I Get a Mentor
I loved working for Rob and other bosses safely seven time zones away in Long Island. But I did have one not-so-distant manager watching out for me, the bureau chief of EE Times in Japan who got tasked with managing Alan and I.
At well over six feet, Dave Lammers stood above the crowd of Japanese executives he wrote about. In other ways, he blended right into Tokyo’s culture of dark-suited, well-mannered salarymen who worked long hours and drank too much.
Dave spoke passable Japanese and wrote a column called Yakitori, named for the beef skewers salarymen ate on late evenings after work when they gathered for gossip and beer. The column was a must-read for anyone who wanted to understand the hearts and minds of electronic engineers and tech managers in Tokyo.
With a Minolta camera perpetually hanging from his neck, Dave helped put EE Times on the map with world-class coverage of the US/Japan semiconductor trade wars. He even developed his own pictures in the bathroom of the Tokyo apartment he shared with his Japanese wife and an American-sized family.
Though he worked long hours, Dave considered himself lucky. He was struggling to make ends meet as a reporter for the Associated Press when an EE Times publisher bought him a flight to New York to interview for a job at CMP, a family-owned company founded by Gerry and Lilo Leeds, who fled Nazi Germany as young people in the late 1930s.
“Lilo asked me to type up what I needed for a Tokyo bureau, how much it would cost and my salary expectations,” Dave later recalled. “She was surprised it didn’t cost more, but I had lowballed the expenses because I didn’t know if they were committed to the project.”
It was a good investment. EE Times started raking in weekly ads at $10,000+ per page from Japan’s giant electronics companies who like the Leeds family were eager to expand their markets. The windfall was shared generously with Dave.
“When my kids needed to start school, they paid for them to go to the American school without batting an eye,” he said.
Dave had a reputation for his long walks and extended phone calls. When I first met him, we went on an extended walkabout in Tokyo. He had a therapist’s way of gently probing you with personal questions as if he had all the time in the world to talk. Though it sometimes made me feel uncomfortable – I was more used to doing the interviewing -- I took it as genuine curiosity about a colleague he was responsible for, and also a useful technique to get better stories.
Eventually, Dave became not so much a boss as a mentor, someone who watched after me, made suggestions and provided a sounding board about the rest of this far-flung EE Times crew I was now part of. His long talks were not always welcome. My heart sank when, just as I was about to leave my office in Wan Chai at the end of a long day, Dave would call to check in.
As with most good mentors, I mostly learned from watching Dave’s example. Not only did he invest time in trying to get to know the people around him, he spent time getting to know the technology. Dave was not an electrical engineer, but he had developed a deep understanding of semiconductors. He could explain how an EPROM is different from a DRAM or SRAM. He knew a lot about transistors, the foundation for everything in electronics. He understood how these basic on/off switches packed inside chips were being made and how the methods were evolving with each new generation of semiconductor process technology. That’s typically where the rubber meets the road in chip technology.
Dave knew the companies, too. And not just Japan’s giant conglomerates. Dave pioneered EE Times’ coverage of Korea, getting to know execs at Samsung and LG who read and respected his coverage of their rivals in Japan. Occasionally, he traveled to Taiwan and knew folks in the many smaller chip companies there with strange names like Vitelic and Hualon. An early interview there with Morris Chang put EE Times on the map for people at TSMC.
Somewhere along the way, Dave got infused with the EE Times’ philosophy of covering techno-business. We aimed to put the evolution of the technology into the context of the competing agendas of the companies trying to steer it to their own advantage—and the strong egos often driving those companies.
Thanks to Dave, Rob and a crew of a couple dozen other colleagues I had yet to meet face-to-face, I came to see how PCs, the telephone system, satellite communications, cars, airplanes, TVs, missiles, ATM machines – so much of our modern lives depended on the deep intricacies of how chips are built by engineers often working in relative obscurity at companies whose marketing and corporate managers were the public-facing celebrities. I came to share the pride the EE Times team felt in covering the real story of this generally overlooked population of inventors.
A Tech Reporter’s Notebook
Because semiconductors are so complex, yet so fundamental to society, the factories called fabs where they are built are the subject of major stories. In those days, new fabs required investments of tens of millions of dollars. Today it’s more like tens of billions. So, they’re big business events, too.
In my first few weeks at EWN, I missed the biggest fab story of my time on the publication.
The Singapore government struck a deal with Texas Instruments, Hewlett-Packard and Canon to build a state-of-the-art fab that would be the largest in Southeast Asia. Given our bi-weekly cadence, we didn’t publish our first story on it until eleven days after the news broke. Old news, the worst sin in newspapering!
