George Cooley McNamee – 50th Reunion Essay

George Cooley McNamee

34 Willett Street

Albany, NY 12210

georgemcnamee69@gmail.com

518-527-5700

Spouse(s): Kathleen Lasch McNamee (1992)

Child(ren): Hannah (1993); Daniel (1995); Roger (1998)

Education: Loomis Chaffee School 1964; Eton College 1965

Career: In 2011, I received the Yale Science and Engineering Association Award for Distinguished Service to Industry.

Avocations: skiing

College: Saybrook

Today is another wonderful day to be alive. I think I learned that at Yale. I majored in history but my concentration was in life appreciation studies. That’s why in my second act, I escaped the bank, had a fantastic family, and found intellectual stimulation in startups.

Looking back on my career at the bank, I can see that I had learned just enough from Henry Wallich’s Money, Credit and Banking to appreciate the rapid evolution of the banking system from staid and secure to frivolous and flimsy. Surprisingly, that was enough to support a 25-year CEO career of riding trends, dodging risk, and trying to peek around the corner for the next crisis.

Just in the nick of time Kathleen entered my life and we had the kids I’d always wanted. Hannah was born in 1993, Daniel in 1995, and Roger in 1998. Children changed my life in wonderful ways and my children are as amazing as yours. Hannah writes beautifully, Daniel thinks incisively, and Roger has political skills I can only envy.

In the ’90s, this history major gravitated to tech. I particularly enjoyed the intellectual challenge of reinventing business models to take advantage of evolving new environments, desktop becoming client server, then “software as a service” evolving to support big data and mobile apps. Mapinfo to Autotask to StreetEasy.

Software is fun but I’m passionate about robots. Robots are self-awareness in a box. When I joined iRobot in 1999, they knew they wanted to build autonomous robots. They had some technology but no business. We tried 10 business models and learned to fail fast. We finally got it right and this year, they’ll sell millions of robots and do $1 billion in revenues. Of everything I worked on, iRobot was the one company my kids really loved.

By the time you read this, I will have spent 20 years trying to build Plug Power into a successful fuel cell company. Hopefully by then, we’ll be playing a growing role in the electrification of all things that move. If we power flying cars, my kids will approve of this one too.

I think we are at one of those Kitty Hawk moments, when the preconditions are all in place for something profoundly different. Just as refined petroleum enabled automobiles, plastics, and fighter planes, won’t electricity and AI enable similar leaps—perhaps in things that act and things that think and things that fly?

So, Class of ’69, let us go boldly forth determined to only make new mistakes.

Still I cannot help but sometimes wonder. Could I have possibly been what the admissions committee thought it was looking for? You either? I wonder what they liked about our essays. I wonder what I said. Shouldn’t we get Beinecke and Schwarzman and petition to see our files?