Interviews at The Entrepreneur Center @NVTC

An Interview with David Vos, Founder, CEO and CTO, Athena Technologies
June 19, 2006

When Dave Vos was a young kid, he dreamed of building and flying airplanes. Now, to an extent, he's fulfilling that childhood dream. As the head of Athena Technologies in Warrenton, Va., Vos and his team are building the computers that run unmanned vehicles such as airplanes, drones and robots. Athena’s customers include such big names in defense as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Atomics, and AAI Corp. His company, which was launched by Vos in 1998, is expected to bring in more than $20 million in revenue this year. With a staff of about 60 and $3 million in venture capital, Vos, 45, is a finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2006 award, which will be announced June 22. He came to the United States at age 26 from Capetown, South Africa, to do graduate work at MIT, from which he later obtained his masters and PhD.

Tania Anderson, for Bisnow on Business: What exactly does Athena do?
We build navigation and control systems which are the brains of unmanned airplanes. We build those systems into boxes and we sell them to people who build unmanned air vehicles.

How did you get interested in this?
It was being a three year old and wanting to build airplanes. It was going through education and then finally discovering as a young engineering student dynamics and control systems and airplane control systems. Then I found a very narrow area that I really wanted to explore within that domain. This was when I was still in South Africa as a student. I set my sights on getting to MIT and came here to learn everything I could. Starting in 1979 was the real trajectory…and then ending up with a Ph.D here and focusing on developing the market by building and flying as many as possible control systems on different airplanes. Finally it was the right time to build a company and build a real business around it.

You were at MIT. How did you end up in Warrenton, Va.?
I was doing some development work with a couple of companies around the country and in Virginia. I gravitated down to Virginia mostly because of 9/11. I arrived at National Airport literally the same minute that the airplane hit the Pentagon. I was in the last airplane that came into National Airport that day. I was stuck here for almost a month. My wife came and visited me and took me out to a part of Virginia I had never seen which was the beautiful horse country. We decided that weekend we were going to move here.

What were you doing at the time?
Athena had existed and I had been collaborating with my co-founder and some of the investors. I was the chief technology officer working remotely. We were giving it a shot to see whether the company could run.

How did Athena get customers like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon?
Hustle, hustle, hustle. I developed this theory that I really wanted to develop. The value is in a very structured way to make auto pilots for airplanes. Instead of doing it by debate and consensus, it’s done by mathematics. I got my hands on whatever I could in terms of activities and projects with various organizations as diverse as Raytheon and Aurora Flight Sciences and even in the medical community. For Ingersoll Rand I did projects of various control systems that proved the capability of the theory. By the time the company was formed there was already a decade of demonstrations of the value of the technology and a small core team that the company is centered around. If you build subpar solutions, you’re pretty quickly out of the game. Airplanes, when they have problems, they fall out of the air.

I understand the technology can be used to improve fuel efficiency. How?
In the 90s, we took engine control work we had done and applied it to general aviation airplanes and demonstrated that you could improve the fuel economy by about 20 percent just by doing accurate control systems on the propulsion system for the airplane. 20 percent is a big number. Those kind of techniques apply across the board to any internal combustion engine.

So it would work for cars?
Yes. Cars, generators, anything that goes putt putt. Beyond that to wind-powered generation to stand-by power generation. There’s a very broad application range.

What are you doing to move into that area?
We have patents on that work all over the world. We shelved it because we wanted to focus on the flight controls and navigation market. We’re just in the process of resurrecting those market areas and will be considering when and how we launch into these other energy markets over the next year.

Were you exposed to tech as a kid?
I grew up around airplanes. My family was in and around the Air Force. You grow up a country like South Africa, you have to know how to fix things because it costs a lot. Fixing cars and fixing electronics, that was just what you did as kid growing up there. I never owned a microwave oven before I came to this country. The first time I ever saw TV I was 16 years old. But we had a transistor radio to listen to Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon.

Were your parents business people?
My mother was an admin person at a bank and then she became a mom and was busy with the three of us kids. My father was a navigator in the Air Force and finished his service and was a really good accounting manager and manager of local branches of banks in South Africa. Then he started a business doing construction. But there’s no real entrepreneurial example for me. The notion of setting up a high-tech company, I learned here in the U.S.

How did you end up at MIT?
I finished graduate school in South Africa in 1983. I did two years of national service and then I did a hitchhiking tour around the U.S. in 1985. All I did was fill out a form. Make no mistake, as a young kid, my mother convinced me that academic excellence was very important. I always was top of my classes in school in South Africa. It really paid off.

What did your parents think when you went off to MIT?
If they were proud they really didn’t tell me. It’s British culture. It’s a stiff upper lip and you really don’t say much. I’m certain they were pretty excited. But at the same time they were torn because they didn’t want their kid leaving. But they realized the opportunities were not there.

What was your childhood like?
In the culture I grew up in, it was very outdoorsy and sports oriented and academically focused. I grew up knowing that I needed to be able to speak with geeks and be able to play rugby on the best teams. My childhood was fantastic. I hitchhiked all around southern Africa starting at about age 11. I rode thousands and thousands of rides and went all over the place - Namibia, Zimbabwe, Botswana. I grew up in Capetown on the ocean and surfing and playing in the ocean. But I was very aware of the unpleasant political environment that I was growing up in. We were highly opposed to the government and its policies. That’s not unusual growing up an English person in South Africa and as a member of the Democratic side as opposed to the Nationalist side. The year I was born, South Africa instituted apartheid in 1961. It was not lost at all on me and my friends and it’s one of the reasons I was pretty motivated to leave. When I left, the country was in a state of emergency and had been in that state for most of the decade of the 80s and the world embargoes were having an impact on the country. It was not difficult to leave.

[This interview conducted by Tania Anderson for Bisnow on Business.]