Living Dangerously: Building a 100-year-old electronics startup in California
Dr. Andrew Cromarty, N6JLJ
February 28, 2020 @ 6:00PM-10:00PM

Heathkit is known worldwide as the iconic largest, oldest kit manufacturer in the United States. Or it was, until the company changed its business model 30 years ago to emphasize its institutional educational products line.

In recent years, a new management team at Heath Company has been methodically restoring Heathkit to its destiny as the leading designer, manufacturer and provider of the world's highest-quality electronic kits. Dr. Cromarty expands on his recent invited IEEE History lecture by presenting materials from the century-old Heathkit historic materials archive not previously shown to the public. For those unfamiliar with Heathkit, he provides an abbreviated tour of the thousands of Heathkit products, and describes a few products you probably did not know existed.

Dr. Cromarty relates some of the challenges in building an electronics product manufacturing company today, including some special challenges that make California the worst place on the planet to start a company. Despite these challenges, Heathkit now has re-established R&D, product design, manufacturing, partner relationships, back office infrastructure, vendor and supply chains, operations procedures, publications, marketing and sales, customer service, tech support, intellectual property and legal, and more—while maintaining Heathkit's historic “We won't let you fail™” product approach that makes building complex commercial-quality products possible for everyone. Dr. Cromarty also discusses Heathkit's plans and progress in the company's return to the amateur radio market.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Andrew Cromarty is President of Heath Company (Heathkit). He is an Amateur Extra class license holder, N6JLJ, and has been a ham for about 40 years, having served as an Assistant EC, Assistant DEC, and Section Traffic Manager and participated in many contests, although since restarting Heathkit it's been difficult for him to find time to get on the air.

Prior to Heathkit, Dr. Cromarty has been a chief officer in a half-dozen Silicon Valley companies ranging from tiny startup to billion-dollar publicly-traded tech company and spanning broadband, wireless, health, entertainment, and investment banking, as well as serving in past corporate scientist and corporate marketing roles, and he has sat on corporate boards of directors or advisors in technology, advertising, and corporate venture capital.

He holds undergraduate degrees in Music, Biology and Psychology, and MS and PhD degrees in Computer & Information Science. In addition to his work as President of Heath Company, he has been active in scouting for decades, and he chairs the board of advisors for a company applying microloans, agriculture and community-scale entrepreneurship to address the clean water crisis in Africa.

Photos from the 2019 Winter Banquet:

Photos courtesy Bob Bynum

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