Green Building - The foundations

By Frank | August 29, 2008

Over the past 19 months we have been remodeling our home in Tiburon. You can find it on Google maps by entering the address 1 Reserva Ln, Tiburon, CA. Here is the satellite photo pretty close up.

It is hard to see from this perspective but the home is nearly “on the water” of San Francisco Bay. It is located on a very steep hill so the home sits on a number of deep anchors and steel beams. To get a better idea of its location in the Bay area here is a wider picture -

For the past 3 years, I have been involved with the California Clean Tech Open. This is a business plan competition for clean tech or green business plans. And for the past 2 years, I have been the chair of the Green Building category.

So I felt it was incumbent on me to do something myself. So this would not be like my daughter’s soccer team years ago … where I was the coach but had never played the game.

Today this home in Tiburon makes all of the energy it needs to operate year round on a sustainable basis. In the summer, like now, we make more energy than we need and send it back to PG&E for them to use it elsewhere. But in the winter, we expect to pull that power back.

This home has solar photovoltiac panels that generate substantial amounts of power every day the sun shines (which is most days in Tiburon). It also has solar hot water panels for taking more efficient care of that need. It also will shortly have water collecting cisterns that save the rain water we have in some abundance in the winter so that we can water our garden with that in the summer months where we never have rain.

The Small World Group website will soon have a new branch where how this house works and its daily, weekly, monthly and annual performance can be easily seen and tracked. SWG is engaged in additional projects in the green space and we will be telling you about this more in the future as well.

For now, here is a small taste of what is happening! Below is teh energy usage and energy production curves for the home over the past 24 hours. Note that energy usage is show as positive numbers and energy production is shown as negative numbers.

The home has 2 areas that we keep separate for energy accounting purposes - the main house and the apartment. For the apartment you can see that we use an average of 500 watts but that the solar produces an average of 800 watts so we make an average of 300 watt-hrs x 24 hours per day or an excess of 7.2 KW-hrs daily.

The main house similarly uses about 1400 watts per hour but produces about 2000 watts per hour for an excess of 600 watt-hrs x 24 or 14.4 KW-hrs excess daily.

This is actually even better because we are on “net metering” and this means that since we make most of our power from 10 am to about 6 pm, we sell that to the power company at about $0.30 per KW-hr but when we buy more at night we buy at $0.10 per KW-hr. So our leverage is even greater.

But this is summer and we also removed most of our gas appliances and switched to electric heat pumps and so in the winter we would expect to be serious users.

Stay tuned for much more on this subject.

Topics: Essays, Green Perspectives, Personal Stories | No Comments »

America and the World

By Frank | August 9, 2008

As I write this, I am sitting in the lobby on WiFi in the Impiana Casuarina Hotel in Ipoh, Malaysia.  I like to say that Ipoh is a lot like Muncie Indiana.  A small town atmosphere.  Nice people.  But there is one big difference, things in Asia are changing extremely rapidly.

On this trip, I will visit China (Shanghai), Malaysia (Ipoh and Kuala Lumpur), Thailand (Bangkok), Singapore, India (Mumbai) and Switzerland (Zurich).

One of the benefits and challenges of my last 8 years at Finisar was the very extensive travel that was required as we moved from having all of our employees in the USA in the spring of 2000 to just 5 years later having more than 85% of our employees as citizens of countries in Asia.

What is so different today is that each of the Asia countries has more cars, much higher prices, more wealth, more of everything.  And they are just warming up, so to speak.  In Shanghai, we traveled by car as before, but the traffic jams were more snarled and happened at times when before there would have been no problem.

In Malaysia, same story.  But also the places where I used to stay for $24 per night (same place) now cost more than $60.  And while it is true that the US dollar has fallen and that can explain some of the change in prices, it does not explain it all by a long shot.  What is more the explanation is that people here are wealthier and so wages and other expenses are higher.  More people have jobs so to get people to work in the hotel is not so easy.

I will write another post later in the trip.  But I know I will continue to find the same story.

And the reason is that the rest of the world is catching up fast and we are wasting our time fighting unneeded wars and focusing our economy on sub-prime mortgages and ultra risky investments instead of making money and progress the old fashioned way.  Creativity and hard work and patience.

Stay tuned.

Topics: Essays, Investing, Personal Stories | No Comments »

Ethics, Philosophy, Principle and our minds

By Frank | June 21, 2008

When I worked at Finisar and wrote essays I tried to make many of them on subjects relating to optical and high-speed networking. But inside Small World Group, I am free to range more broadly in what you see here.

Lately, I have been thinking long about how we are approaching a crisis in terms of the moral framework in which we make decisions. Let me give you a modern example pulled from the pages of today’s newspapers.

Our government, George Bush and those that work directly for him have a large number of detainees down in a US naval base on a tip of Cuba. Some of these people have been subjected to extreme forms of questioning that may have been torture (1), (2), (3), (4). In one recent book, the author goes so far as to suggest that if President Bush were to travel to a foreign country, like France or England, after his term in office, that he should be arrested and tried as a war criminal!

The problem is that the argument has substance and it also suggests a moral dilemma.

Let’s suppose that through non-lethal and non-long term harmful torture US interrogators were able to find out the details of a plot similar to 911, one where the loss of life and property would be measured in the 1000s or even millions of people. And by this torture this loss or life would be prevented. Is the torture ethical? Does the end justify the means?

How do our citizens think through this matter?

In the past the world laws that are embodied in things like the Geneva Convention have governed many aspects of war from the treatment of wounded on the battlefield to the treatment of prisoners. And today this specifically calls for there to be no torture used on prisoners.

But when these laws were adopted, the range of damage that was possible was much smaller than it is today where there are weapons of mass destruction and where the opportunity for harm can be exported so far from the site of the conflict. Do these world laws and conventions of behavior fairly assign the rights and protections to the people both combatants and civilians?

