252 - Semiconductor Success: Balancing Growth and Personal Development in Leadership with Axus Technology's Dan Trojan

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started.

Diane Trojan, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are— I get to say this, I'll say it slowly— the co-founder, the co-owner, and the CEO of a company based in, or in Chandler, Arizona, Phoenix area, called Axus Technologies. And Axus is spelled A-X-U-S. The website is axustech.com. I went to the website, and I'm a pretty smart guy, but I am not an engineer. What the heck do you guys do?

Yeah, a lot of people ask that question, and they tend to ask it over and over again because it takes a while before it sticks. When you make computer chips, and these would be memory chips, processing chips, chips for cell phone signal transmission, all this type of thing, all these integrated circuits, semiconductor devices, there are hundreds of processing steps that need to go. It's very complex, very difficult for laypeople to understand, but there are hundreds and hundreds of steps that have to happen, many of them over and over again before you can actually make a functioning computer chip that you could say put in your computer or your cell phone or something. And what we do is we specialize in designing, manufacturing very specific types of equipment that are used for certain of those steps that go over— they're used to actually make computer chips. So it's called generically, in our lingo, we call it semiconductor manufacturing equipment or semiconductor processing equipment.

So don't you have a big chip plant being built there in Phoenix?

Yeah, it's a very exciting time. Everybody knows about Silicon Valley, right? For all, most of us have been alive, that's been a household term. And now what's happening is for multiple reasons, a lot of that activity is moving or just is really accumulating and building up in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Just to the south of us here, a couple miles is where Intel has had their biggest concentration of what we call fabs, which are semiconductor fabrication facilities or factories. Um, the biggest concentration of fabs for Intel are all just south of us here in a different suburb of Phoenix area. And then the largest— so those are companies that make their own chips. Intel makes their own chips. Many companies do. There are also what are called foundries, which are companies that they don't design chips, they don't sell chips or support chips for their applications. They just manufacture chips for other third-party companies. They call that foundry. It was a radical idea back in the, say, late '80s, early '90s. It started in Taiwan. And now one of the most valuable companies in the world is a company called TSMC, which is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

I'm familiar with it.

And they are building, uh, huge— already two, and they're planning to do up to six— what are called gigafactories or gigafabs. Well, they were massive factories to build chips for third parties, and that what they've done, that was the original business model was theirs, and they have now grown that into one of the most valuable companies in the world.

And so do you— does your company then manufacture equipment that you sell to these fabrication facilities?

We sell to those types of, of businesses and, and business models and customers. But one big differentiation in our industry is how large the wafers are. Wafers of silicon, very high purity silicon. That are, that the chips are made on, are fabricated on. And so the largest portion of our industry is a large, the largest wafer, which is 300mm, which is nominally a foot in diameter. That is where the high volume leading edge stuff occurs in our industry. That is not our core market. Our core market is for the next size smaller wafer, which is 200mm, nominally 8-inch diameter. And that is more used for a lot of very interesting, new, challenging types of materials rather than silicon. Silicon is the most prevalent element on Earth. It's a salt. It's just sand, basically, that gets very highly purified and processed. That's— that is basically the starting material for silicon. But there's— as the technology gets more and more prolific in our society, There are a lot of other applications and technologies that don't rely on silicon. And those are— that's the part of the overall ecosystem where we focus. A good example of that is a very new material called silicon carbide, which was originally brought to a large scale by Tesla because Elon Musk and Tesla realized that by using a much more advanced optimum type of material, They could actually extend, say, the range of an electric vehicle by 25 to 40%. And that's an area that, that is driving a lot of our growth currently is this process equipment I described earlier that is used for these very advanced novel materials like silicon carbide.

How the heck did you get into this business?

The way I got into this business was my uncle worked for a company that was just starting to get into semiconductors from other materials that they worked on were similar materials. Like glass, and he was the manufacturing supervisor. He saw me working as a busboy at a Mexican restaurant, and he said, hey, Dan, I can tell you really hustle when you're on the job. He said, how about you come to work for me, and you can learn some actual trade skills, technical skills, which sounded great to me. And then I spent about the first couple of weeks in that new job sweeping the shop floors and cleaning up the machine shop and taking out the trash. So it was a pretty humble beginning as far as learning the trade skills, but over time I did learn a lot of very valuable trade skills from that. And then when I left, uh, the company because I thought I wanted to be a commercial fisherman, um, and then I realized that had its own set of challenges that I didn't see coming. So I decided I'd better go back to college, get my engineering degree, which I did. And when I completed my degree, the company asked me to come back to work for them in engineering. And I really started, that was when they were just getting into semiconductor type of equipment. And so I led the charge at that point in my career.

