Who’s Who: Jerry Lin, Entrepreneur

Name: Jerry Lin

Age: 36

Occupation: CEO and founder, ON-Q Lighting Systems

A self-described serial entrepreneur, Jerry Lin laughs when trying to describe in one sentence how he got into his latest business.

What got you interested in creating a lighting company?

My signage company was working with a Taiwanese lighting manufacturer on the UC Jumbotron, part of the new stadium, when we saw an opportunity to introduce green lighting.  In the two-and-a-half years since then, we set up a company, ON-Q Lighting Systems, where we design and manufacture energy efficient LED lighting systems, primarily for large environments.  We light up large places, like the Chabot Space and Science Center, the Rotunda building in downtown Oakland, Japan Center in San Francisco, AT&T Park, UC Berkeley, and all the California State University campuses. 

What type of lighting do you provide?

We provide programmable lighting fixtures with built-in sensors and equipment that program lights to be bright or dim, on or off, according to the legal requirements and needs of large environments.  Recently, we’ve been working with the City in East and West Oakland, as well as with some other cities, to be part of a setup that detects and identifies gunshots, which are heard and relayed to the police station where the location lights up on a city map.  When that happens, our street lights go to super bright for a half-mile to a mile radius, to assist police officers in their response.

Security lighting seems a far cry from making signs and banners, another successful business of yours.

I have to go way back to explain this.  I was an engineering major at UC Berkeley, but I’m not very good at that kind of math, and I found the culture of engineering students to be not very helpful, very competitive – everyone said things like, “It’s in the text book; just look it up.”  So I ended up going to business school, where everything was collaborative, with a lot of group work. It made more sense to me, you could find people who were the best at what they did.  That’s how it works in the business world.

While at Haas Business School, I started UC Discounts, a student on-campus discount card business I later sold to AT&T Student Advantage.  From there, I founded an IT company called Innerwerks Design Studios, and we began building engines for online companies.  We were the first to build an engine that changes colors of product choices for vendors on line. 

Then we started a ColoWatch, where we managed colocation centers, which were called data centers back then in the late nineties.  We worked with the largest companies around -- WalMart, the CIA, Granger, and others.  In 2003 that company was sold to Dragon Fiber  in China to assist their universities' communications with each other.

Next, I started Innerwerks, an IT industrial design company,  where our motto was “24/7 babysitters for your network infrastructure.”  The company had a progression of different people who worked together and moved on, or stayed, all very fluid.  These companies were all my ideas, and grew out of the work we were doing.  Personally, I’m a people person and my job is to make friends and make ideas work, mine or someone else’s, just figure out how to make it work. 

One of my assignments was to build a few robots for the US Military in Afghanistan and Iraq to disable IEDs -- improvised explosive devices.

After the robot design and building project, in Houston, I came back to San Francisco, where I was born.  My parents are both professionals, from Taiwan.  I met my wife, Lisa, before I went to Houston.  She was from the other side of town -- the Sunset district. After we had our first child, I was looking for my next idea.  I wanted to find something that was low tech. I discovered a signage company in the Bay Area with expert skills but no marketing skills.  So I started Direct Sign Outlet and brought in that group of sign artisans.  Lighting was an easy segue.  People who require signage also require lighting.  By the way, I sold the signage company last June, so now I’m concentrating on lighting systems.

What brought you to Piedmont?

The schools and the community.  Lisa takes care of the kids and is active in the schools. I have a 2^nd grader, Sheri, at Beach by the Bay Elementary School.  Charlise is a kindergartner at Beach Havens, and Sydney is 16 months. They are  all awesome, although I’m not excited about middle school years.  I love the school program here.  I was nowhere near as smart at this age as they are.  They have so many activities.  My oldest read more than 480 books last year.  I don’t think I read that many in college!