In December 2014, the company Nader Sadrzadeh led announced a component just 0.45 millimeters thick. A product launch measured in fractions: no grand object to park outside the office, no sweeping silhouette. The KXCJB was an accelerometer, designed to give electronic devices a sense of motion while taking up very little room. For a chief executive, it was a useful reminder that a business can grow by making its wares harder to see.
Sadrzadeh was president and CEO of Kionix, a sensor manufacturer in Ithaca, New York, owned by Japan's ROHM. Today he is co-founder and CEO of DeepSight Technology. The connecting thread is sensing, but the interesting part of his career sits around the component: the software, the manufacturing arrangements, the people, and the customer who has already invested in something else. Tiny products can acquire remarkably large entourages.
Look at those surroundings and a particular kind of executive work comes into focus. A technical specification answers whether something can be built. A customer has more awkward questions. Will it fit? Who supports it? Must the rest of the system change? Sadrzadeh's public career supplies examples of what happens when those questions become part of the product itself.
A chair already occupied
When Sadrzadeh took charge of Kionix in October 2013, he inherited a company with its own founders and history. Gregory Galvin, its co-founder and chief executive, was stepping down. Tim Davis remained the co-founder and chief technology officer quoted in the leadership announcement. Sadrzadeh arrived as someone already familiar with the boardroom: he had been a Kionix director and had served as vice president and general manager at ROHM.
That distinction matters. The startup origin story often gives one person the invention, the courage, and the office keys. Here, the job was stewardship of an existing technical business. Kionix already made accelerometers, gyroscopes, and combination sensors, with software libraries alongside them. Its customers operated across consumer electronics, automotive, and industrial markets. Sadrzadeh's appointment put him in charge of carrying that work forward.
ROHM had acquired Kionix in 2009, four years before his appointment. Its own corporate history also records the acquisition of OKI's semiconductor business in 2008. Those names recur in Sadrzadeh's résumé: earlier roles at Oki Semiconductor, followed by ROHM, then Kionix. Read together, they place his career within a connected industrial world of components, subsidiaries, and manufacturing. The apparently separate company names belonged to a changing corporate landscape.
His education includes a BS and an MBA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His earlier experience includes management consulting at Arthur Andersen and service as chief information officer and vice president at Oki Semiconductor. These are useful coordinates for understanding the eventual founder: his route included organizational and commercial responsibilities well before DeepSight. A business degree and a component catalogue make an unfashionable pairing. They also give a person quite a lot to talk about with purchasing.
The software was in Finland
A year into his Kionix tenure, the company and ROHM announced a software development center in Oulu, Finland. Established on November 1, 2014, it supported ROHM, Kionix, and LAPIS Semiconductor. Its remit covered sensor algorithms, embedded software, applications, and support. The location was chosen for available engineering talent, an explanation Sadrzadeh gave when the center was announced the following month.
There is something revealing about a sensor executive opening a software office. The physical device is only one part of what the buyer needs. Information still has to be interpreted and put to work. An algorithm has to behave inside somebody else's product. The Oulu decision put resources behind that surrounding work, spreading the effort across companies and countries rather than treating the sensor as a finished conversation.
It also gives a concrete meaning to an otherwise slippery executive word: team. In this instance, the team had an address, a start date, and specific development duties. Customers rarely buy the internal organization chart. They do experience its consequences when a component needs an application, a driver, or an answer from someone who understands both. Opening the center was an organizational decision with a technical destination.
Two clocks on the same desk
The product releases of the period reveal another complication. Consumer devices and industrial equipment do not keep the same calendar. A new handset may make last year's design look tired. An installed industrial system can represent years of investment. A supplier serving both markets has to resist the temptation to treat their different buying habits as a temporary misunderstanding.
In a 2014 interview, Sadrzadeh described Kionix's move beyond consumer applications as a way to diversify and gain stability. He distinguished short consumer product cycles from the longer commitments of automotive and industrial work. That is a commercial observation with engineering consequences. Changing the customer can change the package, the support obligation, and the time horizon, even when the underlying expertise remains sensing.
Three years later, he made the practical case for analog sensors while announcing Kionix's KX220 series. Industrial companies, he explained, had existing infrastructure, long equipment lifetimes, and a need for continuity. Replacing everything simply to adopt digital technology could be a poor bargain. Kionix was adding analog options alongside its digital offerings. Progress, in this case, included leaving room for what the customer already owned.
“analog is still very alive”Nader Sadrzadeh · Kionix, 2017
The phrase carries a quiet rebuke to the usual language of obsolescence. A product's age tells you surprisingly little about the cost of removing it. The better commercial question is what a change allows the buyer to do, and what the buyer must give up to get there. Sadrzadeh's explanation put that calculation ahead of the pleasure of announcing the newest thing.
This is one of the more human details in an otherwise technical career. It leaves space for the customer with a working factory and a budget. An executive can sound ambitious while acknowledging constraints. Indeed, constraints offer an unusually good test of ambition: they oblige a supplier to make something useful under conditions it did not choose.
There is a second responsibility hidden inside that calculation: deciding how much variety a supplier can support. Serving different customers means carrying different requirements through the organization. The temptation is to promise flexibility at the sales desk and leave engineering to settle the bill. A coherent product portfolio has to connect those conversations before a commitment becomes a surprise. Sadrzadeh's public explanations of Kionix's choices make that coordination a useful way to read his work. The customer is present in the discussion long before the finished component is shipped.
The founder after the operator
In 2019, Sadrzadeh co-founded DeepSight Technology with Lan Yang and Anand Chandrasekher. Yang became co-founder and chief technology officer; Sadrzadeh became chief executive. DeepSight's founding brought his experience in commercializing technology into a company built around proprietary sensing. Its operations span the San Francisco Bay Area and Clayton, Missouri, adding another geographic pairing to his career.
The order of events is worth keeping. He ran an established sensor business before helping create a new one. His biography places his Kionix leadership between 2013 and 2019 and also records a senior vice presidency at ROHM. By the time he became a founder, he had worked with the machinery of larger organizations as well as the demands of a specialized component company.
DeepSight's leadership roster makes the breadth of the task visible. John Chong serves as chief operating officer and head of engineering. Janet Goldenstein leads software and AI, Catherine Maresh handles intellectual property, and other leaders cover systems engineering, finance, sales, and product management. The founder's job exists among those disciplines. A sensor company needs people who can agree on what to make, protect the work, and get it into a customer's hands.
It would be easy to flatten that into a familiar tale of business meeting science. The actual names and responsibilities are more useful. Yang brings the scientific founding role. Sadrzadeh brings years of commercial and organizational experience. Their company needs both, along with colleagues whose work runs beyond either founder's title. The point of assembling such a group is that no one résumé contains the whole business.
Back in a room full of beginnings
Sadrzadeh's LinkedIn profile lists a volunteer mentoring role with Equalize Startups beginning in January 2023. In 2025, he delivered the keynote at Washington University's Welcome to the Wall startup celebration, sharing reflections on DeepSight's startup journey. It was a fitting return to the setting of company formation: a founder with an operating history talking to people closer to their own beginnings.
Mentoring is an especially apt coda to a career spent translating between specialties. Advice becomes useful when it survives contact with a particular problem. Someone building a company needs more than an instruction to be bold. They need to choose colleagues, decide what customers require, and understand which commitments will last longer than the current product cycle. Those are the kinds of decisions visible in Sadrzadeh's earlier work.
The small component remains a good place to end. In a finished device, a sensor may disappear beneath the enclosure and the interface. Around it sit years of decisions about people, software, manufacturing, and adoption. Sadrzadeh's career invites attention to those decisions. The object can be tiny. Getting it to belong somewhere is a considerable job.