HARMAR TOWNSHIP, Pa. — Brian Beyer is the co-founder, president and CEO of Hellbender Inc., a Harmar Township-based company that manufactures camera systems for AI and robotics, or, as Beyer puts it, the ‘eyes and brains’ of AI systems. Beyer began his professional career as a roboticist with RE2 Robotics and Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center after serving in the U.S. Marine Corps for several years. He spent almost a full decade with Carnegie Robotics before founding Hellbender in 2021. Now, the company is balancing growing its product offerings and workforce alongside a rapidly growing demand for the hardware that makes AI work.
What would you say has defined your leadership style the most? My service in the Marine Corps. I’m also certainly neurodivergent, so you put those things together, and you get something pretty interesting. I tend to be pretty frank, my team knows that I wear my emotions on my sleeve and I don’t think that’s from a lack of control. Everybody knows where they stand with me all the time, and I try to remind the team how we’re moving in the same direction. But I bring a lot from the Marine Corps, like an ‘all together pull’ (mentality). … I think that the leadership style you evoke definitely has to evolve as your organization evolves and grows, and I think that’s where a lot of people struggle in growing a business because, frankly, not every leader is going to be the right leader for the scale and pace of an organization.
Having covered startups, I think a lot of early stage founders approach leadership like, ‘I’m going to be CEO forever, so I need to read books from famous CEOs to learn for the long-term.’ You’re emphasizing a very different approach. Well, frankly, I think that a lot of those CEO books are full of it. They’re self-congratulating works of quasi-fiction, written how they remembered it, not how the rest of the team does. And there are nuggets to take away from all of those. But when I started the company, I warned the founding team that I might not be the right CEO five years from now because depending on what the company’s needs are and where we’re trying to go with the organization, I might not be able to grow my skillset and continue. I’m not sure I’m there yet, and this is probably the trouble of the CEO/founder, which is maybe I am going to glue myself to the seat forever.
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