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Entrepreneur Interview with Pete Adams, CEO of Noah Precision and SOLX

Pete Adams, of Noah Precision and SOLX, started by Pete in San Jose,CA, but company division is located in Boston,MA,USA:

Pete Adams is my cousin Debbies husband in San Jose, CA, and he started 2 businesses with others, “Noah Precision”, an employee owned company (with a large fund as an investor) that is a manufacturer of temperature control equipment to the semiconductor industry. Our customers include HP, AMD, Samsung, Texas Instruments, Lam Research, Applied Materials and similar such customers. Our smallest customer has annual revenues of "> $10,000,000,000", with "80%" of that outside the USA. Noah Precision includes a board of directors with more than 100 combined years of experiences in the semiconductor equipment industry. To reach the international market, they have distributors in more than 10 key countries. Each distributor has a relationship with our key customers that date more than 10 years. Most of the distributors that represent our products were once buyers of his products. Petes other business he cofounded 12 years ago in Boston (but while living in CA), a glaucoma surgery company in the Boston area called SOLX whose goal is to preserve vision for an aging population. SOLX is a pre-revenue company seeking FDA approval for a surgical device for treatment of glaucoma. The board of directors for SOLX includes doctors with more than 50 years of experience in the glaucoma treatment industry.

The government played no role in our start up or has provided no specific resources to accelerate our growth. However, the State government in many states has encouraged energy savings and has made a large pool of funds available to our customers who purchase energy efficient equipment. Since our temperature control equipment uses "80%" LESS energy that what we replace, there has been a large subsidy available to our customers when they purchase our equipment. Internationally, governments have also created large pools of funds to reduce energy consumption. These funds have provided for significant growth for us. Boston University hosted a competition for emerging businesses and SOLX was awarded a seat in their incubator. Boston University provided SOLX with facilities and trained staff to accelerate our growth. Boston University served as an “anchor institution” for SOLX.

The biggest challenge for Noah Precision is to fund the product development process that ensures their technology is at the leading edge for the benefit of our customers. This spending consumes over "18%" of total revenue and it continues to grow annually. The only way to stay relevant to customers in the semiconductor industry is to have the best technology and this requires investment. Choosing the right technology to invest in is always challenging. Their measure of performance is return on capital employed (ROCE). This is the only metric they care about. As small business owners, we want a significant return on our invested capital and ROCE is the best measure of performance for us. At some point, Pete will retire and finding a successor organization that will become the next measure of success for them.