Puget Sound Technology Family Tree

My friends Jasmine and Ankush work for a big umbrella company, Danaher.  Danaher is one of the most successful big companies you’ve never heard about.  They have a market cap of something like $9 billion.  Their strategy is to go around buying relatively small companies and to make them efficient by instilling the Danaher Business Process, which involves a lot of ideas borrowed from Toyota.  The particular business where Jasmine and Ankush work is Fluke, a company that makes the Cadillac of digital multimeters.

Not long ago, Danaher made an unusually large acquisition — they bought Tektronix.  I heard about this acquisition a lot because my parents live in Portland, which is where Tektronix is based, and to them Tektronix is a very big deal.  It’s kind of a matriarch for the technology industry in Portland.  Lots of smart people “graduated” from Tektronix and went off to start their own successful businesses.  My dad works at a company called Planar, which spun off of Tektronix years ago, so this issue is pretty close to home for him.  The big question on his mind is whether Danaher will continue to foster the culture of innovation that was a staple at Tek, or whether they will buckle down, kill frivolous projects, and in general turn it into a less inventive but efficient machine.

To illustrate how important Tektronix is to Portland, take a look at this poster that shows a kind of family tree of the Portland technology community.

Now some people at the Washington Technology Industry Association are trying to create a similar poster for the Puget Sound technology community.  The poster is obviously going to include some well known companies like Microsoft, Expedia, Amazon, Boeing, etc.  But they now have a list of some 170 smaller companies that, I’m sure, have roots in the big ones.  I know that most of the engineers at Redfin are either ex-Microsoft or ex-PlumTree.  My friends at JamGlue have roots in Expedia, Microsoft, and Amazon.  It’s all pretty connected.  Can’t wait to see how the poster will look.

BTW, I learned about this on John Cook’s blog, where else.