Steve Santamaria

Our recent podcast guest was Steve Santamaria, CEO of Folio Photonics, who spoke with us about a wide spectrum of subjects covering everything from birthplaces to boomerangs and beyond.

Steve is a native Midwesterner who grew up in the Pittsburgh area and went to Allegheny College. After graduating college and living and working for several years in various sales roles in the Cleveland area, Steve was offered a position with Intel. The role was a great one: Steve would be running the Microsoft partnership for the company. But it would require him to move across the country to Seattle. So, Steve packed his bags and headed West.

 “That was really my first big jump into a very large technology company,” Steve recalled. “[Intel’s] a great environment for you to learn from some really, really intelligent people.” One of those people was Renee James, who eventually became the president of Intel, and who over 14 years provided Steve with plenty of “fun projects” that took him around the globe. Hearing him talk of it, it’s clear that Steve valued that season.

 But, as we all know, even good things must come to an end eventually. Steve’s journey with Intel ended as he moved on with a company he became acquainted with while Intel was acquiring it, which offered him a job as chief revenue officer. Steve recalls how it was a big shift for him: “I went from a very large company to an eight-person company … It’s a whole different world, the startup world, compared to being in big companies.” A world with “a lot of hard lessons,” according to Steve.

 One lesson Steve learned while making the transition from a big company to a startup was the almighty importance of cash flow: “It’s really about cash flow when you’re at a startup company. You have to be mindful of your spend and scrutinize every spend.”

 He shared a comparison that drove this point home: “At Intel, if I went over budget, I would just go to another division head, and I’d borrow a million bucks. And no one thought anything about it,” Steve recalled, before adding that the worst-case scenario was “you might get your hand slapped for being over your budget.” In stark contrast, according to Steve, “in the startup world, you go over your budget, you’re out of business.”

 As well as the shock of these new financial constraints, Steve was also surprised to learn how few people he really needed: “It’s like when we go on vacation, I tell my wife, ‘Take half the luggage and twice the money.’ [It’s the] same thing with a startup … You need half the people, but twice the funding. You don’t need that marketing person. You don’t need that office manager. You can do it yourself.”

 After his stint in Seattle, Steve dabbled in consulting and traveled a lot—a lifestyle that eventually became not as fun as it may sound at first. So Steve began looking for more opportunities, specifically in the Midwest, at the request of his wife, who is from Cleveland and still has (a very big) family there.

 Steve’s journey took him to Case Western Reserve University, which was spinning out a high-tech, data-centered business, and they were looking for a CEO. “We decided to do a ‘try me buy me,’ so I did six months’ worth of consulting, as a consultant and kind of an acting CEO.”

 After that initial trial period, Steve recalled when he came to the decision that officially made him a boomerang: “It was Thanksgiving of 2017, and we sat our kids down and said, ‘We’re packing up, we’re moving to Ohio.’ And that was a big moment.” It was a big moment that brought much joy and happiness but also brought with it a fair amount of challenges.

 Steve explained, “It’s a different environment in Ohio than in Seattle, especially for a high-tech company. There are elements of friction that I wasn’t aware of when I first came in.” Among this friction? “Everything takes a little bit longer to get done because this is not a high-tech region that has a lot of high-tech startups, so some of the resources aren’t available.”

 An example of this can be seen in hiring. Specifically, according to Steve, it’s hard trying to find people. Like who? “Optical engineers, servo technicians … These skills which are in abundance on the West Coast or in Colorado or in China, [but] are rather limited here in Northeast Ohio.”

 But Steve’s trying to change all of that by focusing not only on recruiting people from out of state and moving them back but also committing to in-state recruiting. Steve is clearly excited, and his passion for—and belief in—Cleveland’s promise and potential is contagious. Steve is hopeful that the advantages of living in Ohio will lure many star players to come bat for his team. Among the top of these advantages? A far lower cost of living versus any of the coasts. “These engineers are coming back, and they’re making kind of pay parity moves, but they’re buying a bigger house. And they’re excited about getting into certain neighborhoods, especially if they have families and kids.”

 Steve is also excited about his company, Folio Photonics, which makes a optical storage product for archival data storage. Steve summarized it: “There’s a large amount of data that sits and gets used infrequently … [our] commitment is we’re going to store it.”

 He then explained, “With the rise of these new AI tools and machine learning, we now have the capability to analyze massive amounts of data. But you can’t analyze data if you don’t have it. So these big repositories of data, it’s coming a key point for the world. It’s who has the most data wins.”

 Steve added: “They’re already looking at Google and Facebook, how to break them up because they have so much data. And no one can compete. And so it’s becoming a bigger and bigger problem. And, for us, it’s a big opportunity.”

 To hear more about how Folio uses its revolutionary technology to tackle this issue and own this opportunity in today’s market, and what else Steve says is in store for the future, head over to listen to the full podcast.