Full Circle in the Valley

Blackberry is addictive. No question. Even a non-workaholic like me check my message first thing after I open my eyes every morning even before I get out of the bed. It has become a reflex action.

Mine is an East coast law firm with big and small offices in the West Coast. By the time I get up at the Pacific coast, my inbox is already populated with a daily dose of professional newsletters, routine conflict check emails, and lately, with motivational messages from the managing partners from the East coast offices narrating recent success stories of engaging new clients and new businesses. This morning was no exception.

The firm CEO sent an excited message about engaging new business from a tech client, GigOptix, “a leading provider of electronic engines for the optically connected digital world.” This is a photonics communications company. Once you switch to patent law, it becomes a professional necessity to dilute your subject matter expertise in order to cover the breadth of technologies that come your way. Still, being a Ph.D. engineer who wrote a thesis on photonic devices, I got very curious to explore the extent of our firm’s engagement in GigOptix matters. Are we going to do their patent work? Am I going to be part of the GigOptix team at my firm?

I went to GigOptix’s website to refresh my memory regarding their technology and to know more about the key people running the company. The CEO, Dr. Avi Katz’s name rings a rather loud bell. Where have I heard his name before?

A search in the nooks and crannies of my brain for information stored long ago takes a few seconds. Oh, I remember now. I studied one of his patents on gold-tin eutectic solders when I was working as a first year graduate research assistant at the University of Maryland, back in 1997! The patent was granted in 1993 on an invention that Dr. Katz came up with while he worked at AT&T Bell Labs in New Jersey. (I later read in his bio at the GigOptix website that he has more than 70 patents!)

Back in 1997, I had no inkling that I would end up being a patent law professional myself. I had groomed myself to be an academic researcher. But patent law appealed more as a career during some introspective moments while I was pregnant, and I joined a boutique intellectual property law firm in Washington DC in 2005.

Strangely, even at my first job in patent law, I had these “full circle” happenstances. I applied to my DC patent law firm, as I knew their name through the University of Maryland’s Technology Transfer office, who handled the patent application on my graduate work on electronic packaging (along with my Ph.D. advisor and another researcher). Coincidentally, my first boss at the DC law firm was the same patent attorney who wrote and successfully prosecuted my patent application into an issued patent. I talked to him over the phone as an inventor in 1999, six years before I became his colleague.

In late summer 2008, we moved to the silicon valley as my husband joined Google. (Since we are on the topic of coincidences, it won’t be completely irrelevant if I mention that I wrote patent applications for Google at my DC firm even before my husband joined the company.) I joined the Palo Alto office of my current law firm in September, 2008. In November, 2008, a big group of lateral attorneys from a now-defunct law firm joined our firm. It didn’t take long to find another coincidence. Apparently, my current next-door neighbor, who came with the big group as a lateral Partner, knows my second boss at my DC firm very well. They had adjoining offices at the Patent Office when they were both US Patent Office Examiners!

Coming back to Dr. Katz and GigOptix, I am thrilled at the possibility of working with someone who inspired me when I was a young researcher more than a decade ago. Silicon valley is full of these people, who started as hard-core researchers, and then took on greater/more diverse roles in technology companies. The valley makes me feel everyday that I have landed in the right place. This is where you and your friend talk about “copyleft” while shopping for school supplies at Target. And it does not hurt, when Meg Whitman (ex-eBay CEO) says at a conference, “You look familiar”! I am sure Meg mistook me for someone else, but I got my anecdote alright.

For a techie, the circle is not completed until you come to the valley.