If you like thinking about such matters, there are some interesting sites that present similar stories where the ethical or moral dilemma is put with simplicity and stark contrast. Take a look and see what you would do. Remember you have to make a choice, even doing nothing as your choice has consequences.

Small World Group is beginning work to define a new philanthropic effort called “The 12″ and through this group we will be providing non-profit funds for people who will act as social venture capitalists. The investments they will hopefully make will be in areas of knowledge creation that will expand our critical thinking and practices in many of these areas. You can link to The 12 on SWG’s home page and watch as the group definitions and first members get started.

By putting ethics into our efforts to cause change and in the broadest possible meaning we will come under potentially much criticism. But we need to progress in our understanding of ethics. There are so many ways that we compromise ethical thinking -

• a recent article in Scientific American on the ethics of climate change highlighted a weakness in that we have little means to think through an extinction level change. What if global warming would release methane from the permafrost so that temperatures rose 20 degrees or more. That would surely cause loss of nearly all or fully all human life. But current science only judges this to be a 5% probability. How much sacrifice do we ask from current living people to save the lives of those not even born based on a 5% chance?
• there will always be differences between people so differences in wealth are probably natural in some sense as well. How much is ethical though? Am I worth more than all others? But I have probably done more philanthropy than most others as well. Would difficult philanthropy ever get done with out accumulation of wealth? How do we understand wealth in a future where uneven distribution may very directly relate to ability to survive extreme conditions brought on by our own excesses?
• What is the value to our world of a very challenged human. Do we keep a very bad criminal (known bad) alive at the expense of much poorer education for large numbers of children?
• Do we continue to allow religion to define so much of what happens on our planet. In a time when weapons are so powerful, can we allow the survival of a religion that teaches the full inhumanity of all non-believers and therefore total disrespect for their lives and beliefs?
• Can democracy work in a time when the voting masses may not be able to understand a global life-death level decision because the lack the technical and mental ability to understand the arguments? Can we survive if people vote for much better lives now at the sacrifice of the future lives of many or all?

Anyway, I am so convinced that we need new modes of thought, science, living, respect for one another and our planet. We need ideas as sweeping in ethics and philosophy as quantum mechanics and general relativity were to science 100 years ago. Before these to key pillars of all modern technology, many believed all that would be discovered had been discovered.

And now for 2000+ years we have not evolved far in ethical thought areas so we believe that religion and Greek philosophy define the center and circumference of what we need for ethics, morals, philosophy. Moreover, we lack systems of thought that even make change in these areas possible.

In science there are mechanisms for helping sift truth from false ideas. Even then there are major challenges to making changes. But in religion, once an idea has been part of such an organization of humans for more than 100 years, it becomes the word of God and then cannot be challenged by any human. Change then takes 1000s of years not 10s of years. We may not have such a period of time …

Topics: Essays, Green Perspectives, Spiritual Threads | 2 Comments »

Movement of a Butterfly Wing

By Frank | June 10, 2008

In an email exchange this morning, I was able to reflect back on the past 30 years of technology change in a very personal way. Let’s see if this can be reconstructed for you as well.

Around 30 years ago, I was finishing a PhD in Astronomy from the University of Virginia. Jobs were scarce in this field at that time and there were questions about my thesis as well. So when I applied for teaching or research jobs, I received no offers at all. With a baby on the way (my son and his wife are having their first child later this month!), I widened the job search.

One thing I did was to take the Air Force officer’s candidacy school exam (OCS) and did pretty well, so I was offered to join the US Air Force and to teach and do research but would also serve. I had some dream of perhaps being a shuttle mission expert as that program was just starting.

But finally people believed in my thesis, but too late for normal astronomy jobs and so a former professor offered to help me have interviews with Bell Labs (ATT). I interviewed in integrated circuit processing, software for IC design, switching technology and fiber optics.

And in the end, I chose to go to work for Bell Labs in Allentown, PA.

They say that sometimes hurricanes get started when a butterfly moves its wings off the coast of Africa and that ultra small disturbance at just the right moment changes everything.

Well it did for me!

At the time I joined Bell Labs here is the state of communications-

• virtually no optical fiber had been deployed anywhere (today you do not make a call except to your neighbor)
• the phone company only offered plain old telephone service (POTS) and long distance was expensive; around that time I made a phone call to Europe that cost over $100!
• fast data communications was 0.0003 Mb/s using a modem over the phone lines - today we have DSL at 1-8 Mb/s and cable modems are even faster.
• no cell phone network so no SMS, no email on phones, no GPS, no camera phones
• there was no Internet like we think of it today, a few researchers were playing with it and Bob Metcalfe had just made ethernet work pretty well. But no email, web browsing, Google, video on demand, YouTube

I was able to begin working in a field that would produce one of the largest transformations for us all over the next 30 years

Today we have all of those elements different. That $100 long distance call would be $0.60 or free if we use Skype or iChat and it could be video as well as audio!

And in starting Finisar in 1988, the level of participation I had was even greater. Today most mouse clicks, most email sends, nearly all video conferences and skype phone calls at some point have one or more Finisar optical transceiver modules make light for those actions! Now I am sure the internet would have happened without me, but the point is that my seemingly random decision not to go fly the shuttle and instead to work at Bell Labs on optical fiber communications was a butterfly wing level personal decision that let me ride the hurricane for more than 25 years!

How does one get so fortunate?

I would like to tell you that I felt the butterfly wings and knew what was right to do. But I did not. I was educated, open minded and willing to help. But I did not consciously choose this wonderful (looking backwards) decision.

Topics: Essays, Personal Stories, Spiritual Threads | 2 Comments »

When Can We See Solar Impact?

