Where in the world is Dado Banatao?
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| Known as the “Father of Semi-conductor,” Dado Banatao was friends with Steve Jobs back in the day when Silicon Valley was just a “bunch of orchards.”: “In the really, really early stages of personal computers, there were a lot of tinkerers and engineers who wanted to build these computers themselves at home, so it was more like a hobby.” |
In person, he is an extremely simple man, unassuming, clad
in a basic button-down polo and dark trousers. With how low key he is, you
would hardly be able to tell that he is a billionaire visionary based in Silicon Valley. He shies away and politely begs off
talking about net worth and material assets, and instead lights up and laughs a
lot when talking about his work. He is responsible for consumerizing a specific
technology used exclusively back then by the US military, and today, we have it
on our phones and cars and we call it GPS. According to MorphLabs CEO and
co-founder Winston Damarillo, 30 percent of every computer and laptop in
existence carries technology and ideas developed by this man.
Here are 10 things you should know about Dado Banatao.
1. He who is known as
the “Father of the Semi-conductor” and “Filipino Bill Gates” (he is not so fond
of the latter) is the son of a farmer from Iguig, Cagayan and used to walk a
dirt road to school every day. He went on to study in Ateneo de Tuguegarao,
Mapua, then Stanford.
His father first worked as a farmer, then left for Guam to become an OFW when Dado was around nine years
old. He recalls that he was probably too young for it to affect him, and all he
knew was that his father was not there all the time but that he would come home
once a year. His favorite pasalubong? “Rubber shoes. That was fun!” He
graduated valedictorian from elementary school. He left their barrio to go to
Tuguegarao to attend high school, where he lived in a boarding house on
weekdays and went home on weekends. “It was a little room with a basic bed and
little table, and that’s where I studied every night. When I was done, I’d go
to bed. It was such a simple life.” Dado was very driven at an early age,
studying, reading, and doing his homework on his own even if nobody was
watching over him. He loved and excelled in algebra, trigonometry, and physics,
which prompted his dean to advise him become an engineer. He then moved to Manila and lived with his
aunt and graduated cum laude with a degree in Electrical Engineering from
Mapua.
“I’ve always been inclined to learn more. I felt that my
training in college was not sufficient,” Dado explains. While working in the US, he was accepted in a graduate study program
where he could work full time and earn a salary, but at the same time study at
the University of
Washington at the expense
of the company. “I saved for my eventual expense when I went to Stanford,” he
says. He was not on any scholarship at Stanford, instead he saved up and paid
for his own master’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and
finished in less than two years.
Unlike the young, less fortunate Pinoys today who say they
study or work hard to get themselves “out of poverty,” Dado’s motivation to
excel in school was different. “We had no notion of wealth, we didn’t even know
there was such a thing as a wealthy person. We studied because our parents told
us it was important.”
2. Dado’s childhood
wish was to become a pilot. In his early 20s, he was hired as a design engineer
for the development of the Boeing 747. As fate would have it, today, he is able
to fly his own plane.
“I was literally 19 years old when I got my engineering
degree, and at that age, I was looking for something more interesting. I had
high expectations,” Dado shares. He says he was offered a couple of jobs after
college but he found them boring (“I didn’t see myself doing it every day”) and
he was actually discouraged. Until he saw this advertisement for Philippine
Airlines saying they were looking for pilot trainees. They were 10 in their
batch at the PAL Aviation School,
and after a year-long training, he was offered a job at Boeing. He took the job
and moved to Seattle.
“They were in the final stage of integration and a lot of
systems have already been designed, but there was quite a lot of work left,”
Dado recalls. He says that there were a few other Filipinos working on the 747,
but it was his team that was in charge of finalizing design, control surfaces,
and engine systems indication (to name a few). There was grand event for the
Boeing 747 launch and Dado shares: “To see it do its first flight was amazing.
You cannot imagine such a big airplane lift up. It was very inspiring.” He says
that the event was very exciting, but that he found his work there to be
boring. “So I went to graduate school.”
