycke also focuses on angel investments.
Charity: Kipaji Fund
Together with Casper Peeters and Job Elders, Slycke set up the Kipaji Fund for the University of Twente. “When you have more experience at a certain point, and you have your ducks in a row, it is great fun to help others on their way. Especially when it concerns young talent from other countries, who have fewer opportunities than students in the Netherlands.” The Kipaji Fund is managed by the Twente University Fund, and is open to donations. Slycke thinks it is a great initiative because the Fund has a direct impact on both the individual and the recipient's country of origin on a small, individual scale.