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Scots Away - Tom Willey

Tom Willey | Monday October 20, 2008



Tom Willey is CEO of Discera Inc, based San Jose, California.
Discera is a World Leader in CMOS MEMS Resonator Technology. The company’s broad portfolio of PureSilicon resonators offer a significant breakthrough in technology, that is being used to create the industry’s most advanced and economical, Frequency Control and RF Circuits. Founded in 2001 and headquartered in San Jose, California, Discera is a privately held fables semiconductor company with investments from Scale Ventures, Horizon, Ardesta, Partech, 3i, and Qualcomm Ventures.

Hi-Tech Scotland (HTS): Describe your current role.
Tom Willey (TW): I’m CEO of Discera Inc, which is a semiconductor company specialising in MEMS Resonator technology. Every electronic device in the world has some kind of ‘heartbeat’ to make things work. Traditionally, a tiny quartz crystal has been utilised to carry this heartbeat but our technology replaces that crystal with silicon in a way that reduces cost and improves performance. There are over 10 billion of these devices shipped every year, so we think there’s a potential half billion dollar market out there for us to capture. Our product is designed in the US, manufactured in Canada, Thailand and Singapore, then brought back to the US for testing before being shipped once more all over the world. We’re very much a worldwide organisation.

HTS: When did you first become interested in technology as a career?
TW: I originally come from Greenock and left school in 1972, so as you might expect, I cut my teeth with IBM. There was no burning ambition to get into the technology industry on my part, I simply went where the best opportunity was. Happily, IBM put me through a degree in electronics which really provided the springboard for the career I’ve been developing ever since. These days, of course, there’s very little technical content to my role – much more geared towards sales and marketing. At sixteen my first job was actually selling suits part-time in Burtons and I honestly believe that the skills I learned there are more relevant to me today than anything else.
 
HTS: Broadly speaking, from your own perspective, what technologies are likely to prove most important over the next 10 years?
TW: There are tons. There’s a lot of biotechnology coming through that will be very significant, but in terms of Silicon, I think the big focus in the next few years will be on ‘clean technology’. There’s huge interest in California right now in finding alternative and sustainable ways to provide energy and, more significantly for the techmology industry, find ways to reduce the level of energy consumption by electronic devices. As a result, I think the phrase “smarter home” will become a lot more common over the next few years as more people begin address the energy issue at a domestic level.

HTS: Was it always your ambition to work overseas?
TW:  Not particularly – I was always very happy living and working in Scotland. Having said that, every company I worked for back home was a large American company, usually headquartered in California, so it might have been inevitable to some extent that I ended up here.
The actual move came after I had been out here on business and met a friend who had just launched a start-up company. He asked me to join him, I agreed, and my wife and I sold up in Scotland within a couple of weeks. It really was that quick and simple and, looking back, there wasn’t really a great deal of planning involved at all!
It’s 19 years now since we first came over the the States and, overall, it’s been a great move for us. It wasn’t until we had been here for something like 10 years before we realised that we had actually emigrated! I don’t think we’d ever move back full-time to Scotland now. My wife and I are back in Scotland at least three times a year, so we like to think that we have the best of both worlds.

HTS: Has being Scottish ever been an advantage (or disadvantage) to you elsewhere in the world?
TW: Looking back, it really has been an advantage. The Scottish accent gets you noticed and remembered and, on the rare occasions that someone struggles to understand my accent, it simply makes them listen to me more carefully. Beyond that, I think there is definitely something about the Scottish character - our “no-nonsense” mentality and solid work ethic - that goes down particularly well in Silicon Valley. There are a lot of Scots over here who have done very well in the technology business - too many for it to be a co-incidence.

HTS: Do you have any remaining ambitions?
TW:  My professional ambitions are always fixed firmly on the project that I’m working on at that moment. Discera has just recently started shipping products, so my current goal is to get Discera to $10 million in revenue, then $100 million.
Beyond that, I don’t anticipate ever retiring completely but I will slow down someday and devote more time on my family. Like many others in my sort of job, I’m aware that I’ve probably taken my family for granted at times. I have four grandchildren already and who knows, they’ll probably be more, so I think I’ll be kept pretty busy whether I’m working or not.

www.discera.com

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