Profile: Marco Thompson

‘Catch the wave’ technology entrepreneur joins his friend’s company to develop Smart Grid advances in two-way meters for utility companies

By Arthur Lightbourn

(L-R) Martin Caniff, president, Solekai Systems Corporations, with Marco Thompson, new chief technology officer at Solekai's offices. Photo/Jon Clark

Thanks to being able to sell his $50 million engineering services firm 14 years ago, Marco Thompson has been able to do pretty much anything he wanted to do.
And what he wanted to do was to ‘give back’:
•by helping other entrepreneurs become successful as he had been helped as a young entrepreneur
•and most recently by signing on as chief technology officer of Solekai Systems Corporation, a firm started by the man who gave Thompson his first job out of college 32 years ago and who became a friend.
Solekai, with a staff of 75 employees (65 of them engineers) is a “for hire” software engineering services company that, since it was founded in 2002, has developed a reputation as an international leader in “Smart Grid” development and digital video engineering.
We interviewed Thompson with his friend, Solekai president Martin Caniff, in the board room of Solekai’s offices on Carmel Mountain Road in Sorrento Valley.
“This is our fourth opportunity to work together over 30 years,” Caniff said. “Marco has shown an ability to lead in two areas critical to the future of Solekai. One is keeping ahead of the curve on the technology that goes into complex consumer devices. And second is his understanding of large market shifts regarding technological changes over time.”
Thompson is a youthful-looking 51 with longish, blondish hair and a California-relaxed and confident, non-executive style, although he was born, the eldest of three sons, in Bellefonte, Penn. His dad was and is a psychologist now practicing in Albany, New York. His mother is a special education teacher.
Growing up, he said, his interests were “all things scientific, mechanical, electronic, mathematical and sports.”
These days, Thompson is a resident of Rancho Santa Fe where he lives with his wife of 25 years, Laura, and their son Spencer, a student at West Valley Community College, Los Gatos.
He earned his electrical engineering degree with a minor in computer science from the University of California San Diego in 1979.

“Martin hired me in 1978 (actually I was still in school) at a company called Megatek to work on what was then the world’s most advanced computer graphic systems,” said Thompson, who initially wrote software, then designed hardware and managed his first project.
Thompson left Megatek, after Caniff left, in 1982, to join a computer work station company start-up called SYTE that folded after two years, prompting Thompson in 1984 to launch his own company, Doctor Design, an embedded engineering services firm that eventually did contract work for major corporations such as Samsung, Sony, Mitsubishi and Intel.
By the time Thompson sold Doctor Design to Integrated Systems in 1996, the company had grown to 250 employees. He stayed on as chief technology officer and brought Martin Caniff in as president of the wholly-owned subsidiary in 1999. The subsidiary was sold to Wind River in 2000 and subsequently to Intel in 2009 when Thompson ended 25 years with the firm he had started.
He credits his success in great part to his alma mater, UCSD, where he was taught, what he describes as, “great basic engineering and thinking skills”; and to San Diego itself as a community that provided extraordinary networking and mentoring opportunities for promising entrepreneurs.
As a young entrepreneur, he said, he benefited from the advice he received and the networking that resulted from his involvement with Connect, San Diego’s start up assistance organization, that was born at UCSD in 1984, connecting entrepreneurs with research academics and with service providers — the lawyers, the bankers and venture capitalists.
“Connect has done a marvelous job over the past 26 years of helping create the San Diego start-up economy…”
In addition, Thompson contributed by co-founding and running CommNexus San Diego (formerly San Diego Telecom Council), a nonprofit network of communications, government and defense industry companies. He is also currently a managing partner of Express Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm that has funded eight San Diego companies.
He joined Solekai in his current capacity in January of this year.
“What we do here [at Solekai],” Thompson said, “is we help our customers invent new products and bring new products to market.”
“We’re an engineering services company,” Caniff, 57, a Del Mar resident, further explained: “We do software development for hire. We have two specialty areas that we really focus on. One is the whole digital video space, the set-top boxes for cable companies, satellite companies and other vendor like AT&T, DIRECTV and TiVo. The other part of the business is this new thing called the Smart Grid.”
Caniff has a B.S. degree in mathematics and physics from Harvey Mudd College.
Smart Grid technology allows utility companies, instead of sending out people to read customers’ meters every month, to record and report meter reading automatically every 15 minutes, giving the utility company much more detailed and accurate data of when and how much power is being used at various times of the day.
With that information, utility companies will be able to adjust their rates accordingly (higher rates for high demand times and lower rates for low usage times) and even, with a customer’s permission, turn a customer’s air condition thermostat down to regulate the power on the grid during high demand summer hours. Looking ever further ahead, customers will be able to program a clothes dryer to turn on when electric rates are cheapest.
Thompson explained: “We write the software that communicates from the meter to the utility and from the meter into the home … We work on both sides of the meter.
“With the evolution of the Smart Grid, in 20 years it’s going to be a different world.”
Caniff said, as a consulting firm, staying on top and in front of the technology, and helping customers stay on top of the technology, is a very important part of their business.
“We invest in our personnel and really work to keep them in front of that technology.
“Marco’s job, as chief technology officer, is to help us identify those next new areas that we should be in front of,” Caniff said. “We call it ‘the next wave.’”
Or as Thompson puts it, “We are always telling our people to ‘catch the wave;’ which is figure out which niches that we’re watching are going to grow into a big area so that we can get expert in it and then we can train our customers in it, because our customers really need us to lead them.”
Asked for an example of ‘the next wave,’ Thompson replied: “In effect, the whole idea of working on meter communication and the smart grid is really kind of a new wave.
“A couple of years ago, we really saw that both the utilities and the companies that make the meters really needed some pretty advanced software for wireless communications between the meters and the utilities, and now the next wave that we’re going to catch is between the meter and the appliances in the home.
“The last 100 yards between the meter and the thermostat in the home, that’s our next wave.”
Thompson is passionate about action sports, which include heli-skiing, snowboarding, wakesurfing and wakeboarding (water skiing on a single board) and roller hockey twice a week.
“Actually, it was Martin who taught me how to heli-ski. He’s a very good skier, I’m not, but I manage to get down the hill.”
Roller hockey, he quipped, “allows me to get out my aggression, so that when Martin makes me angry, I have people I can punch on the hockey rink.”
For more information, visit www.solekai.com.