nwasianweekly.com
Oct. 14,
2006
Tim Lee co-founded Pogo Linux while he was still in college. It is now a
$14 million company with offices as far away as Shanghai and the Silicon Valley.
Once a tech
startup, now big-time player
Entrepreneur
of the Year Awards Dinner
By May Leong
For the Northwest Asian Weekly
Building a business one customer at a time takes a lot of energy and
effort. Mix in equal parts of working up to 18 hours a day (at least
in the beginning), launching a Web site, sending out press releases,
networking, a little serendipity and the insight to move into a market
before your competitors, and you have a formula for success.
This was the recipe Tim Lee used to build Pogo Linux into a $14 million
high-tech company in seven years. Not bad for someone who used to answer
media questions from his college apartment. At the end of an interview
with the popular magazine PC World, Lee was asked what his title in the
company was. Without skipping a beat, Lee answered, “President.”
“After the article was published, our business skyrocketed. We were very lucky,” recounts Lee, the co-founder and CEO of Pogo Linux, who turns 27 in November. “It was 100 percent easier to sell. We could point to the article and leverage it to other magazines to review our product.”
Pogo Linux is a hardware vendor of servers, workstations and storage systems for customers with large archiving data needs. Its biggest clients include T-Mobile, Direct TV and NASA.
Lee started the company with Erik Logan in the late 1990s, when the dot-com industry was beginning to boom. “The scene was full of adrenaline,” Lee remembers. “We didn’t want to feel left behind. Some friends went to work for large tech companies.”
Looking back, what surprised him most was how complicated it was to acquire just one customer. Lee said, “It was like building Legos, piece by piece. We would step back, see what worked. We always kept our heads down, in survival mode.”
After five years, they opened a Shanghai office, “where the dot-com situation was happening again,” Lee said. They wanted to be at the forefront. The office now has 35 employees.
Around the same time, Lee’s mother did something that he will never forget. She acknowledged that she was finally at peace with his decision to start a company rather than work for someone else. Hearing her say that made Lee happy.
His mom must be proud to know that Pogo Linux is now working on a $3.5 million deal within the energy sector in Russia. “We were able to get this connection through our contacts in China and Singapore,” Lee explained.
He is among the nominees for the 2006 Asian American Entrepreneur of the Year Award, which will be given out Oct. 14 by the Northwest Asian Weekly Foundation.
In addition to running a multimillion-dollar company with offices in Seattle, Tukwila, the Silicon Valley and Shanghai, Lee is currently running for the 45th District seat in the state House of Representatives. The Republican candidate said he hopes to be an effective voice for the younger generation as well as the Asian American community in government.
In the past several months, Lee has attended many community meetings to listen to constituents’ concerns about property taxes, traffic and transportation. “We (residents of the Greater Seattle area) really don’t have the freedom to move about where we want. Employees show up stressed out, resulting in a lot of wasted productivity,” he believes.
Lee noted that today’s infrastructure doesn’t support a strong tech workforce for the future. He points to making math and science fun again. “We have to have that enthusiasm. Bring out more role models to show that you can still be cool and have a normal life as a professional in the sciences and math,” he said.
“While it’s hard for us to compete with foreign technology workers in terms of salaries, no other country can compete with us in the quality of technology programs. Graduates from universities in the U.S. come out with a higher level of education here,” said Lee.
Trying to address these complex issues may seem insurmountable, but Lee’s approach is to set expectations high.
“Even if you don’t meet them, at least you tried,” he said.
Visit www.pogolinux.com for more information.
May Leong can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.
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