Fast forward to when he was 53 and Dado still cannot believe
he was able to buy his first plane. He begs off answering specific details, but
says that they’re used for family trips and important business matters. When I
asked what it felt like when he flew his own plane for the first time, he
smiles from ear to ear like a child playing with his favorite toy and says, “It
was awesome.”
3. He decided to base
himself in Silicon Valley at a time it wasn’t even called Silicon
Valley yet. That was in the early ‘70s and Dado was 26.
“It was just a bunch of orchards back then,” he recalls
smiling. He says that most engineers had no idea it would explode in 30 years,
the way Silicon Valley is today. He saw some
established companies that were already doing the things he liked to do, plus
he was very comfortable there, which is what sealed the deal for him to live in
the area. “In my graduate program, I combined solid state circuits and computer
architecture. What it means really is the idea of putting a computer in a
chip,” he explains. He was interviewed and was offered a job at Intel, American
Microsystems, and National Semiconductors (the only companies that were doing
Dado’s vision of putting the knowledge of software and hardware together) and
he chose National Semiconductors because he felt they had the best program.
He often says that if Silicon Valley were a country, it’d be
Top 11 in the world in terms of GDP, which is why he highly encourages the Philippines to
invest more in math and science in schools, and in research and technology,
because he believes it is a great step towards national development.
4. Dado was friends
with Steve Jobs. They were both part of a small group called the Homebrew
Computer Club.
“In the really, really early stages of personal computers,
there were a lot of tinkerers and engineers who wanted to build these computers
themselves at home, so it was more like a hobby,” he says of their club. He
says Steve Wozniak of Apple was “a true engineer, a real techie,” and that
Steve Jobs’ strength was “how to apply things better, and his designs reflected
that.” He shares that the company he was working with back then created their
own personal computer, and that for a good three to four years in the mid ‘70s,
they were outselling the Apple computer. “We had the same ideas and a lot of
those, we were talking about it in the club,” he fondly recalls. “I can still
imagine those evenings where one guy would bring his program and say, ‘Hey, see
what I can do here’ and another would go ‘No, I can do better’ and it was that
kind of club we were daring each other.”
When I joked if he considers himself more of a nerd or a
geek, he says: “You start out as a nerd then you become a geek. By that time, I
was already a geek,” he laughs.
5. Dado Banatao in
numbers:
150: grade of his glasses for his right eye, his left eye is
20/20.
25: centavos (in pesos) it cost him to buy a small bowl of
pancit for lunch back in college. To get to school, he took a bus then a
jeepney to his campus in Doroteo Jose.
18: around the age he experienced celebrating his birthday
for the first time. And he doesn’t really think it was a celebration, it was
just a get together with friends and someone brought bibingka. “Growing up, we
didn’t celebrate birthdays. The way we’d celebrate is we would go to church
that day. It was so basic.” Today, he and his family never fail to celebrate a
birthday, but Dado says its still a very simple celebration.
151: number of scholarships to be given away to Filipino
science or engineering students this year by the SuperFund project. Each
scholar gets a total of P1,000,000 for five years.
unknown: the number of cars he owns. “I like cars,” he says
with a shy smile.
6. On what for him is
his most significant invention: “Let’s not use the word invention, for me,
innovation is more important than invention.”
“When scientists or engineers invent things, there must be
millions of those around the world but we never know of them because it deals
only with one little thing. Unless you mix other things to it, it is not
useful,” Dado explains. He says that in innovation, you take many concepts and
put them together, with a specific application and market already in mind.
“What I did at Stanford became very important because I combined computer
science and solid state devices,” he says. According to him, the trick was
keeping the system the same but throwing away all the useless things. “I found
a way and realized how it can be redesigned properly.”
7. After 10 years as
an employee, he started his own companies that did very well, and eventually
ended up selling some, reportedly one for a $430 million and another for over a
billion dollars.
Dado went from individual contributor to first level manager
to manager of an entire operation in his early years as an employee in Silicon Valley. “Those are all confidence building events
that made me think I can do really challenging things and deliver the product.
I think most entrepreneurs go through that process,” he shares.