By Frank | May 23, 2008

A little while ago California signed into law SB-1 which was labeled the “million solar roofs” legislation. That bill calls for California based utilities and policy to encourage home owners to install solar photovoltaic systems to generate power they can use but also which can be fed back to the state’s utility grid at times when the home owner makes more power than they are using at that time.

Now that sounds like a serious effort and, in fact, there is nothing else like it around the USA. But there was a similar effort started earlier in Germany and now practically everywhere you drive you in Germany you see solar panels on the roof. Such programs tend to succeed in focusing citizens to do their part in helping change the dynamics of a problem.

But how much will that really impact California’s electrical grid? Below is a picture of today’s power usage for a typical spring (not hot or cold) day - one where little air conditioning or heating is required.

Now this is a very typical day. In the middle of the night around 3 am you find we use the least energy and around noon to 3 or 4 pm we use the most. On this day there is a secondary peak of needed power around 9 pm at night. Guess what we are doing then - Yes, you can actually see us all watching TV.

This graph also shows how much power California has in reserve to meet unexpected needs. This is the green jagged line at the top of the graph. You can find this type of graph daily here.

Interestingly enough, a couple of days after this one we had a weekend day where there was particularly low overall demand. The weekend helps because businesses are closed. But it also helped that the weather was not too warm nor too cold and the day was “long” so that we needed less inside lights. Here is what that day looked like on the same graph -

On very hot summer days, the mid-afternoon peak will rise as high as 50 GW or more than 2x what we need at night. And on such days this demand exceeds all the power that we can generate in the state. So we have to purchase additional power from our neighbors if they have surplus.

So now you can see the point of the million roof bill. At precisely the times when California is shortest on power, the solar panels on those 1,000,000 roofs will be generating the most power … on hot sunny summer days. And if they generate about 5 KW per roof (a typical installation) then 1,000,000 roofs will generate 5 GW of power which is about 10% of all of the power required by the system. In such a case the top of the peak in the curve, will flatten off just a little bit. But that little bit is pretty important because it provides relief at just the right time.

What if we were able to have Californians put up not 1,000,000 solar roofs but instead 10,000,000 would be built over some period of time. What would be the impact then? Well then these roofs would potentially generate 50 GW of power and this would be all that the system requires. Wow. Why not set that as the target right now and help us drive towards energy independence? Great question.

Some answers have to do with the politics of it all. But some of the answers also have to do with how the overall electrical power grid will perform when so much of our power is generated from these sources. What happens if the sun goes behind a cloud in a change of weather over large parts of the state? How will that be handled, for example?

Still more relate to how will people be compensated for the power they generate. Today, you are not paid at all but you can receive credits against your electric bill and power you use at night. But if you make more power than you need, you do not get an additional compensation. So that has to be reconciled.

There are many questions like that where we will need to build up experience and make adjustments over time and based on real world learning, I suspect. So even if we could “flip the solar switch” on quickly, it is probably best if we do it at a little slower pace.

Topics: Essays, Green Perspectives | 2 Comments »

Oil and Water

By Frank | May 17, 2008

In the late 1980s and early 1990s California experienced a protracted drought. This condition lasted so long that the various governments across the northern part of the state began public relations campaigns to encourage citizens to find new ways to conserve.

Some policy changes were enacted as well - toilets in new construction were required to have lower water usage, upon sale of an existing home toilets were required to be upgraded to the new home standard, shower heads for sale in California were limited to 2.5 gallons per minute (about 10 liters per minute for the rest of the world). And, of course, all of this helped.

But in the end, it was found out that there was a little problem with all of this civic mindedness. it turned out that if all of the people in CA used NO water for personal use this would save 10% of the total water used in the state. The rest went to industry and agriculture. And most of that went to agriculture.

So if you could save 10% of the agriculture it would be substantially more than if all of the citizens saved 20-30% which is quite a bit for each person!

One more point here is that water costs for personal use and for industrial use are substantially higher than for agriculture. So much so that some have compared the costs of water for agriculture versus that of other industries. In California it 1 acre-foot of water ( = 386,000 gallons or 1200 cubic meters) will produce $60 of revenue for the state if used to grow cotton or alfafa but $980,000 if used in a semiconductor factory! So the efficiency gain is 16,000x!

Now having been involved with my daughter in this exercise when she was in 3rd and 4th grade about 15 years ago, I had to think about what was really going on today in regards to oil consumption. Sounds like a pretty distant link right?

The question i asked myself - What if all of us in the USA stopped using oil today entirely or just saved 30%; such a savings would be very difficult for most of us to achieve quickly. But suppose we could do this over some short time like a few years. What would that do to the price of oil? And my conclusion is that it would have very little overall affect. Because we are increasingly a smaller part of the overall use total. China and India are growing and becomeing 1st world citizens so quickly and with such impact that their combined 2.3 billion consumers will dwarf our pun 0.3 billion citizens.

Does this mean that we should not bother to conserve, convert to solar, wind and other alternatives. No, it rather further emphasizes how important this conversion is and how deep we must take it to truly achieve real independence from the fate that awaits others who cling to the past and the inevitable price rises that still will follow.

To the extent we can not just cut back on oil consumption but really change energy consumption from oil based sources to electricity that is generated from renewable sources this can be game changing for our country and its competitiveness. Inexpensive resources are key to industrial competitiveness - for a country, a state, even a rather local region.

At the individual and family level, this means that we need to consider changing how -

• we heat water from primarily natural gas to solar with electricity or gas providing the backup
• we heat our homes to have more reliance on geothermal, heat pumps and solar and less on gas and oil
• we purchase new cars with a greater emphasis on hybrid technology and the use of the electrical grid to charge batteries for shorter trips
• we individually participate in creating more energy locally by having solar PV on our roofs
• we understand where our energy uses are in our homes many of which can be trimmed through us just being aware and making small changes.

