Tan Tseng

Tan Tseng
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Tan Tseng, owner of Headbobble.com, poses with some of the custom-made bobblehead dolls. HOW I MADE IT: TAN TSENG

From tech bubble to tech bobbleheads

Headbobble.com Tan Tseng, owner of Headbobble.com, poses with some of the custom-made bobblehead dolls. The former Silicon Valley engineer is taking bobblehead realism where no bobblehead has gone before. Customers are nodding their approval.
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Now, Tseng is setting his sights on an even higher-tech production process that he says will take bobblehead realism where no bobblehead has gone before.

Personal: Lives in Redwood City, Calif., with his wife and 10-year-old son. Reads books on 3-D technology in his spare time. Tseng used to enjoy gardening as a hobby, but running his own firm leaves him little time for that now.

Background: Tseng, 47, landed in the U.S. almost 30 years ago when his parents fled Vietnam after the fall of the U.S.-backed regime. Armed with an engineering degree from San Francisco State, Tseng was hired by Intel Corp. in 1984, working as a systems engineer. As the millennium approached, he had caught that most pervasive of Silicon Valley ailments: the start-up bug. In 1999, he launched a company producing IC verification software and within three years employed 30 engineers. Then the collapse of the Internet bubble caught up with him. Funding dried up, and so did his business.

Be the boss: Despite his initial setback, Tseng was determined to be his own boss. "I knew every working-class person must move up the ladder in their careers, either in a management position or by starting their own company," he says. "I picked the latter."

Why bobbleheads: Tseng wanted to have a bobblehead doll made of his son but wasn't happy with what he found on the market, so he decided to start his own company.

The bobble biz: Instead of hand-carving his bobbleheads like many of his competitors, Tseng uses a computerized system that scans photos of the subject and then feeds the information to a machine that carves the likeness in wax.
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Tseng is developing an even more realistic bobblehead using an improved 3-D technology that he plans to have on sale in March through a second online site called Gobobble.com. Tseng says the new bobbleheads are more realistic because instead of being hand-painted, the coloring is applied by computer using a photograph of the subject.

Tan Tseng
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Tan Tseng, owner of Headbobble.com, poses with some of the custom-made bobblehead dolls.