Steve Kim: Korean Ingenuity in Consumer Electronics

Steve Kim is a Korean tech entrepreneur who became successful in the growing electronics industry. He was responsible in putting up two startups that are known as major players in the industry today. One of these startups was Xylan which Alcatel acquired in 1999 for $2 billion. Needless to say, Steve was successful. He shares his secret for his thriving career – his wife Jung. Kim considers her as his most valuable asset.

Steve was born in Seoul in 1952. He moved to the US in 1976 after his mandatory service in the Korean military for two years and studying electrical engineering for four years. He worked in an auto parts warehouse stocking shelves for one year. He used his savings to travel back to Korea in 1977 to marry Jung.

Jung used to point out what Steve overlooked in himself and others. She helped Steve realize his need to increase his income. While attending night school in Cal State Northridge, Steve worked with a local store in Burroughs, and later with Litton Data Systems. He had a third job with a small fiber optics company. This job inspired Steve to establish his own garage-based company named Fibermux that would create networking products.

After seven years, Steve sold Fibermux and earned him $54 million in the deal. In 1993, Steve founded Xylan in Calabasas, California. Xylan would produce the next generation, power-packed switches used in high speed routing in LANs. Xylan’s switches resembled the shape and size of a pizza box, thus Xylan switches were known as pizza switches.

Xylan held its IPO in 1996, which was known as the most successful IPO since Netscape’s. Its shares, priced at $26 for $4.2 million quickly jumped to $75. In 1998, Xylan reported sales of $350 million. This was exceptional considering that the industry is dominated by giants as Bay Networks, Cisco ad 3Com.

Steve’s hard work, coupled with his creativity were instrumental in the most important engineering advances that would keep Xylan’s switches remain on the cutting edge. In 1999, France’s leading telecom company Alcatel showed interest in acquiring Xylan. After the hefty $2 billion payout, Steve remained with Xylan, taking care of Alcatel’s Internetworking division.