Photograph by Paul Myers
Saratoga resident Patrick Lo, 45, went from living on welfare in southern China and Hong Kong to co-founding Santa Clara-based Netgear, of which he is president, CEO and director.
From Hong Kong adventure to Silicon Valley network venture
By Rebecca Ray
As a teenager, Patrick Lo lived on welfare in Hong Kong. But a scholarship to Brown University in Providence, R.I., led Lo to co-found Netgear, a successful private company in Santa Clara that sells networking technology to families and small businesses.
Before Lo, who is now 45 and lives in Saratoga, fled to Hong Kong from the nearby Portuguese colony of Macao, he lived in Guangzhou in southern China.
Millions of Chinese were trying to flee to Hong Kong, because the Soviets had stopped providing subsidies to China, and food had become scarce. Before Lo could make it to Hong Kong, the British closed the Hong Kong borders, so Lo fled to Macao with his uncles.
Lo's parents weren't able to make it to Macao. They stayed behind in China, where then-Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution to increase communism's stronghold over the country. To re-establish control, Zedong executed people whom he perceived to be political enemies, including Lo's parents.
Lo, who was determined to get as far away as he could from the Communists, and his friend, Nelson Leong--who is now a research and development director at Netgear--applied to Brown. They received scholarships for tuition and loans that covered room and board.
At Brown, Lo had an experience that he described as an "eye-opener." He learned that, in the United States, people could pursue whatever dreams they wanted--no one was there to deny someone an opportunity because of his or her background or family history, Lo said.
According to Lo, the professors helped students pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge, rather than for the sake of getting a job, as they did in China. Although Lo enjoyed taking classes in various subjects, he majored in electrical engineering because he had been attracted to electronic gadgets ever since he was a child.
Because Lo didn't have to worry about money at Brown, and the professors there were helpful, his grades "shot up, big-time," he said, and he graduated magna cum laude.
After graduation, Hewlett-Packard hired Lo to work for them in Hong Kong. He worked for the company for 12 years, in China, Cupertino and Japan. He held various management positions in software sales, technical support, network product management and sales support and marketing.
Lo returned to the United States in 1995, when the economy was about to take off. His former boss, Dominic Orr, who had left Hewlett-Packard and joined Bay Networks, asked Lo to join him. Lo agreed and eventually found a home in Saratoga.
That was when Lo and Mark Merrill, the current chief technology officer of Netgear, developed the idea for Netgear. Lo saw that a tremendous number of personal computers were being sold to small businesses--companies with 100 people or less--and homes.
He believed that families and small businesses, like big companies, would want to build networks and to buy products that enabled them to network. Merrill, who had helped sell products to and design products for networking companies, said families and small companies would buy networking products if they were affordable and easy to use.
In January 1996, Lo and Merrill co-founded Netgear. The company, which was a full subsidiary of Bay Networks, sold products that made it possible for different computers in the same house or small business to share printers, files and scanners.
In 1997, Lo began to see how important the Internet was when his daughter, Daphne, who is now 16, and son, Kai, who is now 13, fought over who got to use the Internet. According to Lo, his wife Emily would have killed him if he had installed another line.
He developed the idea for different computers in the same house or at the same business to share the same line. This would allow family members or co-workers to use the Internet for different purposes at the same time.
Soon, Netgear made products that connected networks to the Internet.
Saratoga, California Since 1955
