A KIUEL (Cool) Institute is Born

Ken Klein, BSBMEE ’82, knows the rigors of USC’s undergraduate engineering major better than most of the echo-boomers filling today’s classrooms and lecture halls.
    
He’s been in the trenches, where he learned to work hard, set goals, and stay focused.
    
“The engineering major is tough, any way you slice it,” says the president and chief executive officer of Wind River Systems, Inc., a global leader in device software optimization (DSO). “Our undergraduates have an extremely heavy burden to shoulder during their USC years, so it’s important to support them as best we can.”

Klein sees his $8-miilion gift to establish the new Klein Institute for Undergraduate Engineering Life (KIUEL) as the way to support student engineers at a critically important time in the history of the profession. The world is producing more engineering graduates than the U.S. each year, and the competition is gaining ground.
    
“We are really on the precipice of a serious shortage of engineers,” says Klein, who earned a dual degree from USC in biomedical engineering and electrical engineering.  “I wanted to send a message of encouragement to student engineers by establishing an institute that will enrich their lives outside of the classroom and, hopefully, make things easier for them.”
    
Klein is tall and slender, with ocean-blue eyes, who jogs four miles every day and surfs when he’s in the vicinity of an acceptable surfing beach. Professionally, he’s riding the crest of a burgeoning new market in device software optimization, but that hasn’t prevented him from devoting some time to the formation of his new institute.   
    
He announced the gift in the fall of 2005 and worked closely with Viterbi School Associate Dean Louise Yates to design an overarching program to expand current student services and create an aura of community within the school.  When it opens later this year, the Klein Institute, housed next to the Admission and Student Affairs Office, will provide students with a full array of academic and social support services beyond the traditional classroom environment.

Institute’s Building Blocks

KIUEL is designed to create a more cohesive and positive experience for Viterbi School undergraduate engineering students. It is founded on the building blocks of leadership development, building community, service learning opportunities, and cross-disciplinary activities. Some of its programs are already in place in the Admission and Student Affairs Office, but they will be enhanced and expanded. Other new programs and activities are in the planning stages now and will be implemented, customized, and modified in the years ahead.

Klein’s institute is heart-felt.  He hopes to rid undergraduate engineering students of the isolation he experienced as an undergraduate with little time to do anything but study.

“I felt cut off from university life, like there was a school within a school, and that in engineering, things were a lot more difficult for us than for students in other majors,” says the surfer from Monarch Beach, Calif. ”I took some time to engage in a number of personal pursuits, like becoming captain of the USC surfing team, but the majority of my life was spent studying and working. Of course, I managed to squeeze in a USC football game from time to time.”  
    
Klein is no stranger to university life.  He is the son of a peripatetic professor, a wandering engineer who moved his family frequently to take new teaching assignments at some of the top engineering schools in the nation: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Purdue, UC Berkeley and Stanford University.     
    
“I moved every single year from the time I was born until the time I was in junior high school,” he laughs. The family finally settled in Monarch Beach, Calif., near Laguna Beach, where Klein learned to surf. But while he was still in high school, the family made one final move, this time to New Canaan, Conn., outside of New York City.

“That final experience made me realize that I really wanted to get back to Southern California, and that was a big factor in my decision to attend USC,” says Klein, who makes his home today in Atherton, Calif. “I knew I wanted to get back home and USC provided me with the home I was looking for.”

Honors at Entrance

He began as a freshman honor student in the fall of 1977 and worked part-time through a fellowship program at Hughes Aircraft Company. Midway into his biomedical engineering major, Klein got interested in very large-scale integrated circuit design and decided to begin a second major in electrical engineering. Working and studying day and night, he completed the requirements for both majors in the same amount of time it took most students to complete one major.     
“That was a formative experience,” he says modestly.  “At one point, I was taking 18 units and working 30 hours a week.  I’ve never worked harder before — or since — so it was both a very valuable and a very painful experience.”

For fun, with his limited free time, he surfed his favorite beaches along the Southern California coast, from Trestles in San Onofre to Salt Creek in Dana Point to Rincon in Ventura County.
    
Klein took a fulltime job at Hughes Aircraft Company after graduation, but was careful not to stay too long.  “If you stay in a technical job too long, you get pigeon-holed,” he says.  “I wanted to transition into the business side of engineering and took on a field application engineering position in marketing.”

Silicon Valley startups were just beginning to spring up in the mid-1980s, so Klein leap-frogged from Hughes to Daisy Systems in Mountain View, Calif., a pioneer in the electronic design automation industry.

“I was able to really experience a Silicon Valley company and it was a very exciting time,” he says.  “I grew my career at Daisy, going from a field application engineer to a sales engineer and then, finally, to a regional sales manager, so that’s when I really completed my transition from being purely technical to being more business-oriented.”

