To describe Alan Adler as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur is both accurate and slightly misleading.
He is an electronics engineer with a record in innovation. He has lectured at Stanford University. His company is in Palo Alto, four minutes’ drive from Google, where he has given talks on his work. His home where he does his inventing is in Los Altos, close to the garage where Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started Apple.
But the killer product Mr Adler created, and which paid for the Bentley on his drive and the beach house at Carmel-by-the-Sea, is not even electrical, but a $32 plastic-moulded one-cup coffee maker, manufactured locally — and found in 4m homes and offices in 60 countries.