About Incubic

 

About Incubic Management, LLC

We believe business is built on excellence and trust. We are helpful to entrepreneurs because ultimately what is good for the business is good for its founders and investors. Having been entrepreneurs, we understand management challenges, and can provide a balanced view to help you make sound decisions. Please feel free to get in touch.

We also share our experience as advisors to entrepreneurs. We have access to an extensive network of professional resources to be helpful. There would be no fees/compensation until substantial advisory services are required.

Please refer to our bio for our background and experience.
 

What we can do for you?

To an entrepreneur, we are value-added angels. We invest, mentor, and coach. We are your partners to help you identify and avoid challenges and solve problems with you and your team. While we prefer getting involved in the early stages, we do consider investing in later rounds.

To managers of an established company, we are strategic advisors and coaches. Our experiences in executive positions running private and public companies make us effective sounding boards to the CEO on strategy. We are highly effective executive team coaches on strategic and operational issues as well as resolve conflicts. We offer depth in business development and operations, marketing, technology, and intellectual property. We will serve or Boards, take on long-term consulting engagement, and take on individual projects to address a specific issue.

To the technology community, we are volunteers who are deeply committed to fostering economic growth by creating synergism between technology development and commercialization. We firmly believe engineers can be more effective on the job and more successful in their careers if they take an interest in business, management, and entrepreneurship. We have been advisors to national laboratories, government agencies, and universities, and we are frequent speakers at technical conferences.
 

Our views about business

To succeed, a business must create value with capital efficiency.

Building a successful business takes far more than a breakthrough technology and a useful product idea. Differentiations and competitive advantages, business strategy, financial resources, operational finesse, and whatever capability and unique ingredient that enables a business to succeed must be put into place with the team operating harmoniously.

We believe it is essential that management and its investors are able to address issues intellectually. That can only occur if there mutual respect to establish a professional and trusting working relationship. These views are deeply ingrained in the way we operate and underscore the approach we take to help grow each business.
 

Our Approach

We put the success of the business ahead of self-interest, because the company has to succeed in order to provide everyone a satisfactory return. We will provide honest thoughtful input, but expect entrepreneurs to make decisions. Our experience has taught no investor would be able to develop the insight as management, and it is essential for management to own the success and failure of their business.
 

Professional Summaries

Milton Chang incubated a number of startup companies and was CEO of Newport Corporation and New Focus, Inc. He took both companies public and his angel investments resulted in six IPOs and seven acquisitions; none failed. Incubic was formed subsequently to co-invest with VCs, where the results were comparable to most VC firms. We have learned our lessons and are now committed to investing as angel investors.

Milton shared his lessons learned by writing a monthly business/management column for the Laser Focus World, and recently published a book Toward Entrepreneurship. This book covers all aspects of starting and running a business as well as learning to become an entrepreneur. This book has received excellent reviews. Check out his articles, ppt presentations, and video, including a precursor to his book, a series of articles written nearly twenty years ago.

Nick Colella was a Senior Vice President at Tessera, Inc., prior to Incubic. He was a member of the senor executive team of Tessera to turn around the company and to take it public in 2003.

Nick held CTO roles in advanced technology companies in energy storage and communications. He held senior positions at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where he conceived and led advanced defense initiatives. He co-founded nChip, Inc., a multi-chip module electronics company later sold to Flextronics International. He helped establish the National Robotics Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon, and chaired its Advisory Board. He has been active in early stage development of companies in the semiconductor, energy, and biomedical spaces and has served advisor and corporate board roles. Nick is an advisor to LLNL, universities, and government agencies. He recently sponsored a robotics club for elementary school students.