Vice president of legal and government affairs, Freescale Semiconductor Inc.

Freescale Semiconductor Inc. employees like to say that the company has probably touched the lives of everyone in Oak Hill several times today already, said John D. Holmes, vice president of legal and government affairs.

Freescale's products help move electrical currents in cars, coordinate anti-lock brakes and airbags, and operate networks that smartphones use.

In the course of developing that technology, Freescale will likely enter into 1,800 to 2,000 contracts this year, he said.

Holmes' job is to make sure those transactions run smoothly.

"It's pretty fun, especially if you're a corporate transactional attorney," he said. "It doesn't sound like a super sexy job ... but I'm from Austin, I get to do it from my desk in Oak Hill and do these really fun, complex multinational deals."

Motorola, Freescale's former parent company, came to Austin in 1974 and started out on Ed Bluestein Drive. Motorola outgrew the Bluestein site and branched out to Oak Hill in 1984.

"I remember driving past this place in high school when going to eat in Oak Hill at Convict Hill Restaurant," he said.

Holmes graduated from Austin High School and went to Tulane Unviersity for his bachelor's and law degrees. By the late 1990s, he ended up working at Thompson & Knight, a law firm in Houston.

"It was spring, it was during South by Southwest, and I was daydreaming about ways to get back [to Austin]," he said. "This was during the height of the dot-com era. There was lots of cool stuff happening at the time, but none of it, for a little conservative lawyer, sounded like a good long-term play."

He said that when he joined Motorola in 2000, it was easier to name the technology fields in which Motorola was not involved. Freescale was best known for making microchips that went into Motorola cell phones back when the company owned a substantial share of that market.

Holmes said he fell in love with Motorola in 2002–03, when his coworkers supported him through his battle with cancer.

"You expect your family and friends to rally to your aid. It was not expected the way the colleagues at the time rallied around to help me through that difficult year-and-a-half period," he said.

Soon after he returned to work, Freescale began working on separating from Motorola—an exciting time for a transaction attorney and Austin in general, he said.

"Instead of being a far-flung division of a multinational company based in Schaumburg, Ill., we saw a line of sight for us to become masters of our destiny," he said.

Since Freescale became independent in 2004, Holmes and his team have overseen some major accomplishments, including the two largest public offerings in Austin history.

"In 2004, we did a $1.3 billion initial public offering," he said. "Last year, we came back out again and raised $850 million."

The new company retained Motorola's close-knit and engineer-driven work environment, but swapped Motorola's "slower-moving Midwestern culture" for a high-performance mentality, he said.

"We are not as big as we once were, and yet we're producing as much as we once did in terms of innovations," he said. "We push ourselves, particularly our inventor communities. In the technology realm, it is always, 'How do you get to market faster? You are constantly evolving in an ever-more-rapid way to bring faster, more power-efficient technologies to market."

Holmes remains active in the community in which he grew up. He has worked with Big Brothers Big Sisters and United Way's Young Leaders Society and serves on the board of directors of Any Baby Can, a nonprofit that offers education, therapy and support services to children and families.

"Any Baby Can is super exciting for me, specifically because you can have such a magnifier effect," he said. "You can get involved with children who need special services. They are among the poorest, or maybe they have an illness that needs help."

Holmes is also on the Austin Chamber of Commerce board of directors. Through the chamber, Freescale can keep up-to-date on local issues such as electrical rate increases, he said.

"We are often asked to host events for elected officials from Washington, D.C., who are interested in seeing why our region has been successful," he said. "Semiconductors are an integral part of this economy. We can show them what semiconductor manufacturing looks like. It's high-wage manufacturing, happening right here in Oak Hill, that the entire globe wants to attract.

"We're not talking about widgets," he added. "We're talking about people who make very good livings doing very interesting work."

Freescale Semiconductor Inc.

Founded in 1948 as a division of Motorola

Headquartered in Oak Hill area of Austin

Local employees: Approximately 5,000

Total number of employees: 18,000

Patent families: More than 6,000

Product areas:

• Automotive semiconductors: Used to improve safety, fuel efficiency
• Home entertainment: Used to improve battery life, interconnectivity
• Business: Uses include building controls, HVAC, factory automation
• Networking: Used in wireless network infrastructures

Source: www.freescale.com