Message Boards
Today's Active Topics Today's Active Cases Browse Forum Categories My Recent Activity My Messages Private Groups My Marked Threads My Subscriptions
Today's Active Images Today's Active Polls Most Active Topics Global Townie Map Advanced Message Board Search Message Board Terms of Use

Bright Idea Benjamin Lund, Editor, Dentaltown Magazine

More by this author (119)


While many dental students are busy practicing their clinical skills or cramming for exams in their free time, University of Southern California School of Dentistry (USCSD) student Ron Nguyen does it while marketing a highly competitive product he designed himself, exhibiting at trade shows and running his fledgling operation, Ultralight Optics, with the perspicaciousness of a seasoned businessman.
by Benjamin Lund, Editor, Dentaltown Magazine
I'm making the rounds in the exhibit area at the 2009 Townie Meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada, when Dr. Mike "Miguel" Melkers pulls me to the side and says, "Dude, you've gotta meet this guy." Mike is pretty hyped up, which piques my interest enough to follow him over to the Ultralight Optics booth. Standing next to the Ultralight table is a young looking, pensive but very genial fellow; he resembles a teenager awaiting his prom date. Mike sticks around long enough to make a quick introduction and darts off in the other direction.
The kid says his name is Ron Nguyen (pronounced "nuhWEN"). Shaking his hand, I say, "Nice to meet you, Ron" but I'm thinking, "You here with your dad or something?" Before I can summon enough gumption to actually ask that, Nguyen starts telling me his story. Turns out this "kid" is the founder and CEO of Ultralight Optics, manufacturer of the Feather Light LED loupe light, which Nguyen says is a relief for dentists who have grown tired of wearing heavier and bulkier head lights. "The light is virtually weightless," says Nguyen. "At four grams, it is three times lighter than the next smallest light. It also has the highest energy density of any light because the amount of brightness it produces compared to its size and weight ratio is magnitudes higher than that of any other light…"

"Wait a minute," I say. "How old are you?"

"I'm 26," he says. "I'm currently enrolled in the dental program at USC."

Scanning his invention, I ask, "You developed this in dental school?"

"Yep!" Nguyen says, then continues to tell me how he started his company…

The Question
"Why can't they make this better?"
It's a question you've likely asked yourself while in the middle of working on a patient. Sometimes you're steