There was a time when Pauline Lo Alker couldn't get a computer job to save her life. Today she's the admired CEO of one of Silicon Valley's hottest companies.
by H Y Nahm
or many the word peripheral suggests marginal, less than central. In the fast-moving hi-tech business world of Silicon Valley that word has come to mean the next hot growth area. For Pauline Lo Alker, 53, that word best sums up her life and career. Once upon a time the only way the bright young daughter of a struggling Hong Kong family could get hired by a computer company was to take a typing job. Today that same woman is the celebrated CEO who rescued a promising Silicon Valley startup from probable extinction and turned it into an industry powerhouse valued at $400 million.
In the fall of 1990 Pauline Lo Alker was in the middle of a well-earned 6-month sabbatical after 25 eventful years in the computer business. Network Peripherals Inc was a 2-year old company struggling to establish itself as a provider of hardware and software for dramatically enhancing the speed and efficiency of client/server networks. What NPI desperately needed, decided its savvy venture capitalist/chairman Paul Ely, Jr, was a tough-minded CEO with a strong hi-tech marketing background to jostle the bigboys for a lucrative slice of the newly emerging market for networking solutions.
Lo Alker fit the bill perfectly, in Ely's estimation. The excitement and rewards of successfully taking the struggling startup to the next level, Ely persuaded her, would be worth cutting short her sabbatical. In January 1991 Lo Alker reluctantly bid goodbye to the two remaining months of planned travel and leisure with her second husband and donned her powersuit. The rest, as they say, has become Silicon Valley legend.
By early 1994 Lo Alker had readied NPI for its long awaited IPO (initial public offering). And none too soon. NPI was in desperate need of a capital infusion to stay in business, its cash having dwindled to alarming levels. But Lo Alker had done her work well. On June 28 NPI's IPO netted $12.1 million by selling 2.3 million shares at $6 a share. An even better indication of the confidence Lo Alker's work had inspired in the investment community came in November when NPI's 1.6 million-share secondary offering raised another $33.7 million. In the four months since its IPO, NPI stock quadrupled to $22.25 a share, making NPI Silicon Valley's most successful IPO for 1994.
ou might say Pauline Leung was trained for the role of the super-competent big sister/savior from the time she was born. She was born in Canton in 1943 to a father who was a self-made entrepreneur. By the time Pauline was six her family fled to Hong Kong to escape the communists.
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In her early girlhood in a struggling Hong Kong refugee family Pauline came to understand that her older brother was the one on whom her old-fashioned parents placed their real hopes. Not only was he the family's first son, he was also the extended family's first grandchild. "He obviously had a privileged position in a Chinese family," Lo Alker recalls. "And my younger brother is youngest, of course another privileged position. Ever since I was very very small, my parents always indoctrinated me that my ambition in life is helping my two brothers succeed."
Under normal circumstances Pauline would have started first grade at the age of 6. In her case, however, her mother bundled her off to school at the age of five to act as a sort of personal attendant to her brother who was 18 months older. The elder Leungs felt his chances of succeeding would be greatly enhanced if he were accompanied by his quick-witted little sister.
"There were times I questioned it, of course," Lo Alker admits. "As I grew older I sometimes grew very resentful. Why me, right? However, looking back, I felt maybe I'm the privileged one because ever since I was young, I was given a direction, a sense of mission so to speak, a focus. Even though it wasn't fair, they always encouraged me to do as much as I could--not so much for me but for them. Perhaps they understood intuitively that I had attributes that my brothers didn't."
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or many the word peripheral suggests marginal, less than central. In the fast-moving hi-tech business world of Silicon Valley that word has come to mean the next hot growth area. For Pauline Lo Alker, 53, that word best sums up her life and career. Once upon a time the only way the bright young daughter of a struggling Hong Kong family could get hired by a computer company was to take a typing job. Today that same woman is the celebrated CEO who rescued a promising Silicon Valley startup from probable extinction and turned it into an industry powerhouse valued at $400 million.
ou might say Pauline Leung was trained for the role of the super-competent big sister/savior from the time she was born. She was born in Canton in 1943 to a father who was a self-made entrepreneur. By the time Pauline was six her family fled to Hong Kong to escape the communists.