From Daisy Systems, he tried his hand at another startup company based in San Francisco: Interactive Development Environments. After a couple of years Klein joined an even smaller startup, Mercury Interactive. He saw opportunity in the business of software testing and application management. As part of Mercury’s founding team, he worked as a regional sales manager and helped to grow the fledgling company into a half-billion-dollar a year enterprise.

Climb to the Top

In 12 years at Mercury, Klein rose to chief operating officer and became a member of the company’s board of directors. He remembers the climb to the top fondly, calling it “a real home run” to be part of a business that had such an impact on industry.
    
The experience was a stepping-stone to Wind River System, Inc.  In January of 2004, Klein was recruited to jump-start Wind River, a 20-plus-year-old software applications company in need of a major overhaul.  Founded in 1981, Wind River enabled companies to develop and run and manage device software better, faster, at lower cost, and more reliably.
    
In less than two years at the helm, Klein and his management team turned Wind River into a $270-million business with approximately 40 percent of the market share in the device software optimization (DSO) industry.  That made it four times larger than the nearest competitor.   
    
“We are really at the forefront of a seminal shift in the marketplace, where software is increasingly becoming the battleground of differentiation for devices,” Klein says.  “In the next five years, there will be over 14 billion intelligent devices connected to each other in ways we can’t even imagine right now.  Software will be playing a greater role than it ever has in the past in these devices.  In a few years, DSO is projected to become a $3 billion industry.”  
 
Wind River Systems designs embedded software platforms — soup-to-nuts applications solutions — for devices as prosaic as digital video recorders, digital television sets, and set-top boxes to very exotic systems for scanners, medical equipment, satellite systems, and avionics systems.  Its longer-term aspirations are to become a one-stop shopping site for everything from operating systems to networking, management and security.

The ‘Wind River Dry Heavers’

The four-building facility sits on 275,000 square feet of prime real estate in Alameda, adjacent to the Oakland Estuary and a deep-water port. Klein jogs four-to-six miles a day along luscious grass picnic areas lining the perimeter of the property, and up the streets of Alameda, with his ‘Wind River Dry Heavers,’ a team of pretty serious runners who competed and won second place in last year’s 199-mile California Relay.
    
Among some of its recent accomplishments, Wind River Systems provided Boeing with the applications platform, or brains, of the main computer system onboard its new 787 Dreamliner aircraft.  Wind River also built the VxWorks embedded operating system that controls the main computers onboard NASA’s twin Martian rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, 60 million miles from Earth.
    
The company’s robust DSO systems are used by everybody who is anybody in the computer industry:  Cisco, Apple, Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Mitsubishi, Motorola, Sony, Samsung, Bang & Olufsen, ZTE Corp. in China, NASA, Nissan and Tektronix, to name just a few.    
    
With offices in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Wind River employs about 500 engineers around the world, “all of whom report to somebody who reports to me,” Klein says. In addition to his daily responsibilities, Klein also serves as a member of the USC Viterbi School Board of Councilors, where he adds a unique perspective to matters involving undergraduate education.
    
In occasional guest lectures on the nearby Cal and Stanford campuses, Klein tells young engineers that the life they expect to have when they graduate -- especially in the embedded software industry -- will be nothing like the reality they face once they get there. Things change too quickly in the global economy. He encourages them to broaden their horizons as undergraduates and partake of the many extracurricular activities that will give them a more well rounded view of the business of engineering.

Minors and Cross-Disciplinary Electives

“I strongly recommend that student engineers take as many electives as they can, or that they minor in a cross-disciplinary field, like economics, biology, psychology or business,” he says.  “Engineers who haven’t gained that broader experience, either through education or work, will wind up on a very narrow path for a very large portion of their careers.”
    
From a functional perspective, it’s important that engineers develop skills in sales, marketing, accounting, finance, business law, and leadership.  

“These are really important skills to master,” Klein says.  “I look at a number of these things when I hire engineers at Wind River. For example, I’m always on the lookout for engineers who are very customer oriented or who are focused on business and have some expertise in that area.”   
 
Klein’s institute — the first of its kind — promises to help Viterbi School undergraduates gain that experience with a number of programs, including mentoring, guidance counseling, tutoring, networking, study abroad, community outreach, and internship/fellowship opportunities. That’s because Klein feels strongly that homegrown talent is a commodity to be treasured.  

“My hope is that the KIUEL Institute will send a strong message to students that the university cares, that we care, that I care about undergraduate student engineers,” he says. “I want engineering students to know that there will be people in the Viterbi School who can make their undergraduate experience vibrant and enjoyable.”