The ultimate impact of all of these changes (talked about endlessly elsewhwere) can be that we do not have to participate in the wars that others will fight over who gets what share of a resource that is already scarce.

But, now I am going to let you in on a secret. If you do this even yourself or with your family, you will be more competitive in comparison to your neighbors. Think about this. If you drive a Prius, combine trips, turn off lights, make some of your own energy, get off the oil addiction - then you are simply more competitive on a growing basis year by year. Gas today at $4 is not headed back to $2 … ever. We are more likely to see $6 or $10 before the end of this decade.

So put together a plan now. Find ways to really understand your energy usage and start changing it in ways that are easy but really do not change how you live. You will be surprised how easy this can be done. And every thing you save is likely to be savings that you continue to reap month after month, year after year.

Topics: Green Perspectives | No Comments »

KaThunk

By Frank | April 28, 2008

When I left day-to-day contributing at Finisar in early 2006, I wondered if it was not possible to teach others some of what we learned in those early years. So began my journey working with small companies somewhere between being an angel investor and a venture capitalist. Probably the best and worst aspect of this has been that I have done it without having a VC firm surrounding me.

The advantage of working inside a VC firm is that I could learn from their collective wisdom – what to avoid in terms of standard and well-known pitfalls. Right away it was clear that the Finisar experience was not sufficient to be able to help well. The disadvantage, I suspect, is that I would not see deals that are so raw and entrepreneurs that are so green.

All that I do today I collect under the name Small World Group. While this activity can range from engineering to investing to venture philanthropy and non-profits, I almost always stick to the lean way that Finisar was able to grow using our own money.

Keeping with the Finisar model, all of the companies (where I am an investor, board member) have sales. This was critical part of Finisar’s success, to have sales from a very early stage and it is a tipping point for my participation. The benefit for small companies to have sales early and steadily is not only that revenues help their cash flow. Sales and customers serve as a constant reminder to the small team that their goal is to create a business, not a technology. And the most important element of a business is to attract new customers and to hold onto existing ones. Customer’s keep the small venture entrepreneurial and not just creative for its own sake.

Today I have helped fund and established 3 companies where portions of the Finisar model are functioning, specifically all of these have sales. And I am actively engaged with another 3 that have ongoing operations that have consistent profits.

Additionally, there are 6+ more groups that are not yet full start up businesses where the engagement level is pre-seed. These groups need help in defining directions, thinking through funding levels, identifying early customers or government grants whereby they could get started as a business.
With these groups, typically there are periodic meetings where we don’t just sit and talk. Generally we try to work together to find some low cost and early way to engage with customers. Can we partner with someone to get funding for a prototype? What steps should they take in order to get to a valuation of their business that they like and that will be acceptable to a traditional VC?

Outcomes of these meetings typically have tasks for both the group and me to perform. I am to find a place where they could test a prototype, to find a development partner, to identify some IP that could improve their efforts quickly. For the group, the tasks are to write a plan, build elements of a prototype, produce some data, take some risk out of a design.

On the garage.com website there are shown the top 10 lies of VC and one of these is “We like early stage investing.” Traditional VC firms no longer like to engage in company building at this very small level. The reasons for this are legion but most significant is that today’s funds are so large in terms of funds to invest that to work with a group to place $500K or even $2M would mean that the firm might have to have 100s of separate investments.

But for me, working with small groups who are trying to get started is exactly where I like to be and what I like to do. I like the chaos and uncertainty. The problem is how to do this efficiently and to choose the groups where some engagement will make a real difference. And to realize that there are no magic meetings where all things get settled, that even here there is process and that it takes substantial time.

Mark Farley (Finisar’s long time SVP of engineering) and I used to have a development model that we liked when the chaos surrounding an idea was particularly great. We would say that early development was the act of getting more and more potentially good ideas out on the table. And as this happens teams start to think of how it all can work together. But we would realize that the moment of truth was coming.

We called it the KaThunk. As people contributed to a new and somewhat undefined goal, there would be a large ball of ideas on the table. It was growing at a fast rate. All the ideas that were a part of this ball looked important as they were added. But ultimately some are not. Many are not. The KaThunk is when the ball of ideas somehow rapidly shrinks due to a rearranging of the really good ideas and the tossing out, at least for now, of the ideas that don’t really fit. Visualize a ball of 1-2 meters in diameter somehow miraculously shrinking down to 10 cm … and there is some loud noise that sounds like KaThunk. And from that point on the team looks at the ball and all there can see how the project can be done faster and with much less risk. All there see how they can make an important contribution. And, in the best of situations, all agree that the ideas tossed don’t need to be argued for until the KaThunk project and goals are achieved.

When it happens well, KaThunk is visceral.

To enter my version of the formative stage you will need to-

• Articulate big vision
• Exhibit humbleness about expectations, this is key to KaThunk
• Have a short term plan where product and customer targets are clear
• Have some early revenue scheme that keeps you customer centric
• Demonstrated a strong willingness to be tight with money

Small World Group Scope
All of the activities I engage in today go under the banner of Small World Group. I tell folks that I called it a group just so I would not feel lonely. But today, there are 3-4 of us, so I guess we are a small group.

The activities discussed in this essay go under the title of Small World Capital. In this arm of our work we engage with companies through teaching, investing and partnering with others.
SWG has a philanthropic side, Small World Institute, where we work in a relatively under served part of the non-profit sector. Philosophically speaking philanthropy has historically been classified into 2 broad categories –

1. “give a man a fish” so that he does not starve today
2. “teach a man to fish” so that he can feed himself more steadily in the future

But like to think there can be another element to this.
That is worded as follows -

1. “create teaching universities” where art of fishing can taught, researched and expanded.

SWG works with folks that want to create fishing universities. Sometimes this means we work directly with existing universities, sometimes with research institutes. But in the future we hope to find a uniquely entrepreneurial way to do this 3rd category for decades to come. Stay tuned.

