This week in | Electronic Engineering | Monday January
30,1989 A CMP Publication |
THE INDUSTRY NEWSPAPER FOR ENGINEERS AND TECHNICAL MANAGEMENT
Alex Severinsky’s American Dream started in the Ukraine.
Today, the former microwave engineer runs his own company,
Viteq, in Maryland
| By Richard Molay Many a case history of a new entrepreneur begins by describing an engineer with an idea for a product, how hand-assembles the first models on his kitchen table, scrambles for startup capital and then bootstraps his way from his garage to 40 acres in Silicon Valley. Alex Severinsky qualifies as a new entrepreneur, but he didn't follow the pattern. His approach to the Great American dream didn't even begin in America. He caught Capitalist Fever while he was as far away from the bug as a person can get. Alex Severinsky was a Soviet engineer working in Kharkov in the Ukraine when he decided to become an American success story. Severinsky earned his doctorate while working at the Central Research Institute for Electronic Instrumenation in Moscow, an organization similar to the United States' National Bureau of Standards. He specialized in microwave technology, but found time to explore other areas. He even designed and built some vacuum-tube-based digital computers. | For want of $ Somehow Severinsky developed a pretty good idea of the business climate in the U.S. and he was determined to get over here and see what he could do. He read every American publication he could get his hands on and even applied for membership in the IEEE. "They sent me the application forms," he says with a laugh, "but I was unable to change my rubles into the Amencan money required for the membership." Severinsky applied for permission to leave the USSR and ran into the difficulties that often beset Soviet citizens in similar circumstances. Among other problems, he lost his job, but after a nine-month fight his application was approved in 1978. He got on a train in Moscow as a Soviet citizen and he got off in Vienna as a refugee. He was met by a representative of the Hebrew International Aid Society (HIAS) and asked where lie wanted to go. "America," was his immediate response. Two months later he was living and working in Dallas. What did he think of the America he saw in Dallas? "It really didn't matter to me," he recalls. "After Moscow, every place in America looked like paradise." Page 1 | Engineering for English Severinsky had studied English and had no trouble reading technical journals, but his conversational skills were fairly basic. He felt an entry-level engineering job would give him a chance to earn a living while bringing his language skills to a level where he could fill a management position. He was lured by Gearhart-Owens Industries to design downhole logging equipment for oil wells deep that the anihient temperatures were around 400ºF. He stayed for two years, broadened his command of English and never lost sight of his ambition to become his own boss. "I looked for what I thought might develop into a mainstream category some five or 10 years in the future-something that would have good expansion potential, something where my expertise would be important. I wanted to find a challenging field that was engineering oriented and didn't have too many participants-in short, a place to be competitive. And it seemed to me that power electronics fit the bill.” |