He Took On the Whole Power-Tool Industry

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Gass spent two weeks designing the technology and, using a $200 secondhand table saw, an additional week building a prototype. Then he began to experiment. With the blade whirring, he touched his hand to its smooth side. It stopped immediately. The same thing happened when he ran a hot dog into the blade's teeth. Gass repeated the experiment dozens of times -- and each time the blade stopped immediately. Convinced his invention would be embraced by the industry, he videotaped a demonstration, registered the patent, and set out to convince manufacturers to license the technology, which he had dubbed SawStop. He sent a video demo to Delta Machinery in Jackson, Tenn., one of the largest table-saw manufacturers, and waited.

Gass was pleased with his results, but he also knew there was something else to be done: He had to test SawStop on a real finger. "There's not a lot of demand for a saw that's safe for hot dogs," he says with a laugh. And so, on a spring afternoon in 2000, Gass stood in his workshop and tried to summon the moxie to stick his left ring finger into the teeth of a whirring saw blade. He had rubbed the digit with Novocain cream, hoping to dull the pain of the cut. On the first try, his heart beating furiously, he eased in close but recoiled before making contact. A few minutes later, he tried again. This time, he rolled his finger close enough to get a faint red mark, but panicked and pulled back before the brake triggered. By now, his forearm was cramping from the tension. It was difficult to keep his hand steady. Still, on his third attempt, he kept his nerve -- and the blade stopped, just as he knew it would. "It hurt like the dickens and bled a lot," he says. But the finger remained intact.

Several months later, Gass finally heard back from Delta. "No, thanks. Safety doesn't sell," he says he was told over the phone. (Delta, now known as Delta Porter Cable, is now owned by Black & Decker. A Delta spokesperson who asked not to be identified denies that a Delta employee made the comment.) Gass could not believe his ears. "Everybody in woodworking knows somebody who's lost a finger or had an accident," he says. How could a major manufacturer not be interested?

"These guys would walk up to us and say, 'I wanna shake your hand.' A lot of them were shaking with two or three fingers missing."

Gass refused to give up. Working with three other lawyers from his Portland law firm, David Fanning, David Fulmer, and David D'asenzo, he raised $150,000, built a more sophisticated prototype, and signed up for the International Woodworking Fair in August 2000 in Atlanta. The reaction there was phenomenal. SawStop's booth was packed with spectators who stood riveted as Gass and his partners fed wiener after wiener into the table saw. "Afterward, these guys would walk up to us and say, 'I wanna shake your hand for doing this," recalls Fanning. "A lot of them were shaking with two or three fingers missing." It was all the validation the four men needed. A month later, Gass and Fanning walked away from law partnerships to pursue SawStop full-time. Fulmer, an associate at the firm, followed a few months later. D'asenzo invested in the venture but kept his day job.

The fall of 2000 was hardly an auspicious time to launch a start-up. The Internet boom had just gone bust, the Nasdaq was in free fall, and investors were gun-shy. Yet SawStop was so practical and easy to understand, the trio had little trouble raising $1.2 million in angel funding from several different investors. They invested in more R&D, better prototypes, and small salaries for the three principals. "It was a no-brainer," says Grant Simmons, a New Orleans urologist who invested an undisclosed amount in SawStop after reading about the company and seeing a video demonstration in 2004. It was Simmons's first experience as an angel investor, and his interest was more than just financial: His father was a lifelong woodworker who had lost a finger in a table-saw accident. "This is revolutionary," Simmons says. "They are applying basic physics in a practical way to address a very important issue that people in the industry have totally ignored -- safety." Gass, Fanning, and Fulmer, meanwhile, filed more than 50 patent applications to protect their invention.

The only thing they lacked was industry cooperation -- but that seemed inevitable. After all, they believed, common sense and consumer demand ultimately would win out. What's more, the technology had implications far beyond table saws. It could potentially boost the safety of all power saws, including band saws and circular saws, as well as nail guns, lawn mowers, and other products. For the next two years, the partners engaged in what seemed to be promising talks with high-level executives at Emerson, Black & Decker, and Ryobi. In January 2002, they appeared to have turned the corner when Ryobi agreed to license SawStop's technology. Under the terms of the deal, there would be no up-front fee; Ryobi would pay a 3% royalty based on the wholesale price of all saws sold with SawStop's technology. The number would increase to 8% if the majority of the industry also licensed the technology. It was not a get-rich-quick deal, but Gass believed it was a vital first step.

When the contract arrived, Gass noticed a typo and called Ryobi's attorney, Bob Bugos, to make the correction. Gass says Bugos apologized and promised to take care of it right away. (Ryobi representatives declined to comment for this story.) When a week passed and the revised contract still had not arrived, Gass called back. He says Bugos was very apologetic and assured him the contract was on its way. Again, it didn't come. Gass says he called every two weeks and each time Bugos made the same promise. After about six months of going back and forth, it finally dawned on Gass that the Ryobi deal, like all the others, was going nowhere.

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