Alex Cable

Alex Cable is an American optical engineer, inventor, and entrepreneur best known as the founder and CEO of Thorlabs, one of the world's largest privately held photonics manufacturers. Raised in Freehold Township, New Jersey, Cable followed an unusually non-linear path: he dropped out of high school and worked as a dishwasher, chef, restaurant manager, machinist, farm manager, and printer before returning to education. He attended County College of Morris, earned a B.S. in Physics from Rutgers University, and later completed a graduate degree in Materials Science at Stevens Institute of Technology.

In 1984 Cable was recruited to AT&T Bell Labs by physicist Steven Chu, where he worked on laser cooling and atom-trapping ("optical molasses") experiments alongside future Nobel laureates Chu and Arthur Ashkin. He co-authored a series of highly cited *Physical Review Letters* papers beginning in 1985 — work that underpinned later advances in atomic clocks and Bose–Einstein condensates. While still at Bell Labs, Cable bought a milling machine and began building optomechanical parts in his spare time, growing the side business until he could go full-time.

He founded Thorlabs in November 1989 — reportedly out of a spare room / basement of his New Jersey home — and named it after his black Labrador retriever, Thor. First-year sales were roughly $370,000, with Bell Labs among the earliest customers. Under Cable's leadership Thorlabs became a vertically integrated global photonics supplier, growing to well over 1,500 employees across multiple countries and serving research, life-science, industrial, medical, and defense markets. Cable has consistently described a strategy of reinvesting essentially all profits back into the business and targeting steady annual growth.

In 2021 Cable stepped down as President, naming his daughter Jennifer Cable as his successor, while continuing as founder and CEO. Beyond Thorlabs, he has co-founded and sat on the boards of several photonics ventures and acts as an angel investor in early-stage optics and photonics companies.

• Domain-driven, strategic angel investing: Cable invests personally in early-stage companies that sit close to his deep expertise — photonics, optics, lasers, MEMS, and precision scientific instrumentation — rather than as a generalist financial investor.
• Seed / early stage: Public profiles characterize him as an angel/seed investor with a small, concentrated set of direct investments (reported as roughly three angel deals), typically taking equity and often a board or advisory role.
• Founder + operator lens: As a founder who bootstrapped and reinvested profits for decades, he tends to favor technically deep teams building real hardware and manufacturable products over pure-software plays.
• Commercialization of research: A recurring pattern is turning university/lab research into companies — e.g., co-founding Menlo Systems to commercialize frequency-comb technology out of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics.