Still Innovating in Networking: A10 CEO Lee Chen (Part 3)

SM: What happened after Convergent?

LC: I had my own company for a while, and then Bobby called me and I joined Centillion. There we built multi-service switches. We had a token-ring offering and later we added Ethernet. We allowed people to connect all different kinds of media. The backbone was ATM, which at the time seemed to be the way the industry was moving. We were one of the first multi-service switches for ATM.

The company only lasted for 18 months before it was acquired by Bay, which was then acquired by Nortel.

SM: How much did they pay for it?

LC: They paid $145M. The company was funded by Sequoia. I don’t quite remember but I think we raised somewhere in the range of $20-$25 million. It was not a bad venture for just 18 months.

SM: What role did you play in Centillion?

LC: I was just one of the key engineers. After that I decided to do my own thing. I went to Houston to work on a project dealing with private internet for the gas and oil industry. At the time all of the bidding procedures were done over the telephone. A buyer would dial into a conference call and they could listen to the different prices. I worked to build a private Internet where they could have a site to allow everyone to compare prices and do real-time auctions. I did that for a while and then joined the Foundry team.

SM: Tell us the Foundry story.

LC: We started in March of 1996. At the time we had two choices. One was to go cable/DSL, the other was gigabit Ethernet. We decided to go with high performance gigabit Ethernet. That was the beginning of Foundry.

SM: Who was involved with the founding of Foundry besides you?

LC: Bobby Johnson, Jeff Prince and Earl Ferguson, who played a CTO role. I managed the engineering teams. Foundry was a fun journey. I actually ran the tech support there at one time as well.

SM: There was a lot of gigabit Ethernet work at the time. What did you do to position yourselves differently?

LC: We actually succeeded because of one niche area in performance. Our target market was web hosting and data centers, and because we were going during the Internet boom those happened to be areas that were really hot. We focused exclusively on the high-end space.

Another thing that separated us out was the talent of the engineering team. We gave other companies gray hair because we always came up with products faster and they were better quality. At Foundry we really delivered. We had our first product in 11 months. We did everything in house and we had a small engineering team. The first ASIC just worked.

SM: What did you do in your ASIC design process that worked so well?

LC: You have to hire top-notch talent and that is what we did. Our secret was ‘review, review, review’. It sounds easy but it is very difficult to do. We combined the hardware and software into one team and maintained an open environment. We also had Bobby Johnson’s style, which was hard-driving. He was the CEO and was very driven. He could always get more juice out of any orange.

I did not have the same style, but I was also able to get a lot of juice out as well. I managed by objective. I injected more process into it and had a lot of interdisciplinary reviews. Every engineer hates being back-stabbed. I focused on making us a forward-looking company. I didn’t care if you made a mistake or not. The review process was there to catch them. My goal was to make a better product and so I eliminated the backstabbing.

Over time our teams built a lot of trust. The right mix on a team is important. You need to mix talent because people like to learn. People can handle an awful lot of stress if you motivate them. They want to succeed and learn. People contribute while learning.

I also knew Bobby very well. I would go into his office and have one on ones, get yelled at, and in a way shield my engineering teams from it. There is trust there because I knew deep down he has a good heart. I would just tell him to let me handle it because he was the CEO and had other things to spend his energy on.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Still Innovating in Networking: A10 CEO Lee Chen
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