A small, palm-sized laptop charger called Zolt is reinventing the laptop charger. Zolt, a division of Avogy, Inc. has created a compact charger that does away with the heavy laptop charging brick that comes with laptops and lets users charge up to 3 devices at once, including a laptop, in one small, lightweight device.
Avogy was launched back in 2010 and the Zolt division was created soon after, with a focus on revolutionizing the technology that powers consumer and business devices. The Zolt Laptop Charger Plus has done just that; letting users, for the first time, forego the standard laptop charger. The company, based in San Jose CA, has grown from 5 to 50 full time employees and is still growing, says founder and CTO Isik C. Kizilyalli. He gave us some insight into what the company looks for in a new hire.
What are your criteria for a new hire?
Domain knowledge, ability to tackle and solve difficult problems, tenacity, excellent written and oral communication skills, and ability to function in cross discipline teams.
What’s unique about your hiring process?
Identify top talent and aggressively recruit.
Is there one question in particular that helps you determine someone's abilities?
Look for documented successes; assess the difficult problems solved by the candidate, and contributions to their respective field.
What are some of the most in-demand skills for working at a tech company today?
There are many necessary skills someone looking for a job in tech needs to have. These include: problem solving skills, communication – oral and written, a positive attitude, the ability to know what is good enough, and excellent mathematical skills.
What can someone do on paper or an application to make his or her skills stand out?
Be specific about their achievements and their impact.
How difficult is it to hire top tech talent in this market?
We have been successful in hiring top talent. We identified top talent and thought leaders in the high-risk technology areas in a targeted way. Contributions and impact to the candidate’s specific fields were assessed by their publications, patents, presentations, and products they had launched. We also took into consideration whether their peers regarded them highly. The key recruits all had prominent roles in major technology companies and they recognized the merit of the technology that they would be contributing to at Avogy.
How do you retain your top talent?
It is critical to retain top talent and the management team is judged on this ability. Top employees must be respected and if they absolutely believe that the work at hand has scientific, engineering, and social merit they will stay with the company.
What did you look for early on when building a team?
We used Vinod Khosla’s Gene Pool Engineering methodology. That is, identify the high risk technical areas (device, process, materials, circuits, and modeling) then actively recruit and hire the best people in the world to cover these risk areas.
We also made sure the hires came from top but different universities (Cornell, MIT, Stanford, Illinois, Texas, Tokyo Institute of Technology), had backgrounds in varying semiconductor materials such as GaAs, InP, SiC, Si, and GaN, and had studied electrical engineering, physics, chemistry, or materials science. The founding technical team were also all from different companies; small and large, established or start-ups (Bell Labs, HP-Agilent, Power Integrations, Applied Materials, Finisar, International Rectifier, Alta Devices). Our efforts (company’s original name in stealth mode was ePowersoft Inc.) were documented in detail and formed the basis of the white paper by Vinod Khosla entitled “Gene Pool Engineering.”
