Cees Links and the joy of creation

“Cees, do you realize this is the first time you’ve gone bankrupt?” his wife told him after Superlight Photonics collapsed last September. The storm that swept away his latest startup proved too strong. At the Dutch Photonics Event in Hengelo, where we briefly met him, Cees Links admitted: “I haven’t learned this much in years.”

That says a lot about someone with a stormy yet almost spotless career in bringing new technology to market. At Agere Systems (the successor of NCR, AT&T and Lucent Technologies), Links built the Wi-Fi business into hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, highlighted by the deal he personally struck with Apple’s Steve Jobs. The startup he went on to lead, Greenpeak, was sold to Qorvo in 2016 for 117 million euros.