These articles by Barbara Fox and Kathleen McGinn Spring were published in U.S. 1 Newspaper on February 5 and 19, 1997. Minor editorial corrections corrections have been made.
Foreboding brick walls jut right up to the sidewalk along Jersey Avenue as you head toward New Brunswick. If you don't slow down, you'll miss the entrance -- two narrow archways separated by a dividing wall. Make a quick right turn, into the courtyard, and you're at 100 Jersey Avenue.
The courtyard presents a gritty view: Funky is the kindest description for it. Two city blocks away is the Amtrak railroad fence. Surrounding the huge parking lot on the other three sides are tall buildings, divided into sections, each with a regular door and a garage door. Everything in the middle is asphalt, dotted with scrubby pines, and looming four stories tall is the rusty water tower. Greeting all comers on the big marquee are haphazardly colored signs of the companies that inhabit the plant, the relic of an earlier industrial age.
In its heyday, workers at 100 Jersey Avenue were making technologically advanced products, and the same is still true. Then, the product was motorcars, and now it is science. Here at a the Rutgers Graduate School of Business Small Business Development Center incubator, one of several in the state that is co-sponsored by the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology, scientists and engineers are working to realize their ingenious dreams. Today the incubator is holding an open house, so it's an opportunity to meet the inventors and glimpse their labs.
The facade is dour, but the actual threshold of the incubator is inviting -- glass doors leading to an entry way, with a glass-walled office for Randy Harmon, the incubator manager, on the left, and an office for the help desk manager, Louis Gaburo, on the right. At the counter, sorting out name tags for the party, is Alma Hunte. It's her voice you hear when you call the Technology Help Desk, the hotline that dispenses all sorts of information useful for inventors and entrepreneurs.
The omniscient Hunte greases the wheels that makes things happen. As it turns out, her job marks a return to her roots -- she has a connection to this place from way back. "My sister told me that my father used to work here," says Hunte, "back in the '50s when it used to be Mack Truck."
This complex is now known as "the former Mack Truck foundry," but at the turn of the century, 100 Jersey Avenue had been used by Simplex Automobile Company to manufacture automobile chassis. During World War I automobiles were displaced by Wright-Martin Aircraft Corporation, which manufactured aircraft engines. In 1919 Mack Truck bought the property for $8 million and used the foundry to produce parts and to do chemical and metallurgical tests.
Vineyard Productions, the landlord since 1994, has filled more than half of the 250,000 square-foot complex with firms that value price more than prestige. Among the tenants are manufacturers of forklift trucks, plastic bags, leather goods, and coin machines -- plus, of course, this state-run incubator, which has 16,500 square-feet on three floors.
Jeff Milanette, a Naval Academy graduate (Class of 1972) with an MBA from George Washington University, set up the incubator in 1989 and administered it until mid-1995. Milanette is now a consultant with Innovative Partners Inc. (908-789-3424), works with the New Jersey Entrepreneurs Network, and is chief financial officer for the Venture Information Network for Entrepreneurs, the Web site for small business that is based at 245 Nassau (609-279-0777).
"Where my office sat was a garage with standing water and some cinder blocks," says Milanette. "The building had been used to make engines, and the back door opened onto a siding, where they loaded the engines onto flatcars. The place had been empty for 8 or 10 years, and there was a great deal of trash to be cleaned out of there. We made that building into a usable, fairly decent industrial facility," says Milanette. Then it was only 10 percent occupied.
It was hard to heat and noisy, he says, "But people got used to the fact that they hear the trains. After three days you don't notice."
During this transformation of a sow's ear to a leather purse, Milanette did some consulting for an incubator in a Polish harbor town: "The odd thing was that their 1903 factory building looked just like the one we had. The incubator managers had exactly the same kind of problems and were handling them pretty much the same way I was." The solution -- build as you have the money and tenants will eventually come."
"It was quite a learning experience," says Milanette. "It proved to me you can make some very good things out of not very much, that you can take paint and studs and wallboard and make some fairly decent office space out of a rundown place, as long as you can put up with it during the transition."
