ALR’s Chief Executive Has Grown Along With His Firm : Management: Gene Lu still misses the days as a marketer and feels more comfortable taking computers apart, putting them back together.

IRVINE —  A blend of a shy engineer who enjoys tinkering with anything mechanical and a natural computer salesman, Gene Lu has gradually grown to fit his role as chief executive officer of Advanced Logic Research Inc.

“Gene used to be shy and extremely reserved,” said Dave Kirkey, the company’s gregarious vice president of marketing. “Now I have to fight for the floor with him at meetings. He has made a very confident move to being chief executive.”

The son of an aerospace engineer, Lu was born in Taiwan and his family moved to the United States when he was 9. Growing up in El Monte, he became interested in electronics by rebuilding and selling old cars and earned an engineering degree at Cal Poly Pomona.

When Lu founded ALR in September, 1984, he was a 30-year-old computer designer who loved to take computers apart and put them back together so they could work electronic miracles. He sometimes misses those days.

“I still feel inadequate being a CEO,” Lu says. “I’m still most comfortable as a technical engineer and marketing person. But I have brought in people who have helped make me a better CEO. I’ve had to let go of the engineering side and learn more management.”

But Wall Street analysts are impressed with Lu’s savvy and the way he is running the company.

“It’s clearly a company being run by a guy whose first love is engineering,” said Liz Buyer, analyst for Needham & Co. in New York. “They’re focused and that focus comes from the top.”

Lu said his impatience and enthusiasm for trying new ideas form a good balance against the precise, patient style of Dave Kelley, one of two ALR vice presidents of engineering and a friend of Lu’s since the eighth grade.

“I’m a good project starter, but Kelley is a finisher,” he said. “The outside world likes to think of a single figurehead in a company, but that’s unfair. There’s a dynamic mass of people here that make it all work.”

Lu’s customers are often courted by the persistent salesmanship of Kirkey. But he says that nothing facilitates sales to customers more than hearing that the company’s CEO is technically literate.

“The scary part of it is that I find myself becoming a salesman,” said Lu, who once abhorred public speaking and even quit an internship program at minicomputer firm Computer Automation Inc. when he was shifted into sales marketing instead of product engineering.

Part of his success is due to being at the right place at the right time and getting the right investor when he started out, Lu acknowledges.

Five years ago, C.W. Wong and Philip Harding, representatives of a unit of Wearnes Bros. Ltd., Singapore’s largest computer-components maker, walked into Lu’s office and offered to invest $250,000 in capital in the 9-month-old ALR.

They had been looking for an investment and heard about Lu during their search. As they went from company to company, they found the fastest computers that they had examined had been designed by Lu.

Lu signed a letter of intent the same day.

ALR got off to a slow start because the computer business was in a general slump, but the firm’s computers drew technical praise for their speed. Wearnes acted as its guardian angel, never putting pressure on the company to perform and making sure that ALR never lacked financing.

But Lu isn’t a golden child whose way has always been paved before him. After graduating from engineering school at Cal Poly Pomona, Lu and several college friends formed LNW Research Corp., a small company which manufactured clones of the early Tandy TRS-80 portable computer.

After IBM introduced the personal computer in 1980, Lu’s company--which had grown to about 50 employees--was caught with an obsolete technology. Lu quit during a downturn and the company eventually folded in 1982.

Kelley, who was a designer for LNW, said the experience with that company taught him and Lu some painful business lessons. It also gave them the drive to succeed with ALR. Lu said LNW moved too slowly because its founders managed the firm as a democracy.

Lu isn’t about to make the same mistakes with ALR. To avoid the risk of investing in obsolete lines, ALR makes multiple lines of computers based on different technological standards such as IBM’s Micro Channel Architecture and the rival Extended Industry Standard Architecture supported by Compaq Computer Corp.

“We don’t want to get left behind,” Kelley said. “One has to be aware of competing technologies. That’s something we both learned through past failure.”

Lu now delegates most of the engineering work to a staff of 36 engineers led by Kelley and Vic Sangveraphunsiri, the company’s other vice president of engineering.

“I’m sensitive to engineers’ problems and try to give encouragement when they are confronted with technical problems,” Lu said. “I’ve tried to create an environment that I always wanted to work in when I was an engineer.”

Instead of tinkering with old cars or old computers, Lu now spends time working on his boat in Newport Harbor. Outside of work, he spends much of his time in San Clemente with his wife, Terry, and their three children.

Colleagues say the success isn’t going to his head, which is still crowned with long, jet-black hair that is just beginning to show a little gray.

Peter Galinsky, ALR’s seventh employee who started in shipping and has moved up to head the company’s sales operations in Toronto, said that Lu remains accessible.

Lu has a glass office and maintains an open-door policy. More often than not, he is out of the office, roaming through different departments and getting involved in product direction and marketing discussions.

“I want to be involved,” he said. “I don’t want to be a figurehead.”

CROSSTOWN BATTLE OF THE BOARDS

ALR is hoping to use new proprietary technology to make a name for itself in the crowded field of personal computer “clone” makers chashing giants like IBM and Compaq. Wavering PC buyers who might be inclined to wait for the next generation’s technology are promised an easy way to upgrade in the future, if and when they need more power.

AST UPGRADE

AST puts the CPU, the computer’s main control and processing chip, and all hardware governed by CPU processing speed on a board that slides into one of the machine’s expansion slots.

ALR UPGRADE

ALR uses a unique slot in the main circuit board that allows the user to plug in a new, faster CPU without need for new memory and peripheral chips. Because fewer components are replaced, the price tends to be lower.