Ron Khormaei was in his twenties, a PhD engineer with seven years at a small company, when he got the offer he says he had been chasing: general manager of a new division, building a virtual and augmented reality device at 100,000 units a year. He was excited that Friday. By Friday night, he says, he was at home asking how you even hire operators, because until then his idea of buying parts was walking into RadioShack and picking up ten. On Monday he went back to his bosses and said he did not know how to do this and needed to learn from people who did. That decision led him to HP, then Logitech, then a string of startups, and eventually to a Portland factory that makes carbon-steel kitchen knives.
In this episode of Starting Small, Khormaei, Founder & CEO of STEELPORT Knife Co., walks through the whole path: leaving Iran at 15, a PhD from Oregon State, a career in manufacturing, the cast iron company he helped build and sold to Lodge in 2019, and the moment he looked at the knives in national stores and decided to start again.
This is the full Ron Khormaei founder story, and the origin of STEELPORT, as he told it on the show.
Listen to the full conversation with Ron Khormaei on Apple Podcasts.
Key takeaways from Ron Khormaei
He left a general manager offer to learn manufacturing first. Khormaei says he realized he did not know how to get 100,000 of something, and went to HP to find out.
FINEX came from a sketch. Someone with a drawing of a cast iron skillet asked him for advice, and Khormaei says they took it to Kickstarter.
STEELPORT started with a gap. In 2019, he says, every kitchen knife he found in national retail stores was made overseas, which he called "a call for a fight."
The standard is "craftsmanship without compromise." Every product, he says, must be beautiful, add value the market lacks, and be sourced and made in the U.S.
Carbon steel and a coffee patina. He says the team looked at 18 materials before choosing coffee.
His advice: "Just start, just do."
Leaving Iran at 15
Khormaei was born in Iran and went to school there until about 15. He says he left the country by himself that year, because after 16 he would have been recruited into the military and could not leave. He spent a little time in Germany, did a year of high school in Canada, then moved to the U.S. and finished high school in Corvallis, Oregon.
He describes it as exciting rather than frightening. He was old enough to travel at 15, 16 and 17, he says, but too young to realize the trouble he could get into. It felt like complete freedom, and he thinks much of his confidence comes from those years.
From pre-med to a PhD
Khormaei calls his college story "the most boring answer" because he stayed put. He earned his BS, MS and PhD all at Oregon State in Corvallis, and says the university once displayed his picture in the Portland airport because so few people hold all three degrees from the same school.
His original plan was to become a physician. At a freshman information session he heard statistics on how few pre-med students make it into medical school, and decided it made little sense to spend four years on a degree you could not do anything with. He lined up his classes to finish electrical engineering in two and a half years, then took a six-month internship at a local small company called Planar Systems. They kept him, and offered to pay for his PhD. His mother, he says, had one requirement, and he met it: he still got to put "doctor" in front of his name.
Planar Systems and the job he walked away from
At Planar he started as a research scientist and quickly became a first-level manager. In his last couple of years there, he asked to lead a small project that grew into what he calls a multi-million-dollar program with funding from DARPA, Army ARL, Boeing and others.
Then came the offer to run the division making the device at 100,000 units per year. Becoming a general manager had been his goal, but by that night he saw the offer as a setup for failure. How do you get 100,000 of something? He had no idea.
On Monday he told management, including a CEO he describes as wonderful and supportive, that a small company did not have enough area for him to learn manufacturing. He says he knew his limitations, helped hire his replacement and moved to the biggest manufacturer he knew at the time: HP.
Thirteen years at HP and two at Logitech
Khormaei says he spent about 13 years at HP, rotating himself through different functions. He started as a manufacturing program manager and brought up a new fab in Singapore. He moved to a printer division in Vancouver, Washington, on the procurement side, then quality and R&D, and five years in San Diego managing engineers around the world. He left HP in 2008.
He then needed to move back to the Northwest because his mother was getting older. He had an offer to chair an electrical engineering department at a local university, and on the way to the final negotiation he stopped at Logitech, which had missed shipments because of quality problems at a company it acquired. A half-hour conversation with the VP of Engineering ran over two hours, and within a week he had an offer he could not turn down. He put the academic path on hold and spent about two years on a turnaround as director of electrical engineering, with teams in Washington state, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
At the end of those two years, he says, he woke up and remembered why he had started at a small company in the first place.
Eleven startups and a cast iron skillet
In 2010 Khormaei went back to small companies. He says he has since been involved with eleven startups in different roles, much of it aimed at bringing manufacturing and jobs back onshore, and he is quick to add that he did not say eleven successful startups. By his own account it has been a mixture of good, bad and non-success. That year he also became an adjunct professor at Portland State University, where he says he has taught for about 16 years.
Then, as a professor, he says, someone reached out with a paper sketch of a cast iron skillet and asked for advice. Khormaei thought he was a technology guy who knew nothing about cast iron, but the idea intrigued him. They turned the sketch into a 3D print and launched on Kickstarter, which he calls widely successful. He says the number of backers was higher than the uncles and aunts the two of them had combined, which he took as a sign of a gap in the market.
For the first three years, he says, the FINEX tagline was that the company was "one hundred percent less French than Le Creuset," because people kept asking why they needed another cast iron skillet.
In 2019 FINEX was sold to Lodge. Khormaei says Lodge has kept manufacturing in the U.S. and kept the core values. He now sits in a STEELPORT factory that has a section for FINEX, because Lodge wanted to keep a presence in Portland, and he says his connection to the brand continues, though it is more emotional than financial.
The 2019 knife aisle
The same year, Khormaei says, he had the experience again. He visited famous national retailers and found that every kitchen knife on the shelf was made overseas, none in the U.S. Given the FINEX story, he calls that "a call for a fight."
The lesson from cast iron shaped the plan. If you are trying to break into a market that is not used to American-made products, he says, you cannot make an average knife. It had to be so much better than anything else that people would see it was made in the U.S., in Portland, and give it a shot because the product is so good.
To do it, he recruited his business partner, Eytan Zias, who has 25 years of experience making, sharpening and selling knives, according to Khormaei. Zias started as a busboy before going to culinary school and becoming a professional chef, and Khormaei says his experience was that cutting onions and chopping potatoes leaves you with calluses because knives are uncomfortable and unbalanced. The two collected about a dozen of their peers to design the best knife they could.
Khormaei says he started the concept in 2019 and the company was fully founded in 2020, the COVID year. With amazing talent available and factories sitting idle, they experimented from early 2020 into 2021 before launching their first knife under the tagline "craftsmanship without compromise." He says the line now has eight different knife SKUs and a broad selection of kitchenware.
Why carbon steel, and why coffee
Khormaei describes STEELPORT as a pyramid. The base is craftsmanship without compromise: a knife that is sharp, stays sharp, is comfortable and maneuverable, and does not tire you out after an hour. On top of that, every product has to pass three requirements: it has to be beautiful, it has to add value the market does not already have, and it has to be U.S. sourced and locally made. If something already exists, he says, STEELPORT has no interest in putting its name on it.
Carbon steel, he says, follows the same logic as cast iron when everyone else was using Teflon or aluminum. It allows the sharpest edge and the longest-lasting, most comfortable system. The tradeoff is that you have to rinse it and keep it dry, and he says STEELPORT expects customers to care about the tool.
The company also does what he describes as a process unique to STEELPORT: a coffee patina. Coming from cast iron, where you season a pan before using it, the team wanted to patina the knife. Patina is sometimes done on Damascus knives with ferric chloride, but a Portland company making knives for kitchens, he says, was not going to dip them in that. The team looked at 18 different materials and chose coffee, which gives a controlled oxidation of the surface. After a mirror-finish polish, he says, the patina provides protection, a nice color and a quality feedback.
How STEELPORT makes a knife
Because Khormaei comes from high-volume manufacturing as well as craftsmanship, he says STEELPORT lets others do the work wherever something good already exists, and does in-house what is unique. The flagship eight-inch chef knife starts as a rod that is drop forged. For that, he says, the team worked with a Midwest company that makes engine parts, including for Harley-Davidson, and spent the COVID year transforming one of its big machines into a high-quality steel forging capability, because the U.S. had lost the ability to forge knives at high volume.
The handle is a one-piece design wrapped around the full tang, which he says the company believes no one else in the world does. Assembly with natural wood has to be done by hand, because each piece differs slightly.
STEELCORE: a cutting board with steel inside
Khormaei says STEELPORT's real interest is making food preparation a joy rather than a chore. A sharp knife is necessary for that, but not sufficient. The company moved into accessories, including a patented knife stand, and the cutting board, which he calls probably the second hardest product to develop. It took about three years.
Wood boards have two problems, he says: they absorb flavor, and good ones must be an inch and a half to two inches thick or they warp. His answer is what he describes as the only two-sided cutting board in the world. One side is a recycled paper composite, non-porous, for garlic, onion and raw meat; the other is walnut end grain for the rest of food prep. Steel bars inside, which he compares to rebar in concrete, keep it flat at about half an inch thick.
Now, he says, the company is trying to license the STEELCORE technology. His model is Gore-Tex. STEELPORT keeps the cutting board, but as a small company its reach is limited, so he wants larger partners to bring STEELCORE into completely different product lines.
Ron Khormaei's advice for founders
Asked for one piece of advice, he says it is very simple: "Just start, just do." Many of the students and startups he advises, he says, have an idea but get stuck thinking instead of moving.
He says whatever you decide to do will be wrong, and he has never seen anyone start with an idea and have that exact idea come around ten years later. But when you start, you get a chance to adjust. He compares it to riding a bicycle: "You need to start moving before you can control it."
His own career is the evidence, he says. He did not grow up wanting to make STEELCORE cutting boards. He wanted to be a doctor. His biggest learning is to stay open, allow yourself to make mistakes, and not be shy or ashamed. When he gives that feedback to students in their late twenties and early thirties, he says, they tell him it was freeing, and he sees them accelerate. He is starting a new class on technology entrepreneurship in the AI era.
Frequently asked questions about Ron Khormaei and STEELPORT
Who is Ron Khormaei?
Ron Khormaei is the Founder & CEO of STEELPORT Knife Co. in Portland, Oregon. He was born in Iran, left at 15, and earned his BS, MS and PhD in electrical engineering at Oregon State University. He worked at Planar Systems, HP and Logitech before helping build FINEX and then founding STEELPORT.
What is STEELPORT Knife Co.?
According to Khormaei, a Portland company making U.S.-sourced, locally made carbon-steel kitchen knives and accessories under the tagline "craftsmanship without compromise."
What was FINEX?
Khormaei says FINEX was a premium American-made cast iron skillet company that began as a sketch, launched on Kickstarter and was sold to Lodge in 2019.
Listen to the full conversation
Listen to the full conversation with Ron Khormaei on Apple Podcasts. Learn more about STEELPORT at steelportknife.com. The Starting Small Summit returns February 17, 2027, at the Everest-Rohrer Auditorium in Mishawaka.
