Tim Ewald: When we decided to start Laserblast, I had heard of laser tag. In fact, my brother-in-law, it’s now called Laser Web down in Dayton Ohio and that was the very first time I had ever played laser tech. My brother-in-law invited us to come down. He would say, “There’s this great new thing. You got to come try it.”

And so, Carla was not with me when we played the first time. It’s funny how you out of the thousands of games of laser tag I played, I remember the first one. And that’s a very good experience because I remember that first laser beam coming in me, it had a big clunky vibrator on it and when I felt the impact because the vibrator came, I mean that’s it. We got to have the biggest, badest vibrator there is because that was a cool thing when you actually feel the laser hit you. It really stuck with me.

So I played once and I got a Master’s Degree in Entrepreneurship from the university, a business school, and so I knew from the time I was 18 years old that I wanted to start my own company. It’s just a question of in what business. And I had spent the time since I was 5 years old and up in model airplanes. So at the time we decided to start Laserblast, we have just introduced a product for model airplanes to shoot combat. And now, there are a lot of products like that that everyone sees. But back 30 years ago, it was a new thing. You go out to the model airplane to deal and everyone is trying to demonstrate how they are a better pilot than the other guy or fly their plane faster but no one was playing laser combat with model airplanes. So we had just spent about four months developing this product and going to press with it and going to some model airplane tradeshows.

And I went to pick Mike but I think it was Brent up, he was at that Zapzone in Canton and there was – the owner of that Zapzone, there must have been 500 people in this place, all partying. It was booked. The lobby was elbow to elbow and he was backed up. So I just got myself a newspaper and sat down in the corner. I thought I would wait until Brent’s birthday party was over. And I watched what he was doing. He was bringing vests out of the vesting room and I saw these wisps of smoke behind the counter. He was saudering. He was repairing the vest as he was trying to handle all the parties and 500 people in his lobby. And after it calmed down, it was several hours before Brent was available.

I just went up to him and said, “Hey, it looks like you got some problems, buddy.” I just looked over the counter and he was harried from all that goings on there, in saudering the equipment, he said, “Yeah, and if you knew how much I paid for it, it’s just ridiculous.” And that’s why I just asked him, “No. How much did you pay for it?” And he told me. And I was shocked at how much he had paid for it.

Now, it turns out, he didn’t over pay it. That was the going rate for the equipment. And that’s why I told him, “I tell you what, I could do that for a third of that price.” And he just looked at me and he said, “If you can do it for a third of the price, I will take three systems.”

And just like that. So Carla was with me on that visit. And so I went home and we had just finished the prototype rollout cycle of the model airplane. His space got the same circuit. I mean there are a lot of similarities. And I had been working in electronics industry for 15 years at a company called KMS Fusion and the Magnesus company. So I knew electronics manufacturing from a long time before I met Gaz. And so I knew the cost didn’t have to be that high.

So anyway, I spent about three days working up a design and building material and making sure that when I said I could do it for a third that I was right. And sure enough, yeah, it was pretty easy to do it at the time. It gets harder when you get all the support and the bigger overhead. But at the time, it was Carla and I and the building material. And so that it’s much easier to keep the cost down when we don’t have all the expenses of operating a business as I’ve learned over the last 25 years.

So I went back to the Zapzone and I said, “Well, I’ll just talk to the guy again and carry on a conversation where I left off.” And I came back and the guy didn’t – there he was and he had no recollection of our previous conversation. It turns out, it was his brother, Gali, who looks an awful lot like Gaz so we quickly figured out that I was looking for Gaz, not Gali.

I got in contact with him about a week later. We went to lunch because I started the day job so I cut from the day job for lunch. We discussed the equipment and halfway through lunch, he whips out a checkbook and buys the first system right there. He said, “Will that take care of one of the systems?” And it was enough to pay for some of the tooling and get the design going.

So at that point, we started Laserblast. But at the time, we kept the name Advanced Avionics. In fact today, the company corporate registered name initially is still Advanced Avionics with the DBA as Laserblast. And that’s leftover from the model airplane product.

That’s how Laserblast got started.

Mike Ewald: So there was a pretty good story or maybe a little bit of a story about how the name was chosen.

Tim Ewald: Laserblast? Maybe you remember better than I do? I mean I have started probably five or six companies before this and made some terrible choices to the name.

Mike Ewald: Let’s hear about some of those.

Tim Ewald: Epimetheus Corp was the epic worst one. Try and get a secretary to answer, “Hello, Epimetheus Corp.” Our own employees couldn’t say the name!

Mike Ewald: And then there was the MFFI.

Tim Ewald: Oh yeah.

Carla Ewald: The product’s name, Multi- Function Flight Instrument.

Mike Ewald: Well, I think with Laserblast, at least the story I’ve been told is that you asked your sister who is a graphic artist to design the logo – to pick a name and design the logo for us. She did a web search and found the …

Tim Ewald: That’s right. Yeah. Right. I just remembered. Not picking the name.

Mike Ewald: Right. That’s what happens when the company is founded by engineers. The marketing sometimes suffers a little bit. But we’ve over the years added some marketing help, marketing staff and pick things up a bit.

Tim Ewald: Yup. I look back at some of the real early stuff and it had literally architectural font, the blueprint font in the brochure. Oh, that’s fine. Of course, people would look at it and it looks like there’s an engineer but there’s nobody else in the company. They were right at the time. It showed.

My sister helped because she was wonderful at all the graphic arts. We quickly got proper brochures and spec sheets and some web page design and yeah, started selling.