Small World Engineering engages directly in projects, sometimes in collaboration with the companies or non-profit groups where we are otherwise engaged. This can take the form of writing software, building circuit boards, filing patents or working with customers to understand a need better.

Topics: Essays, Investing, StartUp Ideas | 1 Comment »

Human Metrics - How We Differ

By Frank | April 28, 2008

(This essay was published originally in April, 2002)

Many of you read this column to learn more about events and people at Finisar, and it is my goal to accommodate your wishes for this information. So today, I report to you on a recent management meeting at Finisar that produced some interesting results for the company, and fascinating personal insights for me individually.

In order to put this into the proper perspective, please click here to read some background material on what we were trying to accomplish when we gathered together about 30 people from Finisar’s leadership for a team building exercise. The tool we used was a personality test based on the work of Swiss psychologist and philosopher Carl Gustav Jung, a colleague of pioneering Austro-Hungarian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.

It may be more illuminating for you if you take this test yourself before reading further. This will enable you to compare yourself to some of the people here at Finisar. If you’d like to do that, please click here, then press the button that says “Do It”. This should take less than ten minutes of your time.

After you get the results, I encourage you to click on the additional links provided below to read more about your predicted personality type.

If you’re intrigued by this analysis, there is an opportunity on the same Web site to take additional tests about your suitability as an entrepreneur as well as your compatibility with a marriage partner. (Note - The first test is free, but the last two tests require a small fee charged by the people who run the site. No portion of the fee goes to Finisar or to me; moreover, I am not certain at all of the overall validity of these tests.)

To visit one additional site that provides even more details more about the Jung/Myers-Briggs personality types and relationships, please click here.

Success Takes All Kinds
The first time I completed the personality test, my score indicated that I was an ENTP. One day later, I took a similar test and it analyzed me as an INFP. So, I went from a thinking extravert to a feeling introvert in just 24 hours. From what I have read, it is not unusual to get a different type rating on successive tests. Answering just one question differently can swing your score the other way. Perhaps you’ll have the same experience if you take the test more than once.

Eighteen people in our management group at Finisar scored as ESTJ. According to the literature, this means they are extroverts, view the world through their senses (realists), like to use data and facts to reach conclusions and are inclined to judge. Eight people in our group were ENTx and one person (our HR manager) was an ENFP. So now you have some insight into some of the leaders here at Finisar.

As it turns out, it is common for successful high-tech companies to have many people with ESTJ personalities. This type of thinking pattern is required to accomplish difficult technical projects, on time and with all of the goals met. So you see, we have a boatload of people at Finisar with the right stuff.

Interestingly enough, technology companies also need some ENTx behavior types because these folks are more likely to be successful entrepreneurs. You have to be careful about having too many ENTx types, however, or chaos can result and nothing will get done. These people are less schedule-oriented and more likely to postpone decisions. They often make leaps of faith based on sparse amounts of information. But sometimes this is what it takes to get a business started.

Every company needs people who understand how things work in social communities: someone who understands people’s feelings and how relationships work. The head of HR at Finisar fits this description perfectly, thank goodness.

Behavior classifications provide a way to look at other people and understand how they are different. At some level, I believe that everyone is egocentric and this leads us to perceive that everyone thinks and behaves like we do. But this is nothing more than a convenient mental illusion. We are different and this is what makes our world so interesting.

If you have the time to get together with a few friends, family members or colleagues and take the tests referenced above, you can prove that people are very different. Unresolved personality differences can cause arguments and misunderstandings, and as you come to understand this, you can better understand the relationships in your private life as well as those within your company. You can also gain important insights into the richness and value of the cultural and behavioral tapestry that makes up our world.

Applying These Theories at Home
In addition to corporate team building, there are deeply personal ways to benefit from these analytical tests. Here are a few books on personality types, relationships and self-awareness that might interest you (once again, none of the proceeds go to Finisar or to me and it is quite possible that they may lull you into a deep sleep!).

Personality tests may be an accurate measure of past behavior, but they certainly are not to be the final word on how we act and interact going forward.

Does your present behavior conform to the way you want to live and present yourself to the world? Are there decisions you make or things you do repeatedly that you would like to change?

I am convinced that one reason my score moved from ENTP on the first day to INFP on the second day was that I spent some time thinking about how I was living my life. Many times it is likely that our current behavior may be less than desirable for those close to us, like our families. Behavior is something we can change. For me this began with some mental adjustments and those were reflected in answers on the second test.

Jung believed that everyone is part extravert and part introvert. However, most people in modern society (roughly 75 percent) are more inclined towards extraversion than introversion.

Extraverts gain energy from spending time with groups of people. In my case, I can be extravert, but there are also times when it is important to be alone to reflect and re-energize. Since 1999, when Finisar went public, there have been increasingly fewer of these moments.

Each time i have moved to a new home. I have looked carefully at the design and features the perspective home includes. One desirable feature that came up repeatedly was a generous quiet space. When the home is designed from scratch, I took extra care in the design of the first floor and especially our study. The result was a quiet room with computers and comfortable reading chairs, good lighting and warmth. We moved the only television to its own place and then insulated that room for sound isolation so that our main living space now has no TV to make noise or dominate the interactions of our family. These space changes have made it easier for us to relax and for us to recharge our mental batteries.

Thinking about the different test scores of the two different test scores, it seems possible that the manner in which we spend our time has a lot to say about our behavior and the way our personality is perceived by others. We hope our new quiet space will effect such a change.

Fair Warning and Disclaimer
I am not trained in psychology, and I’m far from being an expert on the Jung/Myers-Briggs personality tests described above, so please consider the opinions expressed in this column as those of an optical networking scientist, not a psychologist. At the same time, please explore a few of the links provided so that you might be able to learn something new about yourself and perhaps have some fun with your family and co-workers.