His first start up company, Mostron, was put up with
$500,000 pooled together from friends and founders of the group. They developed
a PC motherboard that unfortunately was not so successful. “I felt really bad
because that was my idea, but all the customers wanted to buy were the chips
that I designed,” Dado reveals.”I learned a lot from there.”
With the same idea from his first startup, with adjustments
made, and with someone investing a million dollars in his idea, Dado put up his
second startup company with a former boss of his, Chips and Technology. He
basically designed the very first chip set for the PC. “It enabled a lot of
engineers who wanted to design the PC system to come up with their own design because
we took care of the nitty-gritty for compatibility,” he shares. The company
grew very, very fast and from the time they started it, they took it public in
22 months, and in four years, the revenue was $650 million.
S3 was (as the name implies) his third start up company. “I
was very disappointed with the graphics performance of the PC, it was very
slow,” he recalls. After setting up a meeting with Microsoft and a separate
meeting with Intel to pitch his idea, he started his redesign of the chip he needed
to make the computer run faster. The technical term is “bus,” borrowing from
the concept of an actual bus, because it is a collection of signals and data
being shipped from one place to another. “Today that bus is called PCI, and it
is everywhere. Companies use it now as a standard bus.”
In 1997, he was given the Master Entrepreneur of the Year
Award sponsored by Ernst and Young, Inc. magazine and Merrill Lynch Business
Financial Services.
8. He met his wife
Maria when he was 23 years old, and they’ve been together ever since. He is now
66.
Dado and Maria met through common friends in Seattle, and after dating
for a few months, they went “exclusive.” He recalls how she asked him one day
if he has a savings account, and when he said he didn’t, she actually opened an
account for him which forced him to save. (That and this forced savings program
at Boeing were what made him afford his tuition at Stanford.) While he was in California for his master’s, she was taking up her
master’s in Education at the University
of Washington. Since it
was a long distance relationship, they had this strategy to save money.
“Instead of calling each other, we had a code of number of rings on the phone.
I had a roommate back then and I had to tell him to not pick up the phone right
away. He was laughing at me.” He did get to visit her during Christmas and
spring break, on which he took eight-hour drives just to see her.
They got married in 1972 and today, they are fulfilled
parents to three children, and even happier grandparents to six grandchildren,
with another one due in August. When I asked him what the one most important
thing he wants his kids and grandkids to value, he says, “Education.”
9. The mobile phone
he uses today has been his phone for the past 12 years. A (“really old”)
Motorola Razr.
“There’s a new one but that’s a smart phone, I have the
really old model,” he says smiling. He has no favorite gadgets, but has an
iPad, a PC laptop, and a Mac laptop. “I hardly use these things frankly,
apparently I stay away from them” he reveals. When I tell him how people
(myself included) would think that he would have the most high-tech phones and
gadgets considering he is the authority on technological advancements, all he
could do was smile and shrug his elbows.
“I’m not into gadgets, the closest thing I guess, its more
of what I drive and what I fly,” he then smiles that shy smile once again.
10. Today, both his
business and advocacy are geared towards helping young students and
entrepreneurs who are set on making their mark in the field of science and
engineering.
Because he had generous teachers and investors who helped
and guided his drive to reach his goals, he does the same today for others.
Tallwood Venture Capital is a company Dado put up that invests exclusively in
semi-conductor related technologies and products that can make a significant
impact in the market. There is one story about a simple family business who
gave Dado a cold call to pitch their idea, and after checking out the facts and
their credibility, through Tallwood’s investment, that small business grew its
worth to about a billion dollars.
Dado is also committed to helping students who want to pursue a career
in science. He is the chairman of PhilDev, an organization that strives for a globally
competitive Philippine economy by supporting students and programs in the field
of engineering. The SuperFund provides college scholarships in the Philippines, they also support high school
scholars in his hometown Cagayan, they have the Asia Pacific Fund that gives
grants to Filipino college students in California
pursuing degrees in science and engineering, and they regularly hold forums and
camps to mentor budding entrepreneurs. On their recent forum in Cebu, he says, “I loved the energy of the young
entrepreneurs, and we gave a lot of advice. They’re very undaunted, they
dream.”
