TTM's name stands for time to market, and its best trick was building a custom circuit board in as little as 24 hours. Engineers at networking and computer companies needed prototypes the next day, then thousands of boards a few weeks later. TTM did both. The company began in 1978 as Pacific Circuits, a board shop near Seattle, and took the TTM name in December 1999, months before its IPO in September 2000.

Speed Was the Product

Every phone, router and server is built on a printed circuit board, a layered sheet of copper paths that ties the chips together. Most board makers competed on price. TTM competed on speed. Its plants handled quick-turn prototypes and then moved the same designs into volume production without a handoff to another supplier. The bet was that customers racing to launch new gear would pay extra to get their boards days or weeks sooner.

Bought Its Way to the Top

TTM priced at $16 a share in September 2000 and listed on Nasdaq as TTMI, just as the telecom spending boom turned to bust. It survived by buying rivals. TTM took over Tyco's circuit board unit in 2006, Hong Kong's Meadville in 2010 and Viasystems in 2015, and grew into one of the largest board makers in the world. It now builds boards for defense, data centers and cars, and it remains public on Nasdaq.

Cover: The Drawbridge, plate 7 from Imaginary Prisons, Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a maze of beams and stairways (layers of circuit traces).