Topics: Personal Stories | No Comments »

My Brush with Big Time Rock & Roll

By Frank | April 25, 2008

(original essay published in January 2002)

One of my favorite stories about Finisar is how we got started in the optical module business. Today, this is our largest market segment, but it was not exactly what we planned when we started out.

It’s important to note that Finisar wasn’t started with a grand plan in mind. I was stuck in a dead end job without a future. So, I quit my job, convinced my former employer to hire me back as a consultant, and rented some space in a corrugated tin-covered Quonset hut in Menlo Park, California. Today that same building complex is the largest privately owned solar powered industrial space in California with an installed capacity of 400 KW!

Along with a few colleagues, I did consulting work for Raynet, Bellcore and then Tekna (a scuba diving company). Then in August 1990, a fellow called us up with an interesting proposition. He was the engineering director of what was essentially an intellectual property and marketing shell. The company had a clever name, Explore Technology, and that described precisely what they were doing.

Explore Technology had been awarded a patent for their ability to “burst” data from an audio or video server to a client at faster than real time rates. (Ultimately this group was able to license this technology to Microsoft and other large companies) They wanted to contract with us to do the engineering while they focused on marketing the idea. The first step was to deliver a demonstration prototype for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January 1991.

We were hungry for business so we agreed.

Creating our Technology Edge
We designed a solid-state disk drive, SCSI based, 128 MB of DRAM, which at the time cost $30,000 to build - just for the parts. The memory was dual-ported. The first port was standard SCSI and the second was a Gb/s serial data port that would drain the entire memory from the box in a couple of seconds or less. For its day, it was pretty cool.

Finisar also developed, at its own expense, a transceiver to connect the video-on-demand server to the client. This transceiver was based on CD laser technology, HotRod Gb/s chips from Gazelle (later a part of Triquint) and other chips we acquired wherever we could find them.

We were pleased that somehow it all worked.

We finished assembling the boxes over the Christmas holidays, loaded two sets of them into a rented van and drove to Las Vegas for the 1991 CES. We set them up on the show floor just across from a booth blasting music from 500-watt car stereo boom boxes. Despite the competition, our demo worked for the duration of the show. Whew!

After successfully reaching our first milestone, we continued to add functionality and features to the system for perhaps another year or so. Explore Technology changed its name to Instant Video Corp and later to Burst.com. Today, Richard Lang is still the CEO of the venture. He is also the inventor of the dual deck VCR sold by Go Video. He and his wife are interesting, creative people.

The Rock and Roll Connection
During the course of the Explore Technology project, we found out that the company was funded in part by the Irish rock band U2. That meant that Finisar was financially connected to famous Rock Stars! We laughed about this late one night while we worked feverishly to get ready for CES, but we never thought much about it until a few months later when U2 came to the Oakland Coliseum for the Zoo 2 tour. They were performing with Public Enemy and someone else very forgettable. We got a call and were told that the “lads” wanted to see our technology first hand. We were jazzed.

We invited U2 to visit us in Menlo Park, but the response came back quickly, “No thanks, no time for that, we will get you backstage passes and you can demo the system to the band before the concert.” I haggled to get some additional passes for our two older children and shortly thereafter we were off for Oakland.

I’ve been backstage at only one rock concert in my entire life. The Zoo 2 tour was a bit overwhelming. There were 20 acres of synthetic paradise brought to Oakland aboard 88 semi trucks. It became a small city set up with luxurious eating tents, massage rooms, quiet rooms, phone banks and more. We collected our “laminate” (as the passes are called) and drove our stuff into the core of this artificial village.

We were assigned a room in U2’s private area. Every once in a while someone would show up and use the private phones. We were not sure who was who. Pretty soon, we were informed “they are coming.” A few moments later, in walked Bono with Wynona Ryder, Edge and the rest of the group. Richard Lang was leading them and they talked energetically among themselves. The silky quality of each of their voices was astounding. It’s a wonder that everyone with an Irish accent is not a professional singer, it seems like a natural talent for them.

The Finisar people involved with this project included Mark Farley and Mike Santullo today partners with me at Clean Tech Circle and Greta Light (now a system engineering manager at Finisar).

At one point one of the U2 members nodded towards us and asked our escorts, “Who are the white coat fellows?” This was their term for engineers. After brief introductions, we proceeded to demonstrate the equipment and had a great time talking and laughing with them. After the demo, we ate at the meal tent and then moved out front to enjoy the concert.

The concert venue was equipped with so much more technology than our little boxes contained that we were later thankful we did our demo before the show. This way, we were able to keep our bravado high and feel good about what we had created, even in the shadow of a coliseum full of state-of-the-art gear.

The Mother of All Finisar Transceivers

Over the course of the next two years as we continued to work for Explore Technology, I would estimate that they paid Finisar more than $1 million for engineering services. We used the profits from that work to jump-start the company, pay our bills, purchase equipment and design some pretty neat technology.

The original laser module inside the video server that we built for Explore is the progenitor of most of the optical devices sold by the present-day Finisar, representing a nearly $400 million/year business.

So, if you get a chance to read this, Bono, please know that the “lads” here at Finisar are really glad we met you. And we’re very appreciative that you’ve seen fit to invest some of your resources in high technology ideas.

Topics: Personal Stories, StartUp Ideas | 2 Comments »

Radical Entrepreneurs of Social Change

By Frank | April 24, 2008

(This essay was originally published in November, 2001)

I’ve been slow to write about the events that changed the world on September 11, 2001, primarily because it was hard to find words to describe my shock and dismay. Yet, I have been reading and thinking about the words of other observers, and especially two interesting pieces published in Forbes Magazine.

