In the 1970s, an engineering graduate from a university outside of Taiwan’s version of the Ivy League — National Taiwan University, National Chiao Tung University and National Tsing Hua University — would find it difficult to compete in the job market.
Multitech — the predecessor of Acer Inc (宏碁) — a pioneer in commercializing microprocessors, had 20-plus employees during the time of its start-up and founder Stan Shih (施振榮) would screen and select every job applicant himself. Those that didn’t graduate from one of the the “Ivy League” schools would not stand a chance.
It was a lucky day for Sherman Tuan (段曉雷), however, an electrical-engineering graduate from Feng Chia University, when he was interviewed on a day that Shih was out of the office.
Shih’s absence made it possible for Tuan to become the first-ever employee at Multitech that didn’t have an “Ivy League” background, he told the Taipei Times in an interview on Wednesday.
“My grade point average in university was 62, and I came from a private university. With a background like that, it was hard to land a decent job,” Tuan said when asked why he decided to start his own business — not in Taipei, but in California’s Silicon Valley.
After eight years of working in Taiwan, he was posted to the US in 1985 to help Shih expand overseas markets.
Tuan was in the US when the PC industry was starting to take shape — Microsoft Corp launched its first-ever retail version of Microsoft Windows in 1985.
Lured by the entrepreneurial spirit of garage start-ups, Tuan quit his job one year after arriving in the US and started his own company. The following 10 years weren’t easy, however.
He set up a company to retail motherboards and small computers, then switched to selling accelerator chips for Windows.
His start-ups didn’t work out and he was later asked to restructure a failing company, which was then acquired.
That was also the time that his marriage was in a crisis.
“I just stayed alive,” Tuan said when asked if he ever thought of giving up.
However, the booming Internet service provider (ISP) industry in the mid 1990s was a turning point in Tuan’s career. Tuan envisioned that as more enterprises and consumers connected to the Web, ISPs would need a link to “speak” to each other.
He was bankrupt in 1996 when he started up AboveNet Communications Inc (網上網), which offered “co-location” services to major ISPs that would allow them to transmit data on a high-speed transmission network.
He was yet to register his company name when a client called him for a formal invoice to facilitate payment in time.
“I was busy running here and there to install equipment for clients — all by myself,” he said.
He couldn’t afford a lawyer for company registration so he drove to the local authority to fill out the forms himself. When registering the company’s name, he called it “AboutNet,” but emplyees at the registration office misheard this as as “AboveNet,” which he later decided was better, so he decided to keep it.
In December 1998, AboveNet was listed on the NASDAQ with an initial public offering price of US$13 per share. The shares rose 67 percent on the first day, and soared to more than US$100 in early 1999.
The company was worth US$1.6 billion when it was acquired by Metromedia Fiber Network in June 1999.
“Get yourself ready and the opportunity will come to you when the timing is right,” 57-year-old Tuan said. “It is not real if I tell you that I understood future trends and steered my company toward that. That would be fiction. I am not that mighty. It was just that the digital convergence trend brought us the opportunity.”
Tuan thinks that TV is the ultimate battlefield for the next wave of digital convergence, which is finally taking shape thanks to cloud computing technology, and he is getting himself prepared in that area.
Telecoms, IT, media and entertainment industries are now converging digitally — with all devices to eventually be connected to TVs, and that’s why the company is riding on cloud computing to offer Internet TV solutions.
Tuan is currently the chief executive officer of 9x9Network, a provider of new media for Internet TV services, which is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and has offices in Taipei and Beijing.
He is talking to telecoms partners, PC makers and content providers in the region to market 9x9 — an Internet TV solution with 81 programs that consumers can mix and match for themselves.
The concept is similar to the video-on-demand services that users now subscribe to, but 9x9 is an open platform in which users can create their own channels and have a say on the contents they want to watch, without the hassle of punching many buttons on a remote control.
The company is ready for a soft launch of the 9x9 platform at Computex Taipei in June, and is scheduled for commercial launch globally in the first quarter of next year.
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