25 Years!

Today is the 25th anniversary of shipping our first order! This post is a quick update about what has happened in the five years since I wrote our 20th-anniversary post. You can see more about our history in these two anniversary posts:

The biggest milestone over the past five years was that we bought our building at the end of August 2021. That was such a pie-in-the-sky notion in early April 2021, when we were just a year into the pandemic and the general global outlook was very uncertain. However, that very uncertainty might have helped us, with interest rates extremely low and commercial real estate vacancies continuing to rise after the shutdowns and transitions to remote work over the previous year.

Meeting with landlord on 27 April 2021.

We had extended our lease for five years (plus some extension options) in 2018 with our long-time landlord, but he had to sell the building somewhat abruptly in 2019, giving us only six months of history with our new landlord when I went begging to him for relief right after the covid shutdowns started in March 2020. He did not help (he had dozens of tenants asking him the same thing), and he even left me with the impression that since I had a very good rental rate, I better be careful not to give him any pretext for evicting us. We hung in there for the next year, and the next time I went begging to him, in late April 2021, it was to pleeeeeease sell us the building: his ownership group has buildings all over Vegas and in several other states, while my whole life is invested in this company that is in turn very dependent on this building; with interest rates where they are now, our monthly mortgage payments would be lower than the rent we were paying!

I think he was skeptical we could get a loan, but fortunately, we were able to make a deal contingent on that loan, and then we were able to find a bank willing to lend us the money. And so the building became “ours” at the end of August 2021. “Ours” in the sense that we owed 90% of the value to the SBA and bank, but as long as we didn’t mess up, it would become more and more ours over time.

Inventory history for a component we ran out of during 2021-2022 chip shortage.

The covid situation continued to improve, and now it’s mostly a distant memory, but since then we have had multiple new challenges to just keeping the business going. The biggest were the chip shortages as we came out of the pandemic, where in some cases we had to wait over two years to get parts (for example, a part I ordered in April 2021 did not get delivered until January 2024). Even with our very large inventory, that led to being completely out of key components for over a year in the worst cases. We had a big slowdown in 2024 as we were hit by the repercussions of having been out of stock on some products for an extended time and probably from some larger customers having stocked up a lot in 2022 and 2023. And as things were finally getting back to normal in 2025, we had the yugely disruptive new tariffs come into effect.

Ceiling light (and/or HVAC system) replacement.

We had done some renovations to the building in 2018-2019, but we had otherwise taken the space as-is at the end of 2011 after it had been vacant for a few years. Once the building was ours, we spent 2022 and 2023 gradually improving it, including replacing almost two dozen HVAC systems and changing over to LED lighting. The biggest project was the installation of a 305kW solar array on the roof, which I covered in a series of blog posts in late 2024:

Solar panels on Pololu’s roof.

• Part 1: Introduction and project overview starting from late 2022.
• Part 2: Installation from January 2023 through first day of operation on October 5, 2023.
• Part 3: System failures and production results during the first year of operation.
• Part 4: Analysis of electrical costs before and after our system was installed.
• Part 5: Actual system cost after tax credits and conclusion as of November 2024.

I am happy to report that we had a much better experience the second year of operation, with no major issues and over 531 MWh generated in 2025, as reported by the SolarEdge monitoring system:

Pololu lifetime solar energy production as of 8 April 2026, showing 531 MWh generated in 2025.

Here’s a monthly breakdown and comparison over the years:

Pololu monthly solar energy production 5 October 2023 through 8 April 8 2026.

It’s hard to know for sure where SolarEdge measures that generation, but once a month I can see the power company’s assessment of the situation when we get our billing statement. There are of course fluctuations as the weather changes, but the best result we got so far was for the year from August 21, 2024 through August 20, 2025, where integrating all of the charges and credits from NV Energy’s side, we used a net of 2,582 kWh. Dividing that by the 531,390 kWh generated in 2025, we generated over 99.5% of our total annual energy consumption!

Jan and Paul juggling, 6 April 2001.

I am writing so much about the building not only because a lot has happened around it in the past five years but because it has such long-term strategic relevance to Pololu’s stability and continuing to operate and grow as a manufacturer for the next 25 years. We moved or expanded almost a dozen times by the time we got to this building, but we have been at this location for almost 15 years now. Over the years and depending on where we were in our lease renewal cycle, this building has alternated between a prison and a refuge to me. It has always been bigger than what we needed, but if we were going to be committed here for many years, I wanted to make sure we had room for growth. As we got more invested in the building, with more installed equipment and procedures around how things were laid out, we also became more vulnerable to potentially losing the space. I don’t know if it’s true for sure, but I heard of long-time juggling equipment maker Dubé going out of business because of not being able to renew the lease on their location (in New York City).

Moving from a lease to a mortgage should give us much more long-term security, but it was not without its downsides. The biggest one is that we are now under more obligations to the banks than we were to the landlord, with the biggest requirement that we maintain a certain level of profitability. Especially when business gets slower, as it did for us in 2024, that becomes a big disincentive toward longer-term and riskier development projects. The pressure to maintain profitability and the difficulty in obtaining components has led to most of Pololu’s new products being simpler over the past several years. Now, with the 5-year anniversary of the building purchase coming up in less than five months, we face some uncertainty of what our interest rate will reset to (and we will also divert some energy and attention to refinancing for better terms now that we are in a better situation than we were five years ago).

The main nice thing with owning our building, even with the caveat that a bank could take it back if we fail to meet our obligations, is that every month and year we survive, the situation should be improving, as opposed to being a month closer to the unknown of a lease renegotiation. There are about 60 of us working here now, compared to the 80 at the beginning of 2020. We have lots of room to grow, but if things slow down, we can also continue operating at our reduced scale without rising real estate costs forcing us out of business.

Pololu building site aerial pictures—spring 2000, left, and spring 2001, right.

One last note on the building: in going through old county aerial photos, I saw just dirt in the spring 2000 picture and the building with cars parked around it in the spring 2001 picture, which means the building is the same age as Pololu! It was built for a public company that went bankrupt in the 2008 recession, and we have occupied the building twice as long as the original company that built it.

Me and my dad, 30 May 2000.

25 years is interesting emotionally and psychologically, as a lot can change in the five years from 20 years. After 20 years of building the company, I could still realistically think I was less than halfway done. That’s a lot less true now, as 25 more years would make me over 70 years old and close to the age my dad was when he died, which happened abruptly in May 2021. Several others at Pololu have also lost parents in the past few years.

Pololu building renovation inspection, 27 April 2019. This guy is taller than me now.

Our kids are also growing up. We five owners of Pololu have ten children among us, and with the oldest about to head off to college and nearing the age we were when we started the company, it also means we have been splitting our energy between parenting and building the company for the majority of the past 25 years. Having kids and building a company each takes a huge amount of time and effort, and each of those major life projects puts substantial limitations on the other. As our kids become less dependent on us, we should be able to put more into the company again.

I continue to be grateful to all of our customers. Thank you for your support and business over the past quarter century! Thank you also to all of the Pololu employees who work hard every day to make the world a better place. In the 20th-anniversary post, I highlighted several employees who had been with us for ten years or more; most of them are still here, which means they have now been at Pololu for 15 years or more. I am blessed to have found such great people early in my life and to be surrounded by my favorite people every day. Thank you all and here’s to the next 25 years!