Latigo Optics Inc.

Optical Product Business Development

Customers & Services

Intelligent Medical Systems

           Physics, Modeling, Components

John was part of the design team that created a tremendously successful Genius^TM, infrared ear thermometer for medical applications. This product shipped in the many thousands. John created a means to inexpensively but accurately calibrate the simple instrument by means of a multi-variable linear regression.  John solved a durability problem with the the infrared window by identifying and developing a source for diamond-like hard coatings for the thermometer. Among many other activities with this customer John also wrote a position paper to defend the safety of the optical coatings against competitor’s claims that the coatings contained radioactive thorium. This successful startup was acquired by Sherwood Medical.

 

Cincinnati Electronics

           Sales

A colleague at Cincinnati Electronics asked John to rep their new infrared camera in the Western States.  As an instrument designer John had always worked closely with marketing and sales but direct sales was a new experience and required learning new skills.  It worked out. We had a good run with this product and made lots of commissions. John and his new wife found themselves in search and rescue missions, peering out the big door of Fire Department Helicopters. We employed our camera to grade night time bombing and strafing runs at Nellis Air Force Base and we got involved in infrared live brain experiments at UCLA, but while we enjoyed the new experience and continue to work with marketing and sales today, straight sales is not as satisfying as business development and instrument design.

 

Lawrence Livermore National Lab

           World’s Largest Laser for Fusion Physics

LLNL is building the world’s largest laser for inertial confinement fusion experiments. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is comprised of 192 lasers, about 2 feet in diameter and each hundreds of feet long and all focused on a fusion target the size of a pin head. There were and are huge technical challenges to this massive national experiment and John’s part was small; about 9 months as a contractor. But we loved this role as much as any other. The team is brilliant, the project is fascinating and it is a key step along the path to commercial fusion power. Some of the staff realized that the operating NIF would continuously consume many of the thousands of lenses and mirrors. The huge laser power literally drives microscopic imperfections through the glass lenses as though they were bullets. John assisted the scientists at the lab with unfamiliar manufacturing acumen that they would need to operate the laser.

 

Name Withheld at Customer’s Request

           Instrument Design, Modeling, Marketing, Training, Speaking

This customer prefers to represent John as an employee (no problem here!) and so wishes to be anonymous in this list. This is Latigo’s longest run with any customer, since 1999 and continuing. For many of these years John through Latigo Optics has been captive to this start-up, billing for a monthly retainer and expenses rather than by the hour.  This company is a classic sole-proprietor startup. We make exotic microscopes for semiconductor fault isolation and in this time John and the proprietor have moved the company from a 2 man operation to now having some 20 employees located in 3 US facilities and international locations.  We now have hundreds of worldwide customer installations with well known names as Intel, Texas Instruments, Toshiba, Samsung and many prestigious international universities. The company is now a dominant force in this niche market, well known.

 

John’s role started as a consultant with the parent to this company, EDO Barnes Corporation.  Barnes announced that it intended to sell their instruments division and subsequently suffered a mass exodus of their employees who wanted local security. Barnes was watching the value of this asset plunge even as they were trying to sell it.  John had exactly the right mix of design, laboratory, marketing and management experience (and moxie) to step into many vacant roles as an instant key contributor.  After a time the manager of this division successfully negotiated a management buyout and John transitioned his contract to the new company.  This company started with 2 products and 2 principals (including John) in 1999. Now the company has a larges selection of products, indeed the largest selection of failure analysis microscopes available for this niche market.

 

Working from Latigo Optics in Malibu John has filled many successive roles for this firm which was located first in Connecticut and later in San Diego.  At first John refurbished the design of their original, dated products, and later designed altogether new products.  In time as the company added employees and skills John would identify and transition to meet new needs and the changing requirements of the growing company.  John introduced many key employees to the proprietor and has pioneered the way through new product directions as the market shifted and matured.  Throughout John has consistently been the principal outside technical spokesman for the company (the owner rarely travels).  John has presented technical seminars on behalf of this company throughout North America, East Asia and Europe. John has also trained customers in the use and underlying physics of the highly technical instruments in a large percentage of the installations. John’s education role has been so well received that the industry’s society, EDFAS, has asked John to present a 90 minute seminar each year at their national conference, and to write a chapter for their failure analysis handbook.  Within this industry John is widely recognized as an articulate expert in semiconductor failure analysis microscopy.

 

JMAR Precision Inc.

           V.P. of Engineering and Marketing

This was actually an employee role. For a year John neglected Latigo Optics to serve as the V.P. of Business Development for a $12M Chatsworth manufacturer.  The company was in a difficult transition, having lost a number of key personnel and John took the position at the request of his friend who was the departing VP. The company made precision motion stages, was well known for microscope based optical metrology instruments and had other products such as atomic force microscopes and custom instruments for circuit and read head edits.  John managed all of engineering and also managed the company’s marketing, but not sales. John served as an officer at the local company and also as a technical resource to the parent holding company and the related sister divisions.  John had about 30 people in his divisions.  It was a new and demanding role for John. The assignment just happened to coincide with the end of the tech bubble in 2000-2001 and a precipitous decline in the American economy and in particular in the semiconductor cycle. The company was in serious trouble and the employees were discouraged.  John had to manage rebuilding a demoralized staff that was no longer matched to the work at hand, hiring to fill key positions while simultaneously managing layoffs and downsizing during a downturn. This was a challenging position but ultimately very satisfying as John supported manufacturing,  introduced products and built significant trust in all levels of the company. In the end the holding company elected to shed this unit to concentrate on other core business and John returned to Latigo Optics full time. John remains on excellent terms with the former president of JMAR Precision.