How board games and disassembled microwaves led Jason Okerman to found a robotics startup

This is How I Got Here, a series where we chart the career journeys of technologists, entrepreneurs, tech workers, builders and people in the innovation economy. Want to tell your story? Get in touch.

Product management is an art — at least for board game designer, engineer and founder Jason Okerman. 

As an artist, the 39-year-old CEO of Gemba Robotics realized that selling individual originals severely limited his reach. By channeling his best artwork into board games instead, he transformed exclusive pieces into shared experiences, bringing his vision to hundreds of players rather than a lucky few.

“I found the logic of thinking through what makes a game an experience. It connected to each side of my brain — the creative side and the engineering,” Okerman told Technical.ly. 

Thinking through problems, like how to turn art into a game, brought Okerman to found Gemba Robotics around nine months ago. He’s now tackling how robots are interacting with humans and manufacturing in factories, aiming to bring efficiency and visibility to their operating processes.

He got his start as an engineer during undergrad at Grove City College before earning his first master’s degree at Georgia Tech in electrical and computer engineering. 

Okerman then started making his impact on the field at the Eaton Corporation before transitioning into product management at places like Gecko Robotics, where he worked while completing his MBA at the University of Pittsburgh. 

As a fresh graduate of the Anvil Founder Coaching Program, Okerman is now ready to transform how robots are used in factories.  

For this edition of How I Got Here, Technical.ly caught up with Okerman about navigating tech workspaces, taking apart microwaves and need-to-knows for rising tech entrepreneurs.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. 

How did you get into tech?

I had so many experiences taking apart our digital cameras as a hobby.

That process of taking apart electromechanical things like a digital flash camera or a microwave, that was informative on my journey. Usually we see this very well-engineered facade on the outside of them, and what’s on the inside you don’t get a look at, and you start to see that there are standardized components.

There are things that I could recognize that were in the microwave. Those same components are actually inside of a printer or a camera. Certainly, that was an influence on where I ended up, which is finding a career that started out in electrical engineering. 

Walk me through your tech journey.

I was working with robotics all the way back at Georgia Tech, and then I didn’t stay with robotics because back in 2010 and 2011, a lot of what we were working on was visionary. 

We put out some papers, and the learning models certainly had not arrived. A lot of the machine learning, a lot of the ability to capture and analyze camera data, was just so early that we were proposing that robots would eventually do things. It was a long way out.

So, I pivoted. I then joined Eaton Corporation, which is a world-class engineering and manufacturing company. It really sparked my journey of not just becoming good at software and electrical engineering, which was my domain, but eventually becoming good at “How do I lead teams? How do I work with all sorts of stakeholders?”

Now I’m using that entire mix of background that I’ve built as a founder to start something new and tackle some of the problems that plague the adoption and deployment process of robotics in these high-value-add manufacturing applications.

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How was your non-technical higher education useful in the tech world?

The value that the MBA brought by having come out of engineering and then doing business school is that I immediately came out with the ability to talk in what I like to think of as the three languages that are used in a tech company workspace.

The first language is: can you talk to engineers and designers about features? 

The second language is: can you talk to the sales team about benefits?

The third one is: can you talk to the C-suite about finance? 

If you put those three things together, that’s what makes many of these powerful tech companies tick. They have all three of those working as well as they can together and in many teams you find individuals that don’t know how to shift into the other language. 

What’s the day-to-day of what your life looks like at your new company, Gemba Robotics?

We’re starting to get traction with what’s going to become our first deployed pilots, where we understand the real nature of what’s happening on a factory floor in preparation for bringing robots in as effectively as possible. 

My day-to-day looks a lot like reaching out to folks that have the problem that I’m trying to tackle and getting more and more refinement in what I’m building based on an understanding of how they describe their own problem.

The second piece of my day is that I’m not building everything from scratch. I’m partnering with others who have little bits and pieces of the solution. I’m seeking to talk to these potential partnerships and understand, “How do they get value out of a potential partnership? What are they looking for?” and then to craft really elegant win-win collaboration opportunities.

What is your advice for someone looking to get into either the tech space or more specifically, the tech entrepreneurship space? 

In the tech entrepreneurship space — practice active listening and get people to talk about their problems. Get in the habit of asking people, “What are the problems that you encounter?” That’s one of the immediate distinctions between businesses that take a long time to find their identity and businesses that grab their identity right away. Are they attached to a problem or do they just have a solution looking for a problem? 

This is an exciting time for folks who don’t have a tech background to get into the tech space because of the effects of what AI is doing. There are new ways to quickly learn the vocabulary around a topic, which used to be one of the barriers to entry.