CEO
Robert Weldon has been CM Labs’ CEO since its founding in 2001. Under his leadership, CM Labs has grown from a small projects-based team into the leading provider of heavy equipment simulation training solutions.
“There's always a big payoff when you design something and it works,” he said. “It's even better when you design something and it works so well that people forget that it was designed. Instead, they see it as the way it works now.”
My background is in mathematics. I studied mechanical systems in an area called symplectic geometry. After graduate school, I started working on physics engines, tools for graphics, and tools for games in the 90s. I had a small company and we had one client for my physics engine. I then received an offer from a company called Math Engine. They asked if I wanted to join them instead of trying to do something on my own, so I did.
I came in as their product manager and did a little bit of fusion between some of my ideas, the ideas at Math Engine’s Oxford office, and the ideas at Math Engine’s office in Montreal, Quebec. By combining the ideas from all three, we built a simulation platform for games, and later began focusing on engineering-quality simulations. Then, I eventually made Math Engine an offer and spun out the Montreal office into CM Labs.
The release of Vortex 5 was a huge step up, bringing Vortex from an SDK [Software Development Kit] to a platform. We also did some very large projects that were very well executed, so I’m very proud of those as well.
I think that my background in mathematics brings a different perspective. It’s abstraction, and having that training in abstraction is very useful because that perspective helps solve classes of problems, rather than being stuck solving each problem individually.
I think I’ve been kind of a bridge at the company between abstraction and strategy and practical concerns. You have to be willing to invest in more general solutions, because it prepares you for the future as well as for the specific thing you’re looking at right now. Those are the two poles I’m bouncing between all the time.
We have our own platform, and by that, I mean our own platform for content such as mechanisms, scenarios, and training packages. This makes our content really portable. We can move it from one class of simulator to another. We can move it from one graphics engine, such as Unity, to another, such as Epic. And we can support integrations with all kinds of things.
Simulation is going to be ubiquitous, and we’re part of that trend—and we’re going to see it everywhere, all the time. It’s the way that we’re going to learn about things. For that, you don’t want negative training. You want a simulated machine that accurately replicates a real machine, that’s been verified by engineering to do what it’s supposed to do.
CM Labs’ company culture has always been quality-oriented. Our people really like to go to the ends of the earth to solve problems. It’s a deep part of our culture to provide solutions where all the i’s are dotted and all the t’s are crossed.
I can’t completely explain it. It comes from engineering, but it also appears in marketing and other places within CM Labs.
We’re a very unique company. Not many companies do blue collar high tech. At CM Labs, you have people with masters and PhDs as well as people who have been out in the field pushing dirt and worrying about pedestrian traffic, accidents, and safety. We have them working together on the same problems. I like that. I like working with a range of people and being involved in the design of solutions to real problems.
I like problem-solving, especially when problem-solving involves designing something that is going to get used not only by one client one time but by a whole set of clients. I find that very interesting.
I have a ton of interests and hobbies, but I’m not super indulgent in them because I’m a full-time single dad.
What excites me most? It’s a good question. I think we’ve reached a certain critical mass and now we can really start going into new segments.
Each segment benefits from the cloud-based backend that supports classroom and test lab collaboration. So as we move forward, the same things being used in the classroom can also run a laboratory trying to measure parameters for improving simulations or for getting real-world data fast. I think that’s the most interesting thing we’re doing.
In the next few years, I see us having more of a global footprint. We’ve built in a lot of modularity in the last couple of years. Now we’re able to switch out controls, switch languages, and switch environments in and out.