Lo and his grandparents later moved to Hong Kong, where he went to high school with the dream of one day studying in the U.S. "From very young I wanted to be an electrical engineer," says Lo. "I'd always dreamed of coming to the U.S. for college."
And so Lo, whose family had no money, hit the books and ended up winning a full scholarship to Brown University in 1976. "Being a very poor boy, there was no hope to pay my own way," he says. Getting the scholarship to Brown "was like winning the jackpot."
In Pictures: Famous Immigrant Entrepreneurs
After raising $400 in a fundraiser back in Hong Kong for his plane ticket, Lo was on his way to Providence, R.I., to study electrical engineering. In a big hurry to start working, Lo fast-tracked his studies and graduated in three years instead of four.
But Lo didn't set off by himself right away, working for
By 1995, Lo had done so well at Hewlett-Packard that he was tapped to lead HP's efforts to develop a Unix servers business in Japan that would rival those of
Lo was knee-deep in the tech boom of the late 1990s when he approached his bosses at HP about starting a new division to target the Internet. But, he says, "they thought [the Internet] was just a fad and it would go away pretty fast. I disagreed, so I quit."
Not an easy decision, but one that paid off for Lo. He found a friend in his former boss, Dominic Orr, then-senior vice president of product development at Bay Networks, which at the time was as big as giants like
"The first year was just atrocious, and the second year was no better" says Lo, who liked running his own show after picking up some business tips from his time in Tokyo. "I wasn't worried about the business because I knew we were on the right path."
Lo still wasn't worried when, in Netgear's third year,
In 2006, Netgear celebrated its tenth anniversary. Walk into a
Netgear is just one of the thousands of publicly traded, immigrant-founded venture-backed companies in the U.S. that together are worth more than $500 billion, according to a November study commissioned by the National Venture Capital Association. The association's research found that immigrants like Patrick Lo--who make up only 11.7% of the U.S. population--have started one in four of all U.S. public companies that have been venture-backed over the past 15 years, including
A similar study from Duke University showed immigrants were responsible for starting 25.3% of all new, high-technology businesses in the U.S. during the past 10 years. The greatest percentage of these entrepreneurs hailed from India (26%), followed by immigrants from the U.K., China and Taiwan.
As for Lo, who now lives with his family in Silicon Valley, China represents more of a business opportunity than a home.
"Coming from China, from a poor family, I had nothing to lose, and I knew I had to work hard. That's what an entrepreneur needs," Lo says of his entrepreneurial experiences in the U.S. "You can't worry about losing anything, and you have to work extra hard."