One was written by a man historically recognized as having relevant opinions in the area of national defense, Casper Weinberger, Secretary of Defense during the Reagan administration. The other was written by Rich Karlgaard, the publisher of Forbes.

In my opinion, Weinberger’s column was stale and lacked some of the critical insight needed to move forward. On the other hand, Karlgaard’s was one of the few brilliant pieces on the horrific terrorist events, suggesting that we view Osama Bin Laden as a venture capitalist of mass murder and global terror. I recommend that you read Karlgaard’s article.

How Fundamentalism Seeks to Slow Progress
Although no trial has yet taken place, the evidence in the media shows that the September acts of terror were committed by radical religious fundamentalists. My observations about this are:

• Fundamentalism, in its broadest sense, is a negative reaction to changes, both perceived and real
• Fundamentalism is grounded in the belief that things were simpler, holier, and somehow better in previous times
• Fundamentalism strengthens its hold on its adherents in times of social inequity
• Fundamentalism should not be associated solely with any one religious community. Each of the world’s great religions have experienced periods of terrific technical innovation along with a natural resistance to the accompanying changes
• Reducing fundamentalism in one part of the world will not stop terrorism in other places. Religion is a fertile ground where a longing for the past and a desire for less change are easy to preach.

The terror attacks of September were precipitated by a fanatical resistance to the natural tides of scientific change. These are the same tides responsible for all human progress and social evolution, and thus the long-term prospects for the terrorists’ efforts would seem to be quite futile.

One more article to read here is by Dinesh D’Souza, who concludes (and he speaks for all of us in technology), “We are under assault because of the kind of people we are…”. You can read this article in the December 2001 issue of Red Herring Magazine. It is not published on the Web currently. Innovation creates enemies even as it solves problems in the world. D’Souza’s book The Virtue of Prosperity: Finding Values in an Age of Techno-Affluence is worth reading.

A Brief History of Scientific Innovation
Here is a brief, personal 2,000-year historical view of scientific revolutions and technological change.

The first well-documented scientific revolution occurred a little over 2,000 years ago. It began about 500 BC with the golden age of Greece, and ended with the fall of the Roman Empire around 300 AD, lasting about 800 years. Change took longer in the days before newspapers, post offices, radio, television and email. Many men contributed to the knowledge of this time but some of the giants were Aristotle, Plato, Ptolemy, Euclid and Archimedes. As in every scientific revolution, the science came first and the engineering followed. The advances were most prominent in architecture (arch based structures), weapons of war (steel), and hygiene (wider access to pure water for bathing).

The next revolution occurred between 1450 and 1650 AD. The contributors were Copernicus, Tycho, Descarte, Galileo and above them all, Newton. This time, it took only 200 years to fill in the major details. For the first time, a scientific view of the world and the strict interplay of theory and observation-verified evidence were demonstrated. This revolution was driven by “experimental scientists,” those who made careful measurements and published their findings. Mathematics, physics, astronomy, optics and chemistry were subjected to major changes in their structures during this time. Substantial engineering marvels flowed from these times and thus we call this the Industrial Revolution. The ultimate fruits of this science also included automobiles, steam ships and airplanes. Engineering results always lag behind scientific advancements so that new ideas have time to be understood and made practical.

The next scientific revolution occurred during a 50-year period between 1880 and 1930. The contributors were Einstein, Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Curie, Schrodinger, Hilbert, Hubble and Godel. Astronomy, mathematics, physics, quantum mechanics and relativity received new foundations. The engineering improvements that came from this period included nuclear reactors and atomic bombs, television and fiber optics, silicon chips and computers, vaccines and antibiotics. You can read further about any of the names above by using Wikipedia.

As we begin the year 2002, we are nearing the end of yet another scientific revolution. Its roots are less associated with famous names and more with technologies and advancements that have yet to be fully absorbed. Because we are so close to these unfolding developments, it is difficult for us to see this revolution from a broad perspective. The elements of this revolution include microbiology and the mapping of the human genome, the scale and wide pervasiveness of computing and advanced broadband networking. This period is centered around 1995 and I believe will have a total duration of 12 years or so.

The Rhythm of Scientific Innovation
Let’s look at a macro view of the four periods of scientific revolutions that I’ve discussed above. The following graph plots these four scientific periods in terms of their position in time, their overall length and the magnitude of their impact on an average human life.

You can see that the frequency of these events accelerates. The time gaps between them grow smaller and smaller. This shows how our scientific and technical infrastructure is accelerating at an exponential rate. The first two scientific revolutions are separated by 1,600 years. The next ones come in 400 years and then 100 years. The time period between revolutions is shortened by four times with each new cycle.

Also note that the length of the each period of innovative change is shorter than its predecessor by a factor of four. The Greco/Roman event is 800 years long, the science of the Renaissance spans 200 years, quantum mechanics and relativity evolve over 50 years, and the current period unfolds over a mere 12-15 years.

Notably, the impact on individual human lives grows with each new revolution.

The importance of Euclid’s geometry and the Copernican view of the solar system were not directly important to average men and women of that time. The relevance of the science of nuclear physics took only a few decades to impact many more individuals, and the impact of computing and networking has taken only a few years to enable you to instantly access and read this column via the Internet.

Please take a closer look at the graph and count the periods of scientific revolution once again. Note that there are five spikes on the chart, including two spaced very close together on the right side. This is because I believe the next event is coming in less than 20 years from now. It will last only five years and its impact will be exponentially greater than before, perhaps led by advancements in biological science rather than physics or mathematics.

The Relationships Between Science, Technology and Fear
Let’s get back to religious fundamentalism and the September 2001 attack on America.

Rapid changes in science and technological advances scare the daylights out of those who do not participate. Ironically, on September 11, the radical fundamentalists who opposed global change employed the very technology it produces to express their objections. The Internet, cell phones, world financial networks and aerospace simulation technologies were among the tools the terrorists used to make a statement our generation will never forget.