Now the interior looks like any mid-scale office building. Though the incubator is festively decorated and tables set up in the two-story lobby are loaded with food, the party has not started. The denizens are still in their labs. So Randy Harmon gives the grand tour, going first to the third floor, a 7,000-foot space where 400 to 500-square foot offices and labs are being constructed.
Harmon had been in charge of the Technology Help Desk (800-432-1832), a centralized telephone and electronic gateway to information, assistance, and resources that can help New Jersey's small businesses and entrepreneurs find answers to their managerial, technological, and financial problems and questions. After Milanette left the Help Desk was moved to 100 Jersey Avenue, where it is managed by Louis Gaburo. Harmon is the technology director and site administrator. A Cornell graduate (Class of 1975) Harmon has an MBA from Rutgers.
Harmon shows off the third floor. Four tenants have been signed here and will move in mid February. The newcomers include Polytherapeutics, headed by Kishore Shah, who works on novel topical drug delivery systems; and Specialty Assays, founded by Richard Kaufman, who works on in vitro diagnostic reagents. "We expect there will be space for a dozen new tenants and a new conference room," says Harmon.
Working his way down through the building, Harmon passes the luridly colored horizon-expanding beach-scene murals, "donated" by the Visual Arts League along with a rotating collection of standing sculptures and smaller paintings.
The first stop: at T/MAC Inc. run by the genial Ted Marks and Marvin Wurtzelman (see accompanying story). Then Leonard Hillis, the marketing director of High Power Devices, ushers us into the assembly area and then the clean room where laser diodes are manufactured for such purposes as medical, atmospheric monitoring, and military applications.
Every one of these labs and offices is a jumble of computers, books, and electrical or chemical equipment, most in the state of disarray that indicates strenuous work is in progress. Each has an intriguing story.
Running through all this technological buzz are the threads of family ties. Yes, the incubator tenants get to be "like family" but this place has lots of what would be called, in the retail trade, "mom and pop shops."
For instance Steve Wilson's wife, Susan, a technical writer and author, is the executive vice president of the Sphere Biosystems. For Princeton Simulations, founded by David Wertz, Wertz's wife Fausta is an administrator (U.S. 1, June 19 and November 6, 1996). Gunter and Carolyn Beck jointly work on high performance multifunction fax, scanner, and printer combinations for C&G Technologies.
The party is by now in full swing and most of the board members have arrived. Board members? The incubator calls on the resources of an advisory board of experts in various fields: Bob Frawley, an attorney with Smith Stratton; Skip Braun, an Arthur Andersen consultant, and Susan Caputo of Technology Management & Funding LP.
Even those who generally keep their noses to the grindstone are ready now to stop, eat, and schmooze. When the Amtrak train rumbles on the tracks by just a few yards away, no one even looks up.
by Barbara Fox
This story by Kathleen McGinn Spring was printed in U.S. 1 Newspaper on February 5, 1997.
Sanjiv Nathwani, along with a friend, Daniel Kirchheimer, started Trilon Inc., a specialty software company, in his apartment. It was a classic start-up he says, "Two cats, two guys and lots of Coke."
That was back in 1991, after Nathwani, a 1988 University of Pennsylvania graduate who majored in computer science and medieval literature, had a casual conversation at a wedding with an executive from a structural engineering firm who had a problem. Nathwani, who was working on Wall Street, advising financial powerhouses like Morgan Stanley on computer issues, chatted casually with the engineer about the difficulty of making the mountains of documents which detail the history of every bridge readily available to anyone with a PC. Knowing about Nathwani's computer expertise, the executive wondered if he might be able to come up with a solution.
Nathwani, whose great joy is creating practical uses for technology, decided to try. At the same time, he decided to start a business to address the problem. Breaking away as an entrepreneur posed no problem. Nathwani grew up all over the world, the son of a globe-trotting businessman. "I saw the Mona Lisa when I was six. Played in Tivoli Gardens. Lived in East Africa and Asia," he says.
