Shimmering Glass

An Interview by Lenny Giteck

David Knox has spent much of his adult life analyzing and manipulating light.

In 1983, he founded a company called Directed Light, which invented and produced laser systems for many of the nation’s A-list technology outfits — including General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola and Boston Scientific. In 1998, he sold Directed Light to a larger Japanese firm.

“I decided to sell the laser company for two reasons,” he recalls. “One, I had reached my highest level of incompetence in terms of being a manager, and I really wasn’t having a whole lot of fun anymore. And two, we were growing pretty fast and needed capital.”

After selling the company, Knox relates, “I slept for about a month, then got up and said to myself, ‘What am I going to invent now?'” Making things has been a lifelong obsession for Knox. “I’m pretty compulsive about it,” he admits. “I’ll take a week or two off, but then I have to go back and make something.”

As it turns out, the next “something” he made was glass tiles — for a kitchen renovation in his girlfriend’s house. “I was thinking about the tile and decided that maybe I could make it out of glass or stainless steel. When I went to a stained-glass store and learned that the owner melted different glasses together, I decided to give it a try.”

In 2003, after three years of experimenting with various techniques, Knox founded Lightstreams Glass Tile, a Mountain View, Calif.-based company that designs and produces shimmering, exquisite glass tiles for both the watershaping and homebuilding industries.

Recently, we interviewed the 53-year-old entrepreneur about what it has taken to market a new and innovative line of glass tiles to the world.

You wrote an article for the April 2007 issue of WaterShapes about the Jade Mountain resort in St. Lucia. The project included — and I’ll quote here — “completely original tile products for use in the structure’s 25 vanishing-edge pools, with each one to have its own unique colors and optical qualities.” Was Jade Mountain pivotal for Lightstreams?

Absolutely. It was an amazing undertaking. Originally, I had set up a facility in Tijuana, Mexico, to manufacture an earlier design for our tiles — but once I became involved with Jade Mountain, I realized that wasn’t going to work. I decided I had to build a factory in California.

When I traveled to St. Lucia to meet with Nick Troubetzkoy, the owner and architect of Jade Mountain, I went with a new formula and just one piece of glass made from it. But Nick trusted me; he gave me hundreds of thousands of dollars. I took that money, added almost all of my savings from the sale of my laser company and set out to build the new factory.

So there was an enormous amount riding on the project.

If Nick hadn’t come trough with his part, or if he had changed his mind halfway through the project, I would have lost my whole life savings, everything I had worked for during more than 15 years in the laser business. Of all the things I’ve done, I consider building the factory and supplying thousands of square feet of glass to Jade Mountain to be the greatest accomplishment of my professional life. Truly a pinnacle project.

Introducing a new product to the market is never easy. What kind of resistance have you encountered?

First off, people generally tend to be resistant to change, resistant to new ideas. Second, by its very nature glass tile is more difficult to install than standard ceramic tile. You need to take a more craftsman-like approach to it. Especially when business is good and pool builders are busy, they try to move on to the next job as quickly as possible. They don’t want to spend a lot of time on a project. They definitely don’t want any delays, because there’s usually a progress payment associated with the completion of the tiling — and a lot of pool builders are sort of living payment to payment. So that’s been a hurdle to overcome.

Isn’t the fact that your tile is relatively expensive also an issue?

True. The standard pool builder gives a contract to the client that specifies an allowance of, say, $5 per square foot for tile. That basically gets you the lowest common denominator in tiles, but it’s what the builders are used to. So, yes, our product is not cheap — but the homeowner, not the builder, will be paying for it in the end. If homeowners want to have our tile, they should get it.

How have you marketed your product?

We’ve built name recognition in the trade through advertising, and we’ve accomplished a lot through our Web site. Originally, in fact, all of our big projects came through the Web. I have to say that a lot of pool builders, and even a lot of architects, are not exactly modern, Web-based people. But the wonderful thing has been that prospective clients find us on the Internet, and they tell their pool builder or architect that they really want to use our glass. Then when the pool is completed, the builder or architect decides it’s one of the most outstanding installations they’ve ever built, and that opens up their thinking.

What happens after that?

We wind up building relationships with many of these people. From my perspective, I want to help them feel as comfortable as possible using our product. We provide them with excellent instructions. I give them my cell phone number and tell them, “If you want, call me when you’re ready to put in the tile, and I’ll walk you through it.” For example, I tell them exactly what mortars to use.

What has been your biggest frustration since launching Lightstreams?

Installers who ignore our recommendations — that’s the kiss of death. When they treat our tile like any other material and do a poor installation job, the customers wind up disappointed. Another thing that bothers me is being lumped in with crummy materials. Some builders will say, “I don’t use glass because it breaks in the winter.” That’s just ridiculous; people’s windows aren’t breaking in the winter! So there are some awareness issues, education issues, but I think we’re overcoming them.

And the most rewarding aspect of starting the company?

For me, the biggest joy is seeing people truly take delight in what I make. We recently were photographing at a location, and the homeowners were just so proud of the glass because it makes their pool one of a kind. That’s extremely gratifying.

When you sold your laser company, you could have spent the rest of your life eating grapes on a beach in the Caribbean — rather than starting a new enterprise and risking your life savings. Why didn’t you do that?

I don’t know, I just felt compelled to work with glass. I think I’m really lucky to have found two things in my life that I love doing. I loved inventing laser applications, and now I love making glass. Both have to do with the primary energy source of life: light. Finding two things you’re passionate about in your profesional career doesn’t come around very often.