Great Minds

The reality of life as an inventor has less to do with the light bulb flicking on than with plain old perseverance. According to Korba, instant success is rare. "I have enough of an entrepreneurial background to know if an idea is good or bad," he says. "But you still have to go through all the stages: research and development, marketing, production, sales. It requires a lot of 15- to 20-hour workdays. You can fail at any one of those steps and take yourself out of the marketplace."

Larry Hayslett and Ed Hirzel are fully aware of the specter of failure-an awareness top inventors use to propel rather than paralyze them. Sometimes that fear of failure is so strong, inventors can't shake it until they see their products on the shelves.

After investing several years and more than half a million dollars in Priority Start, a device that protects car batteries from dying, that day of relief isn't quite here for Hayslett and Hirzel's Granada Hills, California-based company, Baton Labs Inc. "We have families, children, house payments, car payments," says Hayslett. "We've got emotional and physical stress. All we have [to go on] is faith in the product."

Financing has been the major obstacle. "It's difficult for any start-up company to find investors," Hayslett says. "You can't depend on other people and large companies. We've learned to do things ourselves."

Yet the partners haven't given up their quest for an investor and are willing to forfeit some control if that's what it takes. "We're trying to persevere and to not be too possessive," Hayslett says. "We don't want to have a death grip-we're too close to having a successful product."

Likewise, even though Korba made all the right moves-taking on three partners; starting DME/Golf Inc. in Costa Mesa, California; and collaborating with top research companies and NASA-he kept hitting that proverbial brick wall. "These were all capable, sophisticated companies with 90 to 95 percent project success rates," says Korba. "But we were trying to miniaturize an aviation tool that was the size of three or four garages. The technology barriers were immense. We spent a tremendous amount of time and a ridiculous amount of money and came up completely dry." By the end of 1992, Korba says, "we were ready to give up."

For the first time facing the prospect that their product might be dead in the water, the partners decided to take a breather for 30 days. Still, Korba remained committed to the idea, and, finally, his big break came. "By chance, a friend who knew of my project informed me of an inventor whose work in this area was being declassified [by the government]," Korba says.

The inventor turned out to be one of the original collaborators on laser range-finding technology in the '70s. Within 24 hours of meeting, he and Korba had struck a deal; six months later, Korba had his prototype. "There were a lot of trials and tribulations. We failed literally three times with [research and development companies] that were well-recognized in the industry," says Korba.

As daunting as the process was, Korba doesn't believe his struggle is unique. "If you contacted a large number of successful American companies, you'd probably find every company has gone through this phase," he says. "It doesn't matter if it's a $100 company or a $100 million company-at some point, an idea probably didn't fly. [Success] requires the ability to go beyond that point, to let persistence and determination take hold. Even when they're facing defeat, successful inventors will find a way to make it happen. Our attitude [when facing obstacles] was to go right, go left, go up, go down-to take that extra step, always looking for a way to solve the problems."

This article was originally published in the January 1996 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Great Minds.