US's famous immigrant entrepreneurs

Netgear founder and CEO Patrick Lo was just nine years old when he relocated to Macao with his grandparents in 1965. He left Mao Zedong's China without his parents, who had been condemned to nearly 10 years in labor camps in the mountainous province of Canton.

Lo and his grandparents later moved to Hong Kong, where he went to high school with the dream of one day studying in the US. "From very young I wanted to be an electrical engineer," says Lo. "I'd always dreamt of coming to the US for college."

And so Lo, whose family had no money, hit the books and ended up winning a full scholarship to Brown University in 1976. "Being a very poor boy, there was no hope to pay my own way," he says. Getting the scholarship to Brown "was like winning the jackpot."

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After raising $400 in a fundraiser back in Hong Kong for his plane ticket, Lo was on his way to Providence, R.I., to study electrical engineering. In a big hurry to start working, Lo fast-tracked his studies and graduated in three years instead of four.

But Lo didn't set off by himself right away, working for Hewlett-Packard as an engineer back in Hong Kong for the next 10 years. "Being a typical Chinese and having been brought up in a poor family, the first thing I thought about was how to make a living," he says. "The easiest way to do that was to join a big company as an engineer."

By 1995, Lo had done so well at Hewlett-Packard that he was tapped to lead HP's efforts to develop a Unix servers business in Japan that would rival those of IBM and Sun Microsystems. He cultivated a regional customer base, recruited Asian supply-chain partners to service the Japanese market and, in his spare time, managed to learn Japanese in six months by taking two-hour lessons every morning before work. Within three and a half years in Tokyo, Lo took HP's servers business from nothing to over $200 million.

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Lo was knee-deep in the tech boom of the late 1990s when he approached his bosses at HP about starting a new division to target the Internet. But, he says, "they thought (the Internet) was just a fad and it would go away pretty fast. I disagreed, so I quit."

Not an easy decision, but one that paid off for Lo. He found a friend in his former boss, Dominic Orr, then-senior vice president of product development at Bay Networks, which at the time was as big as giants like Cisco Systems, Cabletron and 3Com. Orr liked Lo's idea of developing cheap, fast consumer hardware for connecting to the Internet and, in 1996, agreed to help fund Netgear as a subsidiary of Bay Networks.

"The first year was just atrocious, and the second year was no better" says Lo, who liked running his own show after picking up some business tips from his time in Tokyo. "I wasn't worried about the business because I knew we were on the right path."

Lo still wasn't worried when, in Netgear's third year, Nortel Networks bought beleaguered Bay Networks, leaving Netgear by the wayside in 1998. From a contact at Nortal, he managed to develop a relationship at Pequot Capital, one of the biggest hedge funds in the world at the time, and secured some much-needed venture capital.

In 2006, Netgear celebrated its tenth anniversary. Walk into a Best Buy or Staples and you'll see any one of 100 different Netgear Ethernet, networking, broadband and wireless networking devices that help consumers and small businesses go online. Since 1999, the company has grown at a compound annual rate of 26 per cent with fiscal 2006 third-quarter revenues of $151.6 million.

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Netgear is just one of the thousands of publicly traded, immigrant-founded venture-backed companies in the US that together are worth more than $500 billion, according to a November study commissioned by the National Venture Capital Association.

The association's research found that immigrants like Patrick Lo--who make up only 11.7 per cent of the US population--have started one in four of all US public companies that have been venture-backed over the past 15 years, including Intel, Google, Yahoo!, Sun and eBay.

A similar study from Duke University showed immigrants were responsible for starting 25.3 per cent of all new, high-technology businesses in the US during the past 10 years. The greatest percentage of these entrepreneurs hailed from India (26 per cent), followed by immigrants from the UK, China and Taiwan.

As for Lo, who now lives with his family in Silicon Valley, China represents more of a business opportunity than a home.

"Coming from China, from a poor family, I had nothing to lose, and I knew I had to work hard. That's what an entrepreneur needs," Lo says of his entrepreneurial experiences in the US. "You can't worry about losing anything, and you have to work extra hard."