Title:
President, San Diego Telecom Council; founder, Doctor Design Services; angel investor
Education:
Bachelor of science, electrical engineering, UCSD
Age:
42
Residence:
Rancho Santa Fe
Birthplace:
Bellefonte, Pa.
Family:
Wife, Laura, and an 11-year-old son, Spencer
Hobbies:
Hockey, tennis, snowboarding, surfing, building Battlebots with his son and three other father-son teams
As President of the Telecom Council, Marco Thompson Has Cut His Work Week Down to a Leisurely 70 Hours
Marco Thompson no longer works 100 hours a week.
After starting his company , a designer of high-tech devices , and building it for a decade, the UCSD-trained engineer sold the business in the mid-1990s. He relinquished management a few years later.
Today he estimates his time with Doctor Design Services (now part of Alameda-based Wind River Systems, Inc.) is down to 10 hours a week.
But it’s funny how the other 70 hours of a typical workweek can fill up.
Thompson is this year’s president of the San Diego Telecom Council. He spends the bulk of his time on the organization, he says, adding that the council feels very much like a startup company.
With the help of many volunteers, he is working to increase staff hours by a factor of five, increase a budget by a factor of four and increase events by a factor of 10. Information on council programs is available on the Web at (www.sdtelecom.org).
An important council initiative is its Telecom 1 promotional campaign, which aims to tell the world (particularly out-of-town talent) that San Diego is first in telecommunications. San Diego’s Townsend Agency has done a quarter-million dollars worth of pro bono work on the campaign, Thompson says.
Local companies need more new talent, says Thompson, adding dryly that “we can only be stealing from each other for so long. We need to be a net importer of talent to San Diego.”
By spreading the word about San Diego’s telecom scene, Thompson says he wants to boost council members’ in-house recruiting efforts by 10 percent.
From CEO To Cheerleader
Uniting 100 telecom council volunteers behind a common vision is much different from being a CEO worried about profit-and-loss figures and a bottom line, Thompson notes.
The path to both jobs included study at UCSD.
Thompson was born in Bellefonte, Pa., the son of postgraduate students at the University of Pennsylvania. His family came to San Diego while he was in his early teens.
He received an engineering degree from UCSD, graduating magna cum laude in 1979. His college days included work in the computer industry.
“I like to tell people before I started my company I was in two startups , one successful and one unsuccessful,” Thompson says.
The successful startup was Megatek, which specialized in computer graphics. Thompson saw it grow from $300,000 to $35 million over the half-decade he was there. Digital Equipment Corp. eventually bought it.
Thompson migrated with other Megatek employees to a new company called Syte Information Technology Inc. Syte made computer workstations. It also made “all the classic startup mistakes,” Thompson recalls.
‘Spent Like Drunken Sailors’
“We raised $10 million but we spent it like drunken sailors.
” There were no executive airplanes or any of that kind of silliness,” Thompson recalls, but the company had the best equipment and 115 employees at its height , with no revenue stream.
Thompson said Syte’s other problem was that it tried to solve too many complex problems at once.
“The venture capital guys have a rule that says, ‘If you’re trying to rewrite the laws of physics in more than one or two areas in a startup, you’re going to fail,'” he says. “And we were trying to rewrite the laws of physics seven or eight ways. So,” Thompson says with a pause, “it didn’t work.” He breaks out with a laugh.
When Syte closed, Thompson started Doctor Design. The idea was to run a consulting company half-time, make $50,000 a year doing it, and ski the other half of the time.
“Six months after I started the business, I had eight people working for me,” Thompson says. “So somewhere I lost the vision.”
Essentially Doctor Design is an engineering team for rent. “Hardware, software, integrated circuits, plastic, metal: Whatever (the client) needed, we would make that product happen,” Thompson says.
Speed And Variety
Speed and variety have characterized the work. While he can name exceptions, Thompson says design projects take three to six months.
“If (on) the day you start the project all the resources are lined up, and everybody agrees to what you’re building, and if you have good engineering management watching it like a hawk every day and every week,” Thompson says, “you can do just about anything in five or six months in the technology space.”
The projects have been many. Thompson’s company put together the ChoiceSeat in-seat computer consoles that were once a feature at Qualcomm Stadium. They are currently in venues like Madison Square Garden.
The DirecTV satellite television receivers were also satisfying projects for Doctor Design, Thompson recalls.
With projects coming and going quickly, he says, Thompson’s engineers had variety. They alternated among wireless phones, personal digital assistants, personal computers, networking equipment and digital television.
Thompson says 100-hour workweeks were part of his first five years at Doctor Design, “and I made everybody else work 80.” Some employees left to start their own companies.
Metamorphosis
“During that time frame I was known as a very hard guy to work for,” he recalls. His company gained a reputation for burning people out, he says, adding, “I just came to the realization that I would continue to scare off great people.
“At the end of the ’80s we had a complete culture change in the company. (Nowadays) we try to encourage people to have a life.”
Thompson has indeed made the company family-friendly, said Susan Naire, who served as the first human resources manager for Doctor Design, and now does the same thing for Wind River. She said by the mid-1990s, when she came on at Doctor Design, turnover was low.
Thompson has been especially good to interns from UCSD, she added, noting he would put them on design teams rather than give them “grunt work.”
Mentoring is part of Thompson’s philosophy. It’s one of seven “service mantras” Thompson and his employees devised more than a decade ago.
Another mantra is, “confess early, confess often.”
Naire explains: Since time is short, you had better be up-front with the boss about problems. To make the “confess early, confess often” concept work, though, Thompson had work to do as well. He had to maintain an environment where a worker could admit a problem without being “pounded over the head.”
Thompson sold his company to Integrated Systems, Inc. in 1996. After the sale, Thompson stayed on to run it for about three years, increasing sales from $10 million to $30 million.
The Doctor Design name was revived in 1999, and another merger brought the company under Wind River Systems in 2000.
Telecom Investments
Today, on top of the 60 hours he puts in at the Telecom Council, Thompson invests in telecom companies. He estimates he spends another 10 hours on various boards. He is chairman of the board of a San Diego startup, Xsilogy, Inc., which provides technology for monitoring industrial processes wirelessly.
He lives in Rancho Santa Fe with his wife, Laura, and 11-year-old son, Spencer. He and his son get together with three other father-son teams to build Battlebots robots.
He also is captain of Team Buzzsaw, a hockey team that plays three times a week. Thompson is learning to surf, and he enjoys tennis and snowboarding.
As for his time at Wind River’s Doctor Design Services? Thompson says he does what he chooses.
“I like to work with projects as they begin, to help Wind River’s customers see the big picture. Ask the what-if questions: What if we added this feature, what if we put this piece of software in it, what if we put that circuitry into a custom chip, what if we used a different microprocessor, a different memory architecture? So I like to get involved at the blue sky phase.
“And then I get involved in the design review phase.”
All in 10 hours a week.
“It’s a great job,” Thompson says, “if you can get it.”
