SM: When you look around today, around us here in the Valley, are you involved in any of these clean tech / energy companies? PC: I have some friends who are involved in the clean tech, and that is interesting. I love and follow carefully the development of clean energy, or cleaning up dirty energy
SM: You were dealing with this constantly at Raychem, right? You were bringing new products to market, you identified the markets well, but how did you bridge the technology development and the market? Take for example the first five products you mentioned; three worked and two failed – over the larger scope of Raychem what
SM: Can you walk me through the process behind the thinking? Was it the problem regarding the weight of the wire which came first, or did you have a technical solution first? PC: You have to know the market, and I knew the market. I knew that if we could make a light weight wire
Now that we have a bit of background about Raychem’s history, we can begin the conversation with Paul on the philosophy and mechanics of building the company, and what we can learn from it. SM: To get started, I would like to ask you to share some thoughts about your philosophy, and perhaps give some
[This part of the story is written by Paul Cook] Our first crisis occurred in September when the “tube” of our GE EBG burned out. Halperin got the job of getting a new tube fast so that our manufacturing could continue. The new tube didn’t work nor the one after that nor the one after
[This part of the story is written by Paul Cook himself] Late in 1956, I rented a building in Redwood City, bought some used office furniture and arranged to acquire the world’s first commercial electron beam generator from the General Electric Company. I moved in on New Year’s Day 1957. I hired a handful of
Paul Cook is a legend. I had the great honor to spend some time with Paul over the last few weeks, understanding the story of how he built Raychem from scratch. Today, Silicon Valley has embarked on yet another evolution in its history, and has been consistently committing huge chunks of capital on a genre
I did some digging into the various business and financial media sites last night, and here are some stats. Alexa Ranks: (Yahoo! Finance and MSN Money are not included in this list, because I cannot find Alexa ranks for them.) * CNNMoney.com: 76 * Forbes.com 483 * Marketwatch.com 1,032 * WSJ.com: 1,043 * Businessweek.com 1,310