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Not surprisingly, this lean, fast, hard-working environment, coupled with a pay scale that in Lee's words is not "top dollar," leads to a young work force (average age: 27) and high annual revenue per employee (about $1.8 million per full-time employee, compared with about $560,000 for Cisco). More surprising is that annual turnover is only 5%, compared with an industry average of 9%, according to Mercer Human Resources Consulting. Glen McLaughlin, vice president of North American sales for Linksys, attributes this to a culture in which employees are allowed to run their own projects. "We'll give you enough rope to either hang yourself or be successful," he says. McLaughlin tells of Victor and Janie letting him switch from 15 regional to three national product distributors in 1996 even though they doubted his rationale. Other than e-mails from Victor demanding updates, they did not meddle. Luckily for McLaughlin, it worked. "Victor and Janie really like to see people execute," says Mike Wagner. "They're not afraid to weed people out."

As home broadband Internet use began to bloom in the late '90s, at costs significantly higher than those for dial-up connections, Victor realized that people were going to want to hook all their small-office or home computers to one line. To do so they would need a router, a high-tech cord splitter allowing multiple computers to hook into one modem. These already existed--Cisco was making its living off them--but at $500 and up they were too expensive and complicated for a non-techie home.

So Victor ordered up the product that proved to be the turning point for Linksys: a $199 four-port router that employed an easy browserlike program to lead people through installation. After introducing the product at a trade show in late 1999--the first sub-$300 consumer router to market by three months--Linksys exploded. The company's share of the networking market leapt from 10.8% in 1999 to 18.6% the following year, according to NPD TechWorld, an organization that tracks trends and consumer sales in the industry, and revenue went from $107.6 million to $206.5 million. "They invented consumer home networking," says Steve Baker, an NPD analyst.

The introduction of the four-port broadband router was in perfect tune with Linksys' personality. The decision to go with it was based on intuition and listening to manufacturers, not drawn-out market studies. Liu handled the product design in-house, the price was cheap, and the technology was off-the-shelf. It was not a futurist's invention but an obvious technology made easy. "Everyone knew in the late '90s of the broadband explosion," Victor says. "It wasn't really a secret."

"I won't say Victor has a vision for 10 years," says Liu. "But I think he has a vision for two, which gives you a good chance to be successful if you do the right things."

With the industry's eyes on them, Janie and Victor had to keep running. Janie continued to sign up catalogs, distributors, and retailers (the list now runs from Amazon.com to Radio Shack). Victor kept introducing products around the four-port broadband router--products such as cards that allowed laptops to connect to routers--while he looked for the next big thing.

He found it in wireless networking. The only thing better than letting people connect all their computers to one modem was to let them connect without a cord. In January 2001, several months after a wireless transmission standard called 802.11b (or, less clumsily, Wi-Fi) was finalized, Linksys launched a system of wireless routers and computer cards. Though Linksys wasn't first out of the gate this time, the brand was embedded in consumers' minds, and in 2001 Linksys revenue and market share jumped to $346.7 million and 34.2%, respectively.

Again the Tsaos had capitalized on a known technology by introducing inexpensive products before most of their competitors. In that way, Victor makes his moves in the open, much as he plays basketball, his only hobby. According to Roger Bundy, his Taco Bell boss, Victor telegraphs his basketball shots with his eyes. "Shorter people could block him because he'd announce to the world that he was going to shoot," Bundy says. The difference here is that Linksys gets off the shot before its competitors get off the ground.

Liu describes an instance last February when a Taiwanese manufacturer was in town. Victor asked him to come to a meeting at 10:30 on a Saturday night. The two men talked about a new design for a small-business product. The basics were decided that night--square instead of rectangular, gray and silver instead of blue and black--and by Monday the design was finalized.

That's not unusual. Malachy Moynihan, the company's vice president for engineering, says Linksys and its Taiwanese partners were recently able to move a product from idea to production in three weeks. Sometimes Linksys even jumps ahead of itself. In fall 2002, while an industry board was finalizing a faster wireless standard called 802.11g, the Tsaos decided that they wanted to have 802.11g products in stores for Christmas, final standards be damned. After a September meeting with chipmaker Broadcom convinced them that users could easily upgrade the 802.11g chips with free software if the final standard changed, they plowed ahead. On December 24, Linksys launched its 802.11g products, beating its competitors by three months. It sold 300,000 units in the first two months.

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