Employee No. 10 From Linkabit Seasickness Sends Jim Dunn Ashore and on A Voyage Through Telecom
ad the ocean voyage been any more pleasant, Jim Dunn may have missed a berth in several high-tech start-ups.
“I wanted to be an oceanographer,” said Dunn, an early employee of Linkabit Corp., a co-founder of Primary Access Corp. and now president and CEO of AirFiber, Inc., an emerging telecommunications equipment company in Rancho Bernardo.
It was the 1960s and Dunn was a student at the still-new University of California campus in San Diego. He had linked up with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography for a summer job, embarking on the research ship Thomas Washington for a three-month trip off South America.
“And I discovered I got seasick, and didn’t get over it,” Dunn said. “I stayed seasick for the entire three months.
“I realized I was going to have to find another career objective.”
That objective was simply on another part of the campus.
Dunn found himself taking courses from Irwin Jacobs, then a professor at UCSD. He found Jacobs an intriguing teacher. He found he enjoyed writing software and made information theory the emphasis of his studies. When it came time to graduate, Jacobs offered him a job at Linkabit, which had recently moved south from Los Angeles.
Employee No. 10
“I was employee No. 10,” Dunn said.
Linkabit turned out to be a place that was especially good at nurturing high-tech talent. Today roughly three dozen communications companies, including Qualcomm, Inc., can trace their heritage to Linkabit, according to a recent U.S. Small Business Administration report.
Dunn worked there 17 years. Among other things he oversaw the company’s computers and the staff that ran them. As Linkabit grew, the company expanded into roughly two dozen buildings all over Sorrento Valley and on Torrey Pines Mesa. That presented Dunn with a challenge.
He had to figure out how to connect those buildings to the company’s few computers. There were switches on the market to do that, but their makers assumed all computer users were in the same building. Dunn couldn’t find a switch that could do the job well and told his old professor that.
Jacobs turned him loose to develop his own switch. He did. The company used it in-house, then sold a few million dollars worth of the product. That led to more developments and more sales.
Linkabit created a whole product line on Dunn’s ideas, said Martha Dennis, one of his co-workers at the time.
Early Entrepreneur
“He was very entrepreneurial, way before it was OK to be entrepreneurial in a corporate environment. But he did it anyway,” said Dennis, now president and CEO of two local companies, Tabula Rasa, Inc. and WaveWare Communications, Inc.
When Linkabit split off its switch division, Dunn faced the prospect of moving with it to Texas. Dunn decided he preferred San Diego, so he left the company and stayed put.
He and five other people eventually started a company called Primary Access. It was 1988, and Southern Hills Ventures provided the start-up money. “We raised a million and a half dollars of initial financing which we used over a period of 18 months,” Dunn recalled, pausing for effect.
“That wouldn’t last 15 days (today).”
Primary Access went on to develop an integrated system for dial-up access to the Internet and other data networks. The company also introduced software-downloadable modems. Dunn held high-ranking management positions at Primary Access, and seven years into the venture, Santa Clara-based 3Com Corp. stepped in and bought the place for $170 million.
Dunn stuck around for almost two years to help with the transition, left, then felt the itch to start another company.
Busy Again
Today, three years later, Dunn is busy again. He is trying to woo telecommunications providers back to a technology they may have discounted before.
AirFiber, a privately held company that has grown to 160 people in 2 & #733; years and has its product in beta testing, supplies equipment for a high-bandwidth connection from fiber-optic networks to buildings, using laser beams. The equipment sits in cylindrical housings about the size of fireplugs.
Called OptiMesh, the system is marketed to telecommunication companies like competitive local exchange carriers and incumbent local exchange carriers.
AirFiber marketing materials show a network of such cylinders placed atop urban buildings, passing information back and forth between them on redundant pathways at 622 megabits per second.
Realizing that slow shifts in the buildings may throw the lasers out of alignment, company engineers designed the laser components to track each other and keep themselves connected. The cylinders are placed at relatively short distances from each other , a few hundred meters , to ward off fog problems.
The seemingly simple concept has thrown him a host of technical challenges, Dunn acknowledged, and one big non-technical challenge: “to convince people to try this stuff.”
‘Laser Com’
Potential customers probably had bad experiences with so-called “laser com” before, he said. AirFiber’s approach: Acknowledging past problems (such as the constant need to make adjustments) and assuring the customers AirFiber has come up with a better technology.
“A new company, new technology raises some red flags in a carrier,” Dunn added. But Nortel Networks Corp. has agreed to market the equipment, he said, which is a big boost. “Nortel lends an aura of credibility that we wouldn’t have otherwise.”
By now, AirFiber’s OptiMesh system is well-removed from the concept presented a few years ago to Bill Stensrud, one of the firm’s backers. The former Primary Access CEO is now a partner in Enterprise Partners Venture Capital and an AirFiber board member.
Dunn recalled looking over the laser communications concept in early 1998 at Stensrud’s request. Stensrud wanted his advice on the concept.
“I thought there was a good idea buried in there,” Dunn said, though he felt the technology needed some simplifying, the software needed beefing up, and the whole thing needed a new market.
Dunn brought in some associates who specialized in software, joining them with the original people who had pitched the idea to Stensrud. “Everybody seemed to get along, seemed to have sort of the same idea about where we ought to be going,” said Dunn, who became one of the company’s eight founders.
Beta Testing
Enterprise Partners and Foundation Capital funded the company in 1998. Nortel led the second round of financing.
The OptiMesh system is now undergoing beta testing in Dallas, Denver, Chicago and Washington, D.C., as well as Brussels, Belgium; Madrid, Spain; and Tokyo. The company has yet to make a sale, but that is expected in the near future, said a company spokesman.
Dunn has entered a tough business, said Dennis, who said she consults with him on business matters.
She praised Dunn’s ability to “put his nose to the grindstone,” raise money and get partners for a company. She called him down-to-earth, clear-thinking and “no pushover.”
“He always calls a spade a spade,” she said.
Tom Bernard, who was Dunn’s supervisor at Linkabit in the mid-1980s, said Dunn has good business instincts and is versatile.
Not to mention well-rounded. Bernard noted Dunn is fond of music and horses. He has three American quarter horses. He also collects artwork and photography, and has a large collection of Irish whistles.
Dunn is one of the brightest people he has ever dealt with, Bernard said, though there is a down side to that. He recalls telling Dunn that he “doesn’t suffer fools well.”
Of course, Bernard observed, a person runs into a lot of such people in the business world.
Now an AirFiber board member and president of the international business division at Leap Wireless International, Bernard said Dunn has changed.
“He’s learned to suffer fools a little better.”