Scrambling to make up for this loss, I tried to break a story about a hot tip I had: A new CEO had just been hired by Singapore’s second largest fab. Klaus Wiemer, a former TSMC exec, would head up Chartered Semiconductor. I didn’t know a thing about Weimer or Chartered, but it was a scoop. I managed to get the new CEOs home number and called him immediately. I didn’t stop to check his time zone.
“Hello?”
“Is this Klaus Wiemer?”
“Yes”
“Klaus, this is Rick Merritt, a reporter for Electronic World News in Hong Kong. I understand you are about to become CEO of Chartered Semiconductor. Is that correct?”
“Yes, but do you know what time it is? It’s 3 a.m.!”
It was one of my shortest interviews, but he did answer a few more questions. And every time he saw me after that, he would always remark how I was the reporter that called him in the middle of the night. I was chagrin, but I got a byline on page 1.
I pursued with similar zeal a lead that the Shenzhen Electronics Group aka Chinatron -- a recently formed group trying to nudge the sleeping city toward commercial success in high tech -- was trying to put together a deal with SGS-Thompson in Europe and VLSI Technology in the US to build a fab near Hong Kong. I suspect the sources in China were passing me information in hopes of motivating their probably reluctant Western partners. The deal never happened, but I had a couple highly speculative front-page stories.
Lacking Dave’s deep understanding of semiconductors, I felt more comfortable covering PCs. One of the big trends was the rise of PDAs, the personal digital assistants envisioned by then Apple CEO John Sculley.
One
of my big breaks came from Waleed Hanafi, a telecom exec in Hong Kong who was a
big gadget lover. I met him at a cocktail reception, and we got to talking about
the various devices in the news. Hanafi couldn’t contain his
enthusiasm for one he was testing for a hot startup in the U.S. called General
Magic.
Like the name suggested, General Magic had a mystique. It was a spinout of Apple with support from other top drawer companies including Sony. While the company name was out there, little was known about what it was up to. I managed to get from Hanafi a tiny sliver of what the device was like and its current status. It was enough to get another front-page byline—and an invitation to a pre-launch event at General Magic’s office in Silicon Valley where I would meet a handful of seasoned Apple designers including Andy Hertzfeld who helped create the original Macintosh interface and a fat kid in cargo shorts working on the electronics by the name of Tony Fadell.
The General Magic device was a first crude take at what was to become e-commerce. It was big, heavy and slow. And it lacked links to the wealth of businesses we now take for granted on today’s open internet. In those days, the World Wide Web was only an idea, and only as few companies had a digital presence on any sort of online network.
Unfortunately, another technology was taking hold – voice mail. I got my best stories by cold calling people in the know and prying out of them some sort of news scoop however small. Suddenly, it seemed like everyone was on voice mail. You could leave a message asking for a call back, but that removed the element of surprise I used to get the source excited and talking about something they, on reflection, should not talk about. Worse yet, some folks just forwarded their voice mail to the PR department. I hated voice mail.
If I was going to get scoops I needed to meet people face-to-face. Hong Kong rarely hosted events that brought out electrical engineers or systems designers. Those were more typical of Tokyo and Taipei. As working the phone got harder, I envied Dave and Alan who lived in hubs of the global semiconductor industry.
After EWN folded and Alan and I became EE Times reporters, I got my first taste of tech reporting in America. I was invited as the de facto PC guy to come to Comdex, the mega microcomputer show of those days. Like today’s CES, Comdex was spread across a dozen hotels and a massive exhibition hall in Las Vegas. It was exhausting and overwhelming, but I was doggedly determined to make my name there.
My big break came with an assignment to cover a press conference hosted by Al Shugart, the CEO of Seagate, the leading hard disk drive maker, and Eli Harari, the founder of a relatively new company, SanDisk, making flash memory chips. It was clear that disk drives and flash chips would compete as storage in mobile computers, but which would win and how and when would remain unclear for years.
I
wrote a competent story that led off the EET business section. Word got
back through my hotel roommate and colleague, Brian Fuller, that I had spent a
good part of the night typing it out on the toilet so as not to wake Brian. More
importantly, Harari, an inventor of flash technology, remained a contact
throughout my career, someone I’d bump into in the hallways of tech conferences
and ask about the news of the day or some aspect of the technology that
befuddled me. He was always happy to take a few minutes to get me up to speed,
though the combination of his accent and his depth of technical understanding
sometimes left me still confused.
Next: Leaving My PersonalOz
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