And how did Axis get formed?

Yeah, so I worked for that company for many years, became, worked my way up to director of engineering, and then was seeking new opportunities, greener pastures. And so I worked for a couple of similar companies. They were competitors to the company I was working for originally. And then the company that I moved to Phoenix for one of those companies. And when I did that, two things happened, the dot-com bubble burst and 9/11. All of those things, dot-com bubble bursting was early, was during the 2000s basically. And 2001 was, was 9/11. So basically there were no jobs. I was talking to headhunters and recruiters and they said, man, there's just no jobs in, in this industry, especially in Arizona. So your choices are very limited, but if you want to have any opportunity to try to move, make a lateral move with where you are, where you were with your previous company, which I got laid off from after 9/11 because the company was going downhill. And so they basically said the one choice would be to move to Silicon Valley where there's more opportunities in, in your field, in your industry, and ply your trade there, basically. I was, I had a young family, two young daughters and a big mortgage. And so relocating to another state was really undesirable. So I basically, it was interesting too, the day that I got laid off, I was an emotional wreck. I did not see it coming, had no warning. And I went home in a bad emotional state. And my wife said, Dan, this is great. I said, honey, what are you talking about? And she said, you've always talked about wanting to start your own business. As long as you're making a good salary and providing, providing a good lifestyle for us and everything, that would, it's not, would never happen. So now is your chance. You're out of a job. Your, your career choices are very limited. So this is great. Now you get to start your own company. Having been the one on the receiving end of that, of that encouragement is pretty challenging, but decided I would try to start my own company and take all the experience that I had in the, in designing, manufacturing new proprietary equipment for my previous employers. And I said, I will take that experience and hang up a shingle and see what I can do to just drum up business opportunities and, and give it a shot. So the original business model was to take that experience and apply it to what we call the secondary equipment market. So rather than designing and manufacturing new equipment, it's like a good analogy would be almost like used vehicles versus new vehicles. I wasn't, I didn't have a, wasn't able to design, build, sell new equipment, but I could take existing used equipment and buy those and then add new technology to them, make them expand their application space, extend their life cycle, improve their capabilities, and then resell those, that equipment back into the industry, and that's how I started.

Wow. Yeah. And here you are today. How many employees do you have today?

About 110.

Wow. That's amazing.

And growing quite, quite rapidly.

Now, of course, with the AI revolution and NVIDIA and everybody out there, everybody's demanding more faster.

Absolutely. And you look, we, we say now that semiconductors are the new oil because You see what's happening geopolitically around the world, right? Everything's gone on with, with conflicts between countries and well, as what we went through with the pandemic, all of these countries are realizing, hey, we have to have our own onshore domestic semiconductor industry, or we are at a huge risk of whatever.

That's why the government is putting billions or billions of dollars into incentives for companies like Intel to, to build plants all over the United States.

That's exactly right. And the European Union is doing this. Other countries are doing this. It, it was a wake-up call worldwide that if you rely on other suppliers, countries, companies for something as critical as semiconductor technology, there's just a huge inherent risk in doing so. So now one of the things that's driving a lot of the growth in our industry is now instead of having just the minimum capacity to meet the demands worldwide, you actually have an the need for a lot of redundancy because all these geographic areas, countries are saying we have to be very much independent in our capacity capabilities here. So that's a huge growth driver for our industry, as well as the fact that other things are going on just in society. So electric vehicles is a great example. It's a game changer for our industry. AI, if you look at the stories, the statistics about AI, We've always had these data centers for, for storing information in the cloud and having software services and whatnot that, that run in the cloud. Now with AI, it's, I don't know what the actual numbers are, orders of magnitude more data centers are needed now to support AI. These things consume as much electricity as some countries can produce. And there's still a vast shortage of bandwidth and capacity there.

I've heard some, I've heard some really terrifying statistics that in 5 years, We'll need 10 times the amount of electricity that we produce right now if the projected growth for data centers continues. And it's crazy that existing infrastructure will— could never expand fast enough to support it. Which is really interesting because I'm the vice president of a startup here in California and we build— we've developed a new type of generator that's 33— it uses 33% less copper and is a third less in weight and size and produces huge amounts of power at very low torque. And so the timing might be right for us too.

I'd be very much interested in hearing more about that.

Yeah, no, it's really, it's incredible technology. If the motors, if the generators turn into a motor and put in a car, we can extend the range with existing tech, with existing battery technology, not changing anything. We can extend the range by between 30 and 50%.

Wow.

Just because of how efficient our motors— we use— we have a 3, 3 magnetic fields. It's a radial axial radial technology, and we're able to create 3 magnetic fields instead of the usual 2. And because of the topology, we're able to control the flux so that there— we don't get any—

we have no heat.

There's no heat loss. It's all turned into motive power, or as a generator, it's turning in.

Definitely would like to learn more about it, but that's right in the same wheelhouse as what we're doing.

Exactly. Exactly.

How do you generate more power with maximum efficiency? How do you do that in a sustainable way? Renewable energy being— renewable sources being ideal. How do you transmit that power around the grid with minimal loss, maximum efficiency? But if you look at a data center, for example, these things consume massive amounts of electricity. In the process, they generate massive amounts of heat. That's right. To keep those centers running, you have to have massive amounts of cooling capacity. That's right. HVAC to keep that heat down.

It also takes power to, to run.

It also takes then a massive amount of power. So you get this runaway effect, right? Where this— that AI is, is now the, the benefits of AI and how it's gonna change society. Of course, you could read about that too, and it's just absolutely mind-boggling, right? What will likely happen in the not too distant future. Exactly. But this— the resources, uh, the technology now exists to do large language model learning and this type of thing, but the resources, particularly power, that it's going to require to enable that technology to do its job is, is— it's just amazing.

Exactly. And how do we do it without burning fossil fuels?

Yeah, exactly.

And that's where Even if you were to use fossil fuels with our technology, you're the— we would reduce greenhouse gases by 33 to 40%, which is huge.

Same reason we're using different materials for electronic devices in automobiles. It's just so much more efficient. It used— this technology has been around for a long time. It's been known, but it really just hasn't been economically viable until these other considerations become so paramount that now you have to implement these solutions because it's, it becomes mandatory.

So I'm curious, Dan, what is it? You've been doing this for a long time. What is it that gets you up in the morning and gets you excited to go to work?

Certainly one of the big things is being a technology geek, which wasn't always maybe such a good thing, but some of us couldn't help ourselves. And now it's becoming maybe a little bit more attractive in society because tech is cool in a lot of ways, right? But for me, I've always just been— I, I loved engineering. I love learning engineering in school. I love practicing it. And it's cliché to say if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life.

That's right.

But it also is, it's very accurate and very true in a lot of cases. I, I've, I've said that to employees here. If what you're doing here isn't something you really truly enjoy, then I would encourage you to try to go find something else. And if there's— if I can help you down that path, I'm happy to do it. I'm motivated. I love— it's a combination of technology and creativity. When you design a machine, you can do it an infinite number of different ways, but you have to make— but you do it a certain way. But it's, it's a very creative process, and it's based on technology. So it's a lot of fun. It's very stimulating. Also, I like— I've enjoyed growing the business because It's a way for me to help other people. I hire people, I train them, I try to mentor them if I can. I take a lot of pride in the fact that we've been in business now for 22 years, and I've seen employees that come in here that have had children while they worked here. Now those children have grown up, become adults. A lot of them have gone through school or into a, chosen a career path. For me, that's very gratifying to just be able to say I have been able to provide so many families with a stable work environment that gave them security, financial security and job security, so they don't have to deal with the stresses of not having those things as part of their, part of their life path.

I'm curious, I'm curious, how much engineering do you get to do today? You're the CEO, you run the company, that, that requires a lot of different hats.

Yeah, you're asking me.

I just saw this side. Yeah, I don't get to get dirty as much as I want.

I, yeah, I love working with my hands. I like tinkering with hardware, like writing software, um, and that's what I did for decades in my career. And then now the company starts to grow, that now you have to change your focus and learn new disciplines about— I can't be the guy that if somebody has a problem with the machine at a customer site or out or our, on our manufacturing floor, often people would come to me, customers, employees, and say, hey, how can I, you know, can you help me fix this? Help me figure this out. And I love doing it. I could do it all day long. And then sometimes, typically on a Saturday, I'll come in here and have to do office work, emails, or write a proposal or work on a quote or something like that. And the day just seems to go by so much more slowly because it's not as engaging and entertaining and stimulating as is the hands-on technical stuff that I love. But you're absolutely right. I don't get to do, I don't really frankly get to do much of any of that anymore. I still love, would love to do it, but it's just not, it's not my role anymore. So I spend a lot of time now with, with bankers and lawyers and account statements and consultants, and it's a very different role than I'm used to.

Yeah.

It has, but it's also stimulating since I, learning new skills is always enjoyable.

What do you, what's unique about you that you bring to the table that's made you successful? You didn't start out to be a CEO or a founder.

No.

So you were self-taught along the way. What is it that you think is unique that has allowed you the success that you've had so far?

I think a lot of it is persistence. I think the more you apply your trade and learn new skills and continue doing it just because you're driven and you enjoy doing it just naturally and in a very fo— pretty focused path. I've been, I've worked with people that went from semiconductors to real estate, to marketing, to all these different areas. I've done this for a very long time because I've been, enjoy doing it and I've been successful doing it. And I think one of it's sort of passion, just technical curiosity, persistence and perseverance. You just, you don't quit, you know?

I understand.

And another one, I think for me personally, we're all different, but I've always been the technical geek on the technical side, but I've always enjoyed interacting with customers, certainly employees, suppliers, and partners. Partners. A lot of engineers, I think, tend to be pretty introverted and more focused just in the technical area. I've always enjoyed traveling, meeting with customers, hearing about their problems, seeing how their businesses operate. So I, I was— I always feel blessed that I, I think I had a good mix of certain skills or abilities or interests that allowed me to go from a very technical role and career to something that's much broader. I I do sales presentations with customers. I interact with them a lot. I travel. And most engineers, I think, really often prefer to be more focused just on the technical work and just staying inside the office environment that they're familiar and comfortable with and maybe not wanting to be as, maybe as outgoing as I have just because the way I'm wired.

Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

That depends on if my wife is going to see it. My wife would very much like me to start slowing down a little bit. Slowing down a little bit, not completely, but maybe going from 50 hours a week to 30 or something like that. I think that would be optimal for me. I, I, I have too much still to, too far to go to want to just let off the gas completely. But the other part of this is the company is growing. It's, and so you said co-owner, I'm actually the sole owner of the company.

Oh, okay.

I bought out my co-founding partner in 2017 and then really reinvested a lot in the company, which has really driven our growth a lot. In terms of sales and profitability. Also, we've invested a lot in new products and intellectual property, a pretty extensive patent portfolio to protect those— that investment, which I think we've done a good job of doing. And, but the company is getting to this scale. You go through these— it's a mom-and-pop shop for a while, and then you get up to the, say, the high single digits, low double digits of millions of revenue, and then that's a big threshold. And I think a lot of people see that's a big That's a big chasm to cross for, for a bootstrap startup company, which we were. And then now we've grown it up to the midsize business, the tens of millions. And so being the sole shareholder and funding that growth, and when you have, you have this much invested in the business and this much, say, liquidity as a, as an individual, it, there's a lot of leverage there. There's a lot of risk associated with that. And The next 5 to 10 years for me will be to continue to grow the company. I love doing what we're doing, but looking at probably diversifying my ownership somewhat or whatnot so that it could be a little less different life risk reward balance than what I did.

Yeah. Scaling, scaling is always an issue and scaling is much more difficult than people think it is. As you were just talking about.

And I learned that the hard way. People would always tell me that. I say, I think I got this. We've been in business a long time. We've been conservative, frugal. And so, and I compare that to say maybe a third-party funded company, whether it's private equity or venture capital or shareholder funded or something like that. But I was completely wrong when it came to growing the business. I had, we had just as much challenges and many challenges in that respect as I think anybody else would deal with. And we did, I did not see it coming. That was a, a very difficult learning experience that we, we got through it fine. And that's all in the past and, and lessons were, were all learned along the way. But, but yeah, growing a business is, is like running, starting a business, very challenging. Growing a business is even much more so.

One, I'm curious, this show's called Listening with Leaders, and as from my background, I teach these deep listening skills as a lawyer turned peacemaker. I'm curious about how you learned how to listen.

Yeah, I give that a lot of thought actually, learning how to listen. And I think it's something that's critically important in many aspects of life, not just in business, but particularly in business for sure. It's, I would say it's something I gave a lot of thought to and I would be in meetings or have interact with people where in, you know, the back of my mind, I'm thinking thoughtfully about how best how to make the best of those situations. A lot of that in my mind is doing less talking and more listening. And I was— I've always been very mindful of that. I, I read books on learning leadership skills. Uh, personal development is another topic that's of a lot of interest to me. And so I think maybe I learned some of that from that, but as well things you read. And but learning how to listen And do so effectively is difficult for a lot of us, but I was always mindful of trying to improve at that more or less on a continuous basis.

I think it's really interesting that we're not taught how to listen. We really aren't. When you think about it, we're ordered to listen as children. We're ordered to listen as students. We're ordered to listen as subordinates, but nobody ever teaches us how to listen.

I totally agree. If you look at what's taught in the schools, I think things like this personal development, just as a broad category, and things like listening skills, communication skills. Just, there's— I think those of us that learn that, we learn it, um, based on self-interest, self-discipline, self-driven, because there's no others. Otherwise, it's not— it doesn't happen. It doesn't happen in education. It doesn't happen in, uh, everyday life. And if it's not something that you're really thoughtful about you're— I think your mind just doesn't go there and you just don't learn those things.

And actual listening is counterintuitive to what we think it is. I learned a deep listen. I, I had an epiphany about listening back in 2005 in a very difficult conflict I was working in. And once I applied— in that case, I applied this epiphany just because I didn't have anything else to do. My back was up against the wall.

Sounds familiar.

It was just, it was unbelievable what happened. These people who were ready to kill each other reconciled and walked out 4 hours later, the litigation completely settled and walked out holding hands. They were a former divorce couple and walked out holding hands like nothing had ever happened. And 4 hours before, if there'd been knives on the table, there would've been blood on the floor. I'd never seen anything like it.

I, I perused your website. Um, yeah.

So you saw, you've seen some of the stuff that I do.

I've read some information about what you do, the books you've written. And I would say as, as a student that's always trying to improve and learn, I will be reading one or more of your books. I think it's a fascinating subject. It's something that I appreciate.

My publisher appreciates that. And so do I.

It also seems like a unique subject. I've, I've read about. Emotional intelligence. I've searched for books on that topic and whatnot because I think it's interesting, but I don't know. I have not— I'm not aware of anything that just focuses more on what it sounds like is just the learning aspect of life and communication and interaction and how to get, get better at it. I'm fascinated by the subject.

So yeah, I, I grew up with a lot of disabilities. I had a lot of disabilities, and people were— I had a lot of coaches that as a child that coaches and teachers became very impatient with me. I couldn't see, I couldn't walk. There are a lot of things I couldn't do because I physically was unable. And I swore to myself that when I got through all of that, which I finally did, I would always teach the how, not the what. You just do it this way. No, that doesn't work. Here's how you do it. Step 1, step 2, step 3. And coach people through each step. And that's why I know today that I can teach anybody how to never have a fight or argument again in their life, because I, I figured out the how of it. This is how you do it. This is exact, and here's the science. This is why you do it. This is what's going on in the brain. This is how it works. It's all science. It's all science-based. There's no voodoo stuff in here. No pop psychology. It's real hard neurophysiology that, that makes it work. So that's what makes it fun and gratifying for me. One more question. I'll let you go, Deanne. What's something about you that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us? Yeah, what's coming? If you watched some of my earlier podcasts, that's a tough question.

I guess it would probably be, there are things that are quite important to me that I tend to more keep to myself because I think there are some things that are good to interact with people. There are some things I'd be a little bit more introverted or protective of, and part of that would be religion. People don't really understand that I have strong faith. I'm trying to constantly build that faith, but that's something I don't necessarily outwardly share with a lot of people because I— for my own personal reasons.

Absolutely.

Good for you. You are introverted, and guess what? You're somewhere in the 230, 240 40 episodes I've done on this show of CEOs and leaders, of all the people that I've interviewed who are successful leaders, only one was an extrovert.

Is that right?

I'm an introvert. Every single successful person I've interviewed on this show except for one is, has been a deep introvert.

That's fascinating. I'd never heard that.

I know.

I would've never believed it.

I know, but it's true. And, and there are people, I've interviewed people in every imaginable kind of business from tech like you to big manufacturing, to pharma, to e-commerce, you name it. Some amazing stuff. Wine, winery operator, everybody. They're all introverts. Why? Pardon me now?

Everybody would assume just the opposite, I would think.

You would think, but what they're able to do, what they're— what everyone's able to do is they're able to project themselves out with confidence. And having gone— had a lot of experience and laid, laid a lot of mistakes, they can speak, they can talk, but at the end of the day, they'd rather go home and be with their family and go inside to reenergize than to go out to a conference and glad-hand everybody. And you see, you're nodding your head. I'm exactly the same way.

Very true.

And that's the way, that's the way most successful CEOs that I've interviewed are.

I just, very surprised.

I thought you'd like to know that you're not alone, my friend.

Good to know.

Dan, this has been a great 30 minutes talking with you. Thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.

Likewise, Doug. I really appreciate the opportunity. Studio. I enjoyed it very much as well.

You're welcome.

Okay.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com.

DougNoll.com/podcast.

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