The story starts with Winston Chen, an immigrant from Taiwan in 1965.
After he got his undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering in Taiwan, he was offered a scholarship by Harvard University to pursue his Master and Ph.D. degrees in Applied Mathematics and Applied Mechanics. After he finished his Ph.D. degree in 1970, he worked for IBM for 8 years as an engineer and a manager in R&D of high-speed printing and magnetic recording.
In 1978, he co-founded a small electronic manufacturing service company Solectron Corporation in Silicon Valley at the beginning of the personal computer and internet revolution.
His company grew exponentially in the next 20 years. Solectron grew from 30 to 80,000 employees from 1978 to 2000 and the annual revenues grew from $400,000 to $18 billion. Solectron was one of the fastest growing companies in the U.S. It had an average annual growth rate of 62% per year in 20 years. The company went public in 1989 listed in NYSE. The stock price went up about 250 times from 1989 to 2000. In 2000, Solectron was ranked 128 in sales among S&P 500 largest corporations.
The growth of Solectron was due to the historical opportunities of personal computer and internet revolution and due to the corporation mission of revitalizing American manufacturing competitiveness and quality. Solectron won the U.S. National Malcolm Baldridge Quality Award twice in 1991 and 1997. In 1992, President George H.W. Bush invited him to be one of the 20 CEOs of the largest and the best quality companies as the Presidential Business Delegation to travel with President Bush on Air Force One for 12 days to Australia, Singapore, South Korea, and Japan to promote the U.S. export.
Winston Chen is very grateful for Harvard’s scholarship and the opportunities offered by American society for his business success. He feels deeply indebted to American philanthropy, so he set up Paramitas Foundation to pay back to society.
During his business career, he practiced the Buddhist philosophy of Paramitas which helped him focus on helping his customers, employees, and investors. He thus established the charitable organization named Paramitas Foundation in 1991 in San Jose, California as a charitable non-profit corporation 501 (c)(3).
Paramitas, was a Sanskrit term (Sanskrit is the sacred language of Hinduism, the language of classical Hindu philosophy, and of historical texts of Buddhism.)
Paramitas holds the meaning of six vessels that can carry a person from the materialistic world to the enlightened world of happiness and wisdom. These six vessels are:
Dāna pāramitā : generosity, helping others (in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, 布施波羅蜜)
Śīla pāramitā : virtue, morality, discipline, proper conduct (持戒波羅蜜)
Kṣānti pāramitā : patience, tolerance, forbearance, acceptance, endurance (忍辱波羅蜜)
Vīrya pāramitā : diligence, vigour, effort (精進波羅蜜)
Dhyāna pāramitā : meditation (禪定波羅蜜)
Prajñā pāramitā : wisdom, insight, enlightenment (般若波羅蜜)