Derek Richardson is the CEO and Founder of Deako Smart Lighting, an IoT and Smart Home startup started in Seattle in April of 2015. He holds an MBA degree from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, and received a bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering from the Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. Originally from Canada, Derek started his career as an Engineer and early employee at Research In Motion (BlackBerry) in the early days before BlackBerry was publicly launched. In a technical role, he helped bring BlackBerry to International Markets across Europe.

He then moved to Silicon Valley where he spent the next 13 years at Cypress Semiconductor holding a variety of positions in Sales, Business Development, Product Management and Engineering Management. In 2009, he moved to Seattle to start a new business unit within Cypress focused on making large form factor Touchscreen IC devices in anticipation of an emerging Tablet market. Cypress Large Touchscreen ICs were in almost every major tablet maker (outside of Apple) and he grew that business from nothing to $50M in revenue within two years.

In 2015, after renovating his home he realized there were real problems with smart home technology, and specifically smart lighting. He left Cypress to pursue his passion in creating Deako and has multiple patents pending on a new type of modular light switch and whole home automation system that is poised to change the landscape for the smart home. Deako is a 27 person based startup in Seattle Washington, has raised over $10M in capital and is about to publicly launch there new smart lighting solution.