Three years after founding Northwest Instrument Systems, Jon Birck became a cliche -- one more entrepreneur squeezed out of his fast-growing company.
Duniway Park, Portland, Ore., August 6, 1984 -- At 6:35 a.m. the sun is breaking over the tops of the trees, and the air is cool and clear, although a bit hazy over Mt. Hood. Yesterday Vice-President Bush and his Secret Service men ran here, and the regular runners at this downtown track couldn't figure out why three men in suits were sitting in a car blocking the entrance to the parking lot. but today the lot is open, and Jon Birck has parked his Honda and is stretching. He wears red shorts and a black T-shirt with "The Seventh Annual Cascade Run-Off" in purple letters across the front.
"I'll be back in about 42 1/2 minutes," he says. His lips hint at a smile, but Birck, a slight man with pale skin and freckles, isn't kidding. He means he is going to run this 5.5-mile cross-country route in that amount of time, give or take 30 seconds. He pushes in the stopwatch button of his watch and takes off, half a lap around the track and then up a path through the trees, in a slow, springy stride.
A few months earlier, as chief executive officer of a small but fast-growing company, Birck had trouble finding the time to run. Northwest Instrument Systems Inc. was then three years old and poised to scale up development, production, and sales of a radically new kind of electronic instrument for electrical engineers. The fledgling enterprise had obtained the backing of world-respected venture capitalists, recruited top people from two of the area's most prestigious high-technology companies, developed an instrument it expected to become the core of its first product line, and moved to a new building. And, as Northwest's founder and president, Birck had become part of a new Portland-area elite -- people who had risked all to start their own companies.
To an ambitious electrical engineer from the Midwest who had no formal training or experience running anything like the company his dream had become, it was both scary and exciting. At dawn, Birck would slip out of bed while his wife slept, grab a bowl of Cheerios, and race off to the plant -- 13,000 square feet of glass and cement in an up-and-coming industrial park west of Portland. He kept a shirt and shorts and a pair of Nikes at the office, but often as not he skipped running, settling right down at his desk or walking around to talk with the 60 or so people who were building and selling Northwest's instruments. Although by this time he was no longer working until 11 or 12 at night, as he had during the company's earliest days, he still practically lived at the plant, and most nights he took work home. Not that he minded for a minute. Starting Northwest was one of the most exhilarating things he had ever done.
Then, suddenly, Birck was out. In May of 1984, after three years of working harder than he ever had in his life, he was asked to leave by his venture capitalists, who told him they needed a more experienced CEO to protect their investment. Now, cocooned in a swank, borrowed office on the 23d floor of a Portland bank building, he was driving ahead on plans for a new company -- and sorting through the pieces of the old.
If he had been born a generation earlier, Jon Birck might have spent his career managing a research group for a large company. But he came of age in an era when people with bright ideas started companies in garages and sometimes made millions and appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Maybe his company had outgrown him, as his financial backers claimed, although Birck didn't think the problem was that simple. But the real question he had to answer was: How could he make sure, when he started his next company, that he wouldn't get divorced from it so soon?
A team player from Indiana
At first, Birck couldn't even think about Northwest without his stomach acting up. The first week at home he cleaned out the closets, reorganized the kitchen, and went hiking in the mountains for a few days by himself. He didn't know what the founding ex-president of a company was supposed to do. Get another job? Wait for his stock to make him rich? He couldn't imagine spending the rest of his life out of the action.
The fourth of five children, the son of a mailman and a woman who stayed home with her kids, Jon Birck spent his first 18 years in rural Clinton, Ind., where he grew up mowing the grass, helping with the dishes, and working at the local Dog 'n' Suds. His father encouraged self-reliance. When Birck senior was asked by one of the three sons how something worked, he would tell him to take it apart. "It didn't grow together," he sometimes added. All three eventually became electrical engineers.
Clinton gave Birck a sense of steadiness and order that led him to believe that most of life's problems had one right answer -- an attitude that his Purdue University education reinforced. In the late 1960s, when Birck went to college, much of the country was in tumult over the war in Vietnam, but at Purdue's engineering school, the chairs were still in rows, and Birck and his classmates were in them. It was with his college friends that he first talked about starting a company. But "we didn't know what the world needed," Birck says, and after graduating, they scattered.
Like a lot of young electrical engineers in those days, Birck went to California to be "where things were happening." In June of 1970, he got married and moved to Santa Clara to work for an aggressive young company called National Semiconductor Corp. He found a lot to like -- and not to like -- in Silicon Valley.
