Min H. Kao

Min H. Kao served as a lead electrical engineer at Magellan Navigation in the late 1980s when he realized that the military’s GPS technology could be miniaturized and commercialized for civilian use, a realization that led him to partner with Gary Burrell and found Garmin in 1989 with a vision for portable, affordable GPS navigation.

Min H. Kao is the co-founder and former Chairman of Garmin Ltd., having led the company’s technical vision from its inception in 1989 to its dominance in the global GPS navigation and wearable technology market. Prior to founding Garmin, Kao spent several years at Magellan Navigation, where he designed the first civilian GPS receivers and gained firsthand insight into the limitations of the existing military technology, which was too large, too power-hungry, and too expensive for consumer use. Kao’s technical expertise and visionary leadership were instrumental in architecting the proprietary signal processing chips and fast-acquisition algorithms that allowed Garmin’s first receivers to lock onto satellite signals in under two minutes, a feat that competitors’ receivers could not match. Under his technical guidance, Garmin pioneered the civilian GPS navigation market, forcing the entire industry to abandon the bulky, expensive legacy systems in favor of the portable, affordable GPS receivers he invented. Kao is a recognized expert in GPS signal processing, electrical engineering, and hardware miniaturization, and his founding philosophy of making GPS navigation accessible to the masses remains the core architectural principle of the Garmin product portfolio today.