It was nearly four years ago to the day. As the Business Journal’s technology reporter, I headed out to the far reaches of the Irvine Spectrum to check out Orange County’s latest technology start-up.
I had made the same trip scores of times before. But as I made my way past the glimmering Western Digital Corp. building and what was then the sprawling campus of AST Research Inc., little did I know I was embarking on one of the biggest OC technology stories in years.
There, in what were then the hinterlands of the Spectrum, I met with Henry “Nick” Nicholas and Henry Samueli, UCLA-credentialed engineers and founders of a fledgling startup. The duo recently had left PairGain Technologies Inc. to start Broadcom Corp, which, at that time, few people had heard of.
True to themselves today, Nicholas spoke about his young products with zeal, animating with his hands as if he were on a road show pitching potential investors. He soon would be. Samueli, on the other hand, was soft-spoken with an academic’s demeanor.
As the two told me about their chips for speeding the flow of data through cable TV modems and computer networks, my chin hit the floor. I’d heard a lot of pitches, but none like this one.
After the meeting, I rushed backed to the office. “Put this on the front page,” I told Rick Reiff, who was then Business Journal editor and who this week, after a bang-up run, officially takes on the role of the executive editor.
Like any good editor, Rick was suspicious. They’re a startup, he said. They’re unproven.
So we compromised. The story ran on top of page 5. “Broadcom preparing for public offering this year,” the headline read.
That was June 10, 1996. As it turns out, I was off on the date of Broadcom’s IPO. With market conditions and all, that didn’t happen until April 1998. But what an IPO it was. The company’s shares soared 127% in their first day of trading. And Broadcom spent the latter part of 1998, almost all of 1999 and the first part of this year climbing to higher levels. Despite being hit by the recent correction in technology stocks, Broadcom was trading last week at 10 times its post-IPO level of two years ago.
Today Broadcom is widely acknowledged as OC’s marquee new economy company, the only local enterprise named to Red Herring magazine’s new listing of the “Herring 100.” That sprawling Irvine Spectrum campus once occupied by AST now is home to Broadcom. And Henry and Nick have become celebrities for their 10-figure wealth and philanthropy (and in Nick’s case, for his fast-lane lifestyle).
In hindsight, it sure looks like that 1996 story should have gone on page 1, just like a young reporter wanted it to. Still, now that I’m in Rick’s shoes, as the new editor of the Business Journal, I don’t know if I would have put the Broadcom story on the front page back then, either. But I’m lucky enough to say I was one of the first people to write about the “two Henrys.”
And it’s not just Broadcom. I also sat down with H.K Desai and profiled his QLogic Corp. back in December 1996, just as the company had turned a profit and its shares were starting to take off. And back in 1995, I wrote about how Newport Corp., then a sleepy maker of scientific instruments, was just targeting the fiber-optic telecommunications market. I also got to do scores of stories about Rockwell Semiconductor, now Conexant Systems Inc., Kingston Technology Co., Powerwave Technologies Inc. and others.
Which brings me to why I’m back at the Business Journal. For the past two and a half years, I’ve been a technology writer and editor at Investor’s Business Daily, a fast-growing national paper covering business and the stock market.
And while my work at IBD in Los Angeles was national in scope, day after day I found myself running across OC companies such as Broadcom, Conexant, Powerwave and Quest Software.
So when the opportunity came up to head the Business Journal, I couldn’t pass it up. I’m a native of OC and still make it my home.
Of course, a lot has changed while I’ve been gone. While many of the companies I wrote about a couple of years have gone onto to be leaders, others have just gone away.
Take AST Research, once OC’s top tech company and now just a historical footnote. And then there’s Techmedia Computer Systems Corp., an ambitious PC maker that’s also fallen by the wayside. But the shakeouts also are what make OC an exciting place.
And it’s not just technology that keeps this place buzzing. Check out the construction going on in Anaheim. San Clemente, once a sleepy beach town where I spent a few summers, is a homebuilding boomtown. And the bustling streets of Little Saigon and Santa Ana are full of stories about people who came here and built new lives for themselves. And while these folks aren’t as celebrated as OC’s technology leaders, they share the same entrepreneurial drive.
Look for coverage of these and other subjects in the months to come. We’ll also do our best to peg the next Broadcom long before anyone else does. In the meantime, keep turning to us for all the reporting and features you’ve become accustomed to on OC’s top companies, real estate deals and other news. It’s good to be back.
