Broadening the Focus
Benjamin Kuo (BSEE’94)
Seven years ago, whizzing along the 101 corridor between his Thousand Oaks home and his Pasadena office for two hours a day Benjamin Kuo (BSEE ’94) began pondering the rich and largely unknown Southern California technology industry.
“I was looking to cut my commute, because my wife was expecting our first child, so I started coming up with a list of tech companies in the local area and put it up on my personal website,” says Kuo. “It was just a hobby. It sort of happened by itself.”
Others soon noticed Kuo’s website. People began emailing him with corrections and additions to his list, and he emailed them back asking for more information. Before long there was so much traffic that his Internet Service Provider booted him and Kuo had to go out and get his own domain name.
He began emailing updates, beginning with a grand total of 25 recipients. And so was born socalTECH, now a newsletter sent daily to 4700 subscribers and a website packed with news and information on Southern California’s high tech industry, pulling in 50,000 visitors a month. It grew so much, and has done so well, it is no longer a hobby. It is Kuo’s fulltime job.
“I used to read articles about companies ‘based in the Silicon Valley’ when I knew they were in Pasadena,” he says. “Five or six years ago, no one talked about Southern California tech firms and people said there’s no high tech down here. They were wrong.”
SocalTECH.com provides high-tech news about the Southland. It tracks venture-capital-backed companies and venture funding, and Kuo conducts interviews with executives, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. SocalTECH.com has become an important virtual place for tech networking in the industry, and is widely followed by the movers and shakers in Southern California’s high tech industry.
Midway through USC, Kuo remembers taking an early morning interdisciplinary class taught jointly by engineering and the USC Marshall School. It focused on entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and the whole business of starting a high tech company.
“It was a 7 a.m. class and you really had to be motivated,” he says. “But Mike Markkula, the guy who financed Apple was there. That class and one I took on patents made a big impression.”
Kuo believes engineers tend to be narrowly focused. They learn to focus on the problem at hand, analyze it and solve it. A very good skill to have, he says, but there should be more.
“Sometimes engineers need to step back and take a look at what is going on around them,” he says. “It is like Dilbert. You know the guy on the left and the guy on the right, and that’s all. Too often engineers are working long hours solving problems and aren’t talking to people. You can be running 800 miles per hour…in the wrong direction! You need to understand the market and the world beyond your own little piece.”
After graduation, and after he had been working purely as an engineer for a period including a stint developing standards for the storage industry, Kuo deliberately switched to product management and marketing. He simply wanted to get a broader view of the world. He found time to write a book Building SANs with Brocade Fabric Switches, and became a regular contributor to storage industry publications like Storage magazine.
Today, Kuo is enjoying talking to people and networking with others as he continues to grow socalTECH.
“I love what I’m doing,” he says. Now that his hobby has become his fulltime job, he has developed other hobbies, namely growing rare fruit, at least for Southern California. Growing around his home are papayas, bananas, lichees and guavas.
Kuo still lives in Thousand Oaks. He is married to Jennifer Miyasaka (BSEE ’96) whom he met at USC, and the couple has two children, a boy and a girl.
