Still Innovating in Networking: A10 CEO Lee Chen (Part 2)

SM: What kind of startup did you join?

LC: I went to a company that was competing with Novell. They built a local area network for storage. At the time PCs were still relatively expensive, so the idea was to allow PC users to share storage across the network. That was an era where everything was proprietary and there were very few standards, so our solution was comprehensive.

The company was an interesting experience. It went from $0 to $30 million in a very short time. They started getting ambitious and built a huge inventory. Every several years you have a recession, and we hit the rut with that inventory. The entire industry was down turning, the company had too much inventory, so additional funding was not available. That resulted in the doors being closed. After that I went to another startup.

SM: What was your role in that company?

LC: I was doing engineering. I have been in engineering most of my career to the point that even today I still handle engineering work. The company had one superstar who tended to handle everything himself. Every time he saw how others implemented things he would say it was not good enough and then re-work it himself.

SM: That is not a scalable model.

LC: No it wasn’t. If that one superstar is not available nobody knows how to handle things.

SM: What did you learn in that experience that helped you with your own startups?

LC: I learned that I really like startups. I learned a lot as well, and in this case I learned that it had to be a scalable solution. You cannot have everything in one person’s hands even though you know they can do it exceptionally well. You build a great product where everybody contributes 5-10% more. Getting others involved also keeps morale higher. If other people in the company never get the chance to work on the good stuff then they can never get into a meaningful debate or argue with you about the finer details. They are not challenged in their work.

SM: What was your experience with the second startup?

LC: The second one was a spinoff of GE building proprietary networking technologies. I realized very quickly that the company was not going to take off. It was, in my mind, a GE experiment. If the person in charge does not have focus and passion about the mission, it will never get done. You must have a good manager.

I did realize that I found networking was a very interesting area. I had been involved in it for some time by this point and most of the lessons I was learning were on the management side. Technically I was not overwhelmed. After I realized that company was not going anywhere I left it to join another company, only this time I was specifically looking for a company in the networking space. That is when I joined Convergent.

SM: What did you do at Convergent?

LC: I joined as a staff engineer. I moved very quickly to become a manager. When you go somewhere you always learn something. There I got connected with people, including Bobby Johnson. He was legendary for his temperament, but I was able to work with him very well.

SM: Was he one of the founders?

LC: He was not one of the founders but he was in charge of a lot of things. He was pretty young at the time, and he used to call himself the King of Communication. 

SM: What allows you to work with difficult personalities like that?

LC: In many ways I am like Bobby, I just control my temper better. We both have a lot of passion. We are both very insistent on what we believe. I learned a lot from Bobby.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Still Innovating in Networking: A10 CEO Lee Chen
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