The march of science and technology cannot be halted. Its dispersal throughout the world is too broad. If you attempt to limit it here or elsewhere, it will drive on. So we had better try to make its benefits understood by as many people around the earth.

When revolutionary ideas from the previous cycle of scientific advancements produce new technologies and they become widely dispersed, those who are skilled in their use gain a substantial advantage. This is how the 911 terrorists were able to use flight simulators and jetliners as weapons, and it’s how the west uses its technical resources to dominate the world’s agenda.

We in the west can extrapolate, compute, simulate, consume, build, transport and expand economically much faster than those portions of the world where new technologies are not as widely available. The result of this is fear among those who possess fewer resources. It’s a fear that grows out of a misunderstanding of how scientific advances are possible, and a fear that something truly unfair may be happening.

Gates to Economic Prosperity
I have worked in the field of communications science and engineering for about 20 years. During this time, the communications capacity on an optical fiber has increased from about 10 Mb/s (million bits per second) to nearly 10 Tb/s (trillions bits per second). This is an increase in capability of about 1,000,000 times.

It’s possible that Finisar sold more communications bandwidth in four weeks during December 2000 than all of the communications bandwidth that the planet possessed just 10 years ago. For the record, Finisar sold about 150 Terabits (Tb/s) or 0.15 Pb/s per second of transceiver-based bandwidth in that month. Pb/s stands for Petabits (1,000,000,000,000,000 bits) per second — a word that will one day become a common part of the business world’s vocabulary.

Just 10 Mb/s of bandwidth may equal the communications capacity of the entire country of Afghanistan. How can we not expect people to fear change when the technology gap widens by such a massive amount over a short period of time?

Dynamic changes drive and underpin our lives more than in any previous generation. Change is integral not only to our culture, but also to the world economy. It used to be that economies rose and fell from fundamental fiscal causes such an excess of supply or demand. This is still true, but today the excess is measured not in goods and services, but in terms of ideas and the pace at which we embrace them. Technology drives the economy because it provides significant competitive advantages. In a larger sense, it is possible that the rate of adoption of technology gates economic prosperity.

It doesn’t matter whether those who impede the adoption of new technology do so by governmental regulation, stubborn clinging to an existing technology base in an old-line industry or through religious fundamentalism. To the extent that any of these elements limits us in ways that society would not choose, then we all suffer.

How Technology Enables Determined Individuals
Millennia ago most humans lived and worked as slaves or serfs. Lives were short and dominated by backbreaking work. The first scientific revolution came about and things changed a bit, but not very much for most people. Those closest to the changes experienced better health and longer lives.

Next came the science and eventually the technology that we call the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution. This really improved the quality of life for most humans in western culture. Everyone could now have some of the niceties that were previously reserved for royalty. Mass production meant that everyone could have underwear, flatware, personal transportation, books and newspapers, warm homes and the ability to change jobs as desired.

The revolution that came with quantum mechanics and relativity made possible the manipulation of matter at the atomic level. The result of this was that communications and transportation could be global in every sense. Cultures that have been closed for millennia must now become open or risk being relegated to third world status. Elements in Japan and China are still wrestling with this harsh fact.

Human beings have always been biological thinking machines, able to work abstractly. The computing and communications revolution now coming to an end has provided us with tools so powerful that a single human being or a small group can do the work of legions.

For example, a decade ago only government entities and their contractors owned computers that could perform billions of calculations per second, and there were regulations that limited their sale. Today these powerful systems are plentiful, widely available and low in cost (and considering how they are used to empower our intellect, perhaps we should call them human mind amplifiers). Global networks now bring much of the knowledge of mankind to anyone who is appropriately subscribed. The impact of these changes has been more than spectacular in the past five years.

The combination of super-fast programmable mind amplifiers with unlimited Internet access to all of the collected knowledge of the ages used by beings dwelling in the realm of ideas is manifesting the most radical revolution the planet has ever experienced.

This revolution makes it possible for a company like Finisar to create new technologies and disseminate them profitably to our customers at a previously unimaginable rate. Unfortunately, it also allows small cells of terrorists to learn to fly Boeing 767s on simulators, access the structure of large buildings and city maps online, and use PC-based CAD programs to simulate the structural strengths and weaknesses of buildings, bridges, dams and tunnels.

Fifty years ago the world contemplated whether atomic energy was a blessing or a curse. Leaders pondered whether splitting the atom would bring plentiful new energy sources and medical wonders, or would just help us blow ourselves up.

A large-scale effort involving thousands of people with immense resources was required to manipulate this technology. This meant that participation was limited to government states that could raise the needed sums of money and support large teams of people over long periods of time. Private individuals could not individually participate in the atomic revolution.

In the current scientific revolution, individual entrepreneurs are the driving force and small teams can be highly effective. This helps enable the success of commercial ventures, but it also means that innovation can be wielded destructively by small teams with relatively limited capital.

For example, it has been estimated that Osama bin Laden funded the activities of the September 11 terrorists with just $500,000. This horrible, immoral venture has resulted in more than $50 billion in total damages to the USA and the world at large. At an ROI of approximately 100,000 times, this makes bin Laden one of the most successful investors in history, as evil and despicable as his acts have been.

We cannot build fortresses or defensive structures that are strong or agile enough to make us safe at all times. The inventiveness and nimbleness of determined, destructive offensive forces are far greater than can be countered by any reasonable and practical defensive effort.

I hope and pray that people throughout the world will use the technology we have developed to reach out to each other and build a future based on understanding, mutual respect and fairness. Without this, the radical entrepreneurs of social change will continue to find it easy to pursue their business plans. And this will be grievously unpleasant for the rest of us.

Topics: Essays, Investing, Spiritual Threads, StartUp Ideas | No Comments »

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