These experiences gave him a broad prospective, but it was his mother's unexpected success as an entrepreneur that gave him the confidence to start a business. "She's an artist," Nathwani says of his mother. "She started going to nursing homes to teach the patients how to paint," he recounts, explaining that, at first, this was simply an attempt to bring meaning into the lives of people with few outlets. Soon, however, his mother's volunteer activities took on a life of their own, blossoming into a successful consulting business. "She works from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. She has 250 clients, nursing homes all over Connecticut," Nathwani says of his mother, who, he marvels, didn't begin to work until she was well into her 40s. "If she can do it, I can," he recalls thinking when he decided to start his own business.
But like most new business owners, Nathwani knew he needed help. Researching business incubators, he chose Rutgers because it appeared to him that it was the most attractive and best organized, and also because of its close affiliation with Rutgers University. Another plus was the presence of incubator director Randy Harmon whose advice, he says, has been invaluable.
In Trilon's case, the great need was not so much for space, but for business expertise. Trilon is "100 percent a telecommuting company," which is important to Nathwani who says anything less would be somewhat hypocritical. Selling the benefits of technology, Trilon works through technology. "We all have laptops, Sky pagers, cell phones, " Nathwani says, patting his belt and pockets to point out where some of these devices reside. Employees, which now number 14 -- seven full time and seven more part time -- up from three when Trilon moved into the incubator in 1993, live all over and work when they please.
"We have one guy who gets up at 2 p.m. and works all night," says Nathwani, who lives near Lincoln Center and commutes to Jersey Avenue about twice a week.
While Trilon doesn't need a lot of space, Nathwani says the presence of Alma Hunte, the incubator's pleasant receptionist, has been a great help, as have such office staples as the photocopier and conference room. "It cuts down on infrastructure," Nathwani points out, allowing his business to keep operating costs low.
All to the good, but where the incubator is invaluable, Nathwani stresses, is in the information it provides. "Financing, government organized activities, business resources, information seminars," Nathwani says, ticking off some of the resources Trilon needs, but "never would have heard of," had it not been for the incubator.
Trilon used all of these aids in getting started and now, with several successful products under its belt and a change in direction in the offing, it is again turning to Harmon for help in growing to the next level.
For its first two years, Trilon was strictly R&D as it grappled with the bridge problem. The solution: Hardware and software record and compress all the data on a bridge -- including the photographs, videos, hand-written notes, oversized drawings, inspection reports, and more -- and put them on a computer screen in a form that is easy for anyone to use.
Highway departments in 12 states, including Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and the New Jersey Turnpike Authority, have purchased the tool, which comes with training and a $400,000 price tag. It is "beyond leading edge," claims Nathwani, saying that Trilon has no competitors in this arena. The potential for the system, called IBIIS (integrated bridge inspection information system), is roughly $1 billion in the United States alone, Nathwani says, adding that there also has been considerable interest from abroad.
Going into its fourth year as a tenant in the Rutgers incubator, Trilon has developed two other products, both related to bridge inspection. One, IBIIS On Site, gives field inspectors instant on-site access to historical data on each bridge. The other, Trilon's most commercially successful product, is IBIIS On Hand, a pen based, hand-held device that allows bridge inspectors to enter data easily in the field, doing away with the need for paper reports.
With these products on the market, Nathwani believed it was time for Trilon to decide where to go next. The young company could concentrate on expanding sales of the IBIIS family of products, apply the IBIIS concept to another industry, perhaps housing, or go in another direction. "What do we do best?" is the key question, Nathwani says. "What is the best use of our energies?"
The answer was commercializing technology, Nathwani reports. He is anxious to be a "first player," copying no one, finding entirely novel ways to use the new tools of the information age. Choosing a target area for Trilon's upcoming R & D efforts was easy. "Where is everyone putting money?" Nathwani asks. The Internet, of course.
So Trilon is about to move in a new direction, concentrating its creative talent on coming up with an answer to a problem even more difficult than that posed by the need for bridge inspectors to gain easy access to thousands of odd-sized documents once stored in dusty cellars. A problem every man, woman and child who has been lost for hours on Internet access roads has encountered. How can users find the needle they seek on the Internet without first digging through ever growing skyscrapers of hay? Ah, that is the question, and it's a good bet that if Trilon is the first with an answer, it will be able to provide the Rutgers incubator with a repaved parking lot, and maybe an indoor lap pool as well.
This letter to the editor was published in U.S. 1 Newspaper on February 26, 1997.
I WANTED TO congratulate you on extremely well written articles on the New Brunswick Business Innovation Center (BIC) and Trilon, Inc. (February 15). I believe it is important to let people know of the valuable service being performed by SBDC sponsored incubators and the BIC.
I commend the reporter for effectively communicating a very complex technology and business plan in terms that everyone can understand. I would like to offer some minor clarifications:
The potential for Trilon's IBIIS technology is estimated to be $1 billion internationally for its use in the management of bridge and other structures (signage, buildings, tunnels, etc.).
Trilon's clients include 12 bridge agencies nationally, including the Rhode Island Department of Transportation, Massachusetts Highway Department, New York State Department of Transportation (Region 10), Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, Maryland Department of Transportation, Michigan Department of Transportation, Illinois Department of Transportation, Minnesota Department of Transportation, New Jersey Turnpike Authority, Federal Highway Administration - Western Federal Lands, Eastern Federal Lands, Rhode Island. With the exception of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the Maryland Department of Transportation (prototype research projects), all clients use some combination of the IBIIS, IBIIS On Site and Inspection On Hand products. The average cost of a base IBIIS installation is $400,000.
At its largest size, Trilon has employed 14 people, including consultants and part timers.
Sanjiv Nathwani
President/CEO, Trilon
Trilon, Inc.
This story by Kathleen McGinn Spring was printed in U.S. 1 Newspaper on February 5, 1997. Marvin Wurtzelman was in his car some six years ago when a PSE&G advertisement came on the radio trumpeting New Jersey's resolve to keep small business in the state. "It was, you know, `New Jersey and you perfect together,'" says Ted Marks, then Wurtzelman's co-worker and now his business partner in T/MAC Inc., a manufacturer and repairer of microwave power amplifiers. Wurtzelman, responding to the advertisement, sent for information, which happened to include literature on the Rutgers incubator.
For Wurtzelman and Marks, electrical engineers a few years shy of their 50th birthdays, information on the incubator was a lifeline. The two had just learned that the jobs they had held -- very happily -- for nearly 20 years were about to go away, leaving them at a juncture in their careers that neither had expected to face.
Growing up in the outer boroughs of New York City, Wurtzelman and Marks both came from families whose goal for them, in Wurtzelman's words, was "Go to college, get a career, not have uncertainty." While others might have chafed, both men hewed to this course with nary a second thought. "If there hadn't been this craziness in the 1980s and 1990s, we would still be there," Wurtzelman said of the waves of mergers and downsizings. Ultimately the craziness made its way into the formerly stable world of electrical engineering, forcing the two to reassess what they had once assumed to be unalterable, ever upward career paths.
Sizing things up, the pair, who really do speak as one, felt "If we get some other job, someone will just tap us on the shoulder and say `Out.'" For engineers with specialized knowledge, they decided, job security and upward mobility within a corporation were things of the past. Better to create their own security, they reluctantly concluded.
They left Microwave Semiconductor (formerly a division of Siemens, then owned by SGS Thomson) before the axe could fall, even though each has two children, and neither is comfortable with debt. "If I had a $1,500 credit card bill, that was a lot," Wurtzelman says. Huddling in Marks' basement, drawing up a 60-page business plan, the pair maxed out as many credit cards as they could get their hands on -- raising, they say, hundred of thousands of dollars "by going from one card to another."
They believed they had no other choice. "The banks wouldn't touch us," Wurtzelman says, still smarting from the treatment he and Marks were given despite their detailed business plan, industry contacts and 40 years combined experience in the field in which they sought to start a business. No track record, no money was the banks' attitude, and the bankers they saw were none too friendly.
Speaking of the treatment they received seeking seed money, both Wurtzelman and Marks grow uncharacteristically glum. Their good cheer and easy smiles momentarily disappear, but they brighten quickly. They learned a lesson on the importance of treating people well after being treated shabbily by the banks, they say, and both speak passionately about their commitment to treating their employees with fairness and generosity. "If their children or husbands or fathers are sick, that's where they need to be," Wurtzelman proclaims, while Marks speaks with evident pleasure of surprising T/MAC's employees with two extra weeks pay last summer before the firm's annual two-week paid vacation.
If T/MAC got short shrift from the banks, it received just the opposite treatment from the Rutgers incubator, which provided a 500-square foot space with all the office basics the two needed to try their wings. "Our rent was $450 a month, all we could afford," Marks says.
"We couldn't have gotten started without the incubator," Marks says. Just four years after it began, the enterprise provides a good living for eight families and a fair amount of business for a number of independent contractors. "It had bathrooms, a fax machine, copiers," Marks says of the physical trappings of an office that were all important to the business, which didn't need flashy surroundings but did need a place to greet clients and space in which to design, assemble and repair microwave amplifiers, whose size ranges from four inches by four inches up to the size of a hefty dictionary.
T/MAC's niche is narrow. The manufacture and repair of microwave power amplifiers, most commonly used to boost the strength of signals in radar, communications and sophisticated medical devices, is a service that only a few, very large players are looking to buy. And the number of potential clients is dwindling. "They're all Lockheed Martin now," Wurtzelman says, only half-joking, of an industry where a series of rapid mergers has created behemoth conglomerates. This makes marketing much easier than it would be for a consumer product for which there might be millions of potential buyers.
T/MAC's business is all custom. There is no piece of equipment on Earth with "T/MAC" stamped onto it. Each amplifier is built or repaired to its buyer's specifications. Orders that please a buyer, often a branch of the United States military, a defense contractor, or an aviation corporation, result in bigger orders, more sophisticated orders. And T/MAC is uniquely well-positioned to process these orders. As professionals with decades of experience in designing and manufacturing microwave amplifiers, Wurtzelman and Marks are quietly confident that they understand and can meet each client's needs quickly and expertly.
Also, to the best of their knowledge, this is something no other company can do. With the dissolution of their microwave division (it was sold by SGS-Thomson to a firm on Long Island, which then shut the company without relocating the employeees), there was no one left who knew how to repair microwave amplifiers, which gave T/MAC an instant foot in the door. Beyond that, the jobs T/MAC takes on -- the $10,000, even $100,000 jobs that last year alone nearly doubled its gross, taking it to $1.1 million -- are too small for the big guys.
Marks explains, using T/MAC's latest product, evaluation boards for Motorola, as an example. "They can turn out a million of anything," he says, conjuring up an image of mile-long assembly lines, thick procedural manuals, and workers in white coats and clear plastic head gear. "That's what they're set up to do. But they can't make 50 of anything," he says, pausing to watch Margie Bergen, his employee and former co-worker at Siemens, one of T/MAC's two assemblers, working over a high powered stereo microscope, painstakingly putting together a handful of evaluation boards that Motorola will use to showcase a new integrated circuit.
Beyond mining old contacts in the small world of microwave technology and jumping on new business opportunities such as the evaluation board project for Motorola, Wurtzelman and Marks emphasize that they owe their success to their key employees (Gene Molnar, Nathan Lefkow, Don Brooks, and Bergen), all of whom were once their co-workers. "There is absolute trust," each man says again and again. Not only do they have complete faith in their employees' expertise, but "We say `If we can't trust you with the keys to the front door, we can't hire you,'" Wurtzelman declares, summing up the partners' relationship with their employees.
T/MAC now has 2,500 square feet and 10 employees, two of whom, Carol Marks and Nancy Wurtzelman, are the owners' wives. Wurtzelman and Marks say their wives' attention to all of the administrative chores from payroll through accounting has allowed them to give all their attention to T/MAC's operations. Beyond that, both men say that their decision to try business without a corporate safety net would have been impossible without their wives' unwavering support. "They never said `Why don't you go get a job like everybody else?'"
This story was published in U.S. 1 Newspaper on February 26, 1997.
Now at the 100 Jersey Avenue incubator is an innovation that may indeed have the opposite of a new ring to it. It's the MultiSaurus, a beast which prints, faxes, scans, copies, browses the Internet, faxes through the Internet, and costs under $1,000.
The inventors are Gunter and Carolyn Beck, a German engineer and a programmer from Milk Chocolate Country, who met at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York City. "If you think about it," explains Gunter, "a laser printer, a copier, a scanner, and a fax all do the same thing. We wrote a whole pile of software, and we are using the same hardware that would normally just print -- to fax, to copy, and to scan."
Their business resides at the incubator sponsored by the Rutgers Graduate School of Management's New Jersey Small Business Development Center and the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology (U.S. 1, February 5).
The Becks each came from humble beginnings. Gunter, the son of a welder and union boss in Cologne, Germany, went into the steel mill at age 14, but within four years realized that he wanted a less "hurly burly" profession, and entered an undergraduate program in engineering at the University of Munich. After working at Exxon (then Esso) the oil paid for him to come to America to take a computer course. This was 30 years ago.
Since then Gunter earned a masters in engineering from New York University in 1969, and stayed on with Exxon ("going under the table and ripping out dirty cables") until 1969, when he went started doing computer work in the financial industry. After two years with the Federal Reserve Bank and the marriage to Carolyn, he went on to work for Telerate, the news service, and then spent three years with J.J. Kenney, a now-defunct bond brokerage house, where he headed up the MIS department.
Carolyn, 57, hails from Hershey, Pennsylvania. Her parents worked in the chocolate empire of the same name, and she attended Bucknell, (Class of 1961), majoring in mathematics. Her career included stints with an airplane manufacturer, Curtis Wright, in Wood Ridge, and the Federal Reserve (where she worked from 1972 to 1982, and left as project director). For the next 10 years she worked for Bankers Trust, and then spent three years at Bank of America, while Gunter laid down the foundations of the company.
"Carolyn would bring home the bacon," he says.
"What we both have from our parents is being on the practical side of things," Gunter adds. "When laser printers came about we must have taken 30 of them apart and studied them to death. What we came away with was that laser printers were really souped-up matrix printers. We said it can be done dramatically better, mainly with a hotter combination of hardware and software."
One "killer ap" for the MultiSaurus is that it can use its own hard drive to fax documents into and out of the Internet while your computer is otherwise engaged. Meanwhile you are paying only for a local call to your Internet service provider. The two posit for companies that do a lot of long distance faxing, the product will pay itself off in a relatively short time.
The couple showed a prototype at the North Jersey Venture Fair late last October and are actively pursuing the first stage of financing and are working with Rutgers MBA program for entrepreneurial studies on a marketing program. They are targeting warehouse resellers (like Sam's Club) and superstore channels (like Staples and Computer City) to sell and help fund the manufacture of the products. "These people do not want to sell the same printer that they sold last year," says Gunter. "They are always looking for something new."
But not too new. Indeed, the MultiSaurus does have competitors. For instance Staples advertises a all-in-one machine which can do plain paper faxing, copying, printing, scanning, PC faxing, and color faxing. How is the MultiSaurus different?
Besides being quicker and cheaper, the Becks claim their progeny can browse the Internet and download a Web site while your computer is in use on another project. Also separately from your computer, it can do regular faxing and Internet faxing. It has a smarter modem, which can make repeat connections, take time out, store images on its hard drive, and is positioned to change to ISDN, with more capabilities re error recovering and repeat transmission.
"We don't want to say we have something so unique that people would say, `Come on! There's no way you can bring it to the market!'" says Gunter. "We just bring it all under one roof, differently, and for less."