Mr. Corbin: Cooligy was founded by three mechanical engineering professors at Stanford University in late 2001. They had some friends in the VC community and they got seed funding to get the program together, which, in that period involved: talking about the concepts, trying to figure out a business plan, building a demo unit, and those kind of things. Then, towards the middle of 2002, one of the VCs who was involved was talking to another VC who said if you have professors, then you ought to talk to Corbin. They called me and I got excited about the idea, and closed the Series A round in June of last year to kick off the company. And it was great fun, you know. I love these early stage projects. You get to start with Stanford professor founders, who hadn't particularly done a company before. The environment in a startup is so different from what a tenured professor is used too. We found a building here in Mountain View and had a lot of fun. One day, I was waiting for the air-conditioning guy to come and turn on the building, and I sent one professor to Costco to get the junk food and another one to Orchard Supply to get a toolbox with some hammers and tools in it. It was a new experience for them. It is fun, especially when you start from scratch.
TWST: Is this the first company that you've been the CEO of?
Mr. Corbin: No. Before that, I did a Stanford spinout that was called
Silicon Light Machines. We had a micro machine technology for display
applications. We started in 1994, built up the company, licensed the
technology in 2000 to Sony for HDTVs, and then sold the company to
Cypress Semiconductor in late 2000. So, I have seen this sort of
transition from a technology idea at the University develop all the way
into something that you can manufacture in volume.
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