What led you to start Quantum Composers?

I spent 10 years at Hughes Aircraft back when they were doing stuff with laser range finders and target designators, and that was a great experience from a technical standpoint, but I was travelling quite a bit and I didn’t really enjoy the big corporate environment. So I quit and started my own company in my basement, designing an energy meter. I did that for a year, and I got it ready to go into production, but at that point I realized it would require a lot of money to take it to the next step, especially since energy meters were a fairly well-established technology. You couldn’t just introduce a new one and say, “Trust me.” Luckily, I managed to convince someone at Moelectron Detector (now part of Coherent) to license the technology, and it became their top-performing instrument.

At around the same time, I got an offer to help start a laser company in Bozeman, Montana. I was living in Los Angeles with young kids, and my wife and I were looking for a better environment. So we moved, and I helped start a company called Big Sky Laser, which is now owned by Quantel. I was the third employee and I saw it grow to 45 people, but then I started chafing again at having someone tell me what to do, so I started Quantum Composers. Our first product was a line of pulse generators that was less accurate, but also less expensive, than the competition. It had more features as well; for example, it had multiple channels that were fully independent, so you could set up a Q-switched laser very easily. It has been our base product ever since, although of course we have developed others as well.

Some of those product lines have been split off into separate companies. How has that worked out?

The first time we did it, it was not a great situation. We had built a system for laser ablation, helped develop the market and were just gaining a presence in it when two of my four partners, who were under some personal financial stress, decided they wanted to sell. The offer we got was quite low, but the ones who wanted to sell had slightly more sway, so they forced the sale, and our system became a very good product line for its new owners.

That taught me the importance of picking your partners wisely and making sure everyone is on the same page. The next time we sold a product line, it was a much better experience. We sold it to a major player in the market, and I actually worked for them for a couple of years. Then I arranged to buy back the Quantum Composers name and some of our other product lines, such as the pulse generators. That gave me seed stock, essentially, to re-start the company.

What other challenges have you faced?

The big thing for us in the early years was managing cash flow. We were self-funded and I didn’t have a lot of capital to start with. More recently, we have had some difficulty hiring laser technicians. Generally, we’ve been lucky with our employees; the people I hired when I started Big Sky Laser were mostly fresh out of Montana State University, which has very good mechanical engineering and physics departments, and they turned out to be excellent – I still have some of them working with me now. But otherwise, we have to convince people who trained somewhere else to come and work in Bozeman, and that can be a challenge. The final thing I’ll mention is marketing. You can spend a lot of money on marketing, but we adopted more of a guerrilla approach, doing everything we could to get our name out as cheaply as possible. That has worked well for us, but in the early days of the company, before the World Wide Web, it was definitely a challenge.

You mentioned being self-funded. Why did you go down that route?

When I was at Hughes Aircraft, all we did was government projects, and I wanted to avoid the overheads associated with those kinds of contracts. That decision, in effect, removed a major potential source of funding for us. For a lot of our early contracts, we looked not only at what money they would bring in, but also at what technology we would have to develop. At the end of the day, even if it didn’t turn into a big product for us, it would help us develop our technology base.

Your background is a mixture of physics and engineering. How has that helped you?

I did my undergraduate degree in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but I also took upper-level courses in electrical, mechanical and software engineering. In the laser world, that has been very useful, because laser problems involve a lot of interplay between thermal and electrical issues. You need to understand all those disciplines, at least at some level. I also think there is a difference in the way that physicists and engineers think. One of my employees summarized this well. He was moving house, and he had to tie up a trailer-load of stuff. Another employee, a physicist, got the ropes laced so that everything was secured, but there was only one knot at each end, so if the rope broke anywhere, the whole thing was going to fall. That’s a physicist solution – it works and it requires a minimum of rope and effort. But an engineer would look at it and say, “Hmm, you need some redundancy in your system.” So to me, having a little engineering experience, plus a physics background, is the perfect combination.

What do you know now that you wish you’d known when you started?

I think my biggest regret is what happened with our laser ablation system. If we had been able to stick with that, it potentially would have catapulted us to a new level. So the main thing I have learned is that if you identify a market like that, you have to stick with it, believe in it, and not get cold feet about the cost of getting there. Part of success is luck – being in the right place at the right time. But a lot of it is just having the nerve to stick with a product or a market even if it’s not quite there yet.

Any advice for someone starting a new optics company?

Make sure your product has a customer that’s willing to pay at least what it costs to produce it. Then, once you’ve got a few customers, be very open to what they are saying they really need, because it may be slightly different from the product you originally developed. Finally, be very aggressive in responding to those needs. I think the rest will take care of itself.