Over the course of two decades, Alan cemented Superflight’s reputation as the go-to company for thoughtfully designed, meticulously engineered high performance sporting goods by introducing 18 total products to great acclaim. In 2005 he changed the company name to Aerobie, Inc. after recognizing that millions of people knew the company by its Aerobie brand.
In 2003, Alan embarked on a new adventure - a dramatic departure from the company’s progress until that point. Dismayed by his own bad experiences with home coffee makers, and inspired by a conversation about how difficult it was to make a single cup of good coffee, Alan began to experiment with ways to do just that. He spent months studying the coffee brewing process to determine which variables affect the taste of brewed coffee. Once he understood the ideal conditions for brewing a cup of coffee, Alan set about designing a manual coffee press that would brew coffee under those ideal conditions. Two years and over 30 prototypes later he finalized the design and introduced the AeroPress coffee maker at Coffee Fest Seattle in November 2005. The AeroPress coffee maker has earned rave reviews for the delicious flavor of the coffee it brews.
Today, Alan holds over 40 patents. He has designed instrumentation systems for military aircraft, nuclear reactors, and submarines, a paraboloid lens for telescopes, and dozens of flutes in addition to his boats and Aerobie products. Along with the course on sensors he taught for Stanford University's mechanical engineering students, he has given guest lectures on engineering design, aerodynamics, and inventing at NASA, Google, Caltech, Princeton, UC Davis, and The Royal Aeronautical Society in London.