Tektronix created the Silicon Valley Forest, and Newcombe plans to continue "planting trees"

This article is translated from: wweek.com, author: Anthony Effinger

If you work in high tech in Oregon, you probably have Tektronix to thank.

Don't know who Tek is? It was the original tech company in Oregon. It was the first tree in the "Silicon Valley Forest," which is what everyone started calling Oregon in the 1990s when they started building big new factories there.

Tek was here before Intel. Four Oregonians founded the company in 1946 in a basement on Southeast Foster Road and built oscilloscopes, devices that measured voltage changes in any electronic device—televisions, radios, semiconductors, cars.

As sales surged, Tek became one of Oregon's largest employers, attracting engineers from all over the country. All this talent began to attract companies like Intel, which in turn attracted more suppliers, and the Silicon Valley forest grew.

Tek seemed to be on the decline in the 2000s. It had entered too many markets, including solid-ink printers that looked like crayons. Tek had to narrow its business. Like many Oregon companies, it was acquired by Danaher, a large Oregon conglomerate, in 2007 for $2.85 billion.

But now, Tek is rebounding. In 2016, Danaher spun off a new public company called Fortive, which included Tek. Last year, Tek promoted a former Cisco Systems executive, Tami Newcombe, to president.

Tami Newcombe

Newcombe is excited about Tek’s prospects. As Tek’s industry knows, the test and measurement industry is evolving as electronic devices and sensors find their way into more applications such as self-driving cars. One of the biggest developments is that unlike a cell phone, making sure these sensors work properly is a matter of life and death.

If a phone malfunctions, you might hang up, Newcombe says: "But there's so much electronics in medical devices and cars that you can't get any of it wrong."

Newcombe has been competitive her whole life. She was the first girl to play soccer in her small town of Lafayette, New York. She earned a bachelor's degree in electrical and bioengineering from Syracuse University, where she was also No. 1 on the volleyball team. "I think of business as a sport, and we have a scorecard," Newcombe said.

After graduating from college, Newcombe went to work for IBM as a hardware engineer, designing the company's flagship high-performance computer. Soon after, she earned her MBA.

In 1999, she went to work in sales for Cisco Systems, the networking equipment giant run by John Chambers, a dyslexic lawyer who had brought Cisco to prominence.

She took over a new sales territory in northern Florida and grew sales there from $500,000 a quarter to $2 million in three years. She rose to vice president of sales at Cisco, a position she held until 2017, when she grew the business to $1.5 billion in revenue and Tek lured her away.

When Newcombe was in college, he drove 4,000 miles in the United States in 60 days.

Newcombe respects Tek’s heritage and says she is dazzled by the work of the company’s engineers. Tek still makes its most advanced measurement equipment in its Beaverton plant, not in Asia, because it requires advanced engineering.

Like many leaders of established companies, Newcombe is wary of complacency.

“When you’ve been doing something right for six or seven decades, it’s easy to think you have all the answers and you can sit in a conference room and come up with the next great thing,” Newcombe said. “I think I’ve challenged that process.”

One of Tek's founders was Reed College graduate Howard Vollum. After Tek made him wealthy, Vollum dispersed his wealth around Portland, giving millions of dollars to Reed College, Oregon Health & Science University, Katrin Gabel College and many other institutions, all of which also owed money to Tek's legacy.

Derrol Pennington, a Reed graduate and Tek employee, recalled the obituary for Vollum when he died in 1986: “He was very humble, but quietly insistent on the hard work of others. He expected a lot from people, but he left you alone.”

It sounds like Vollum might be a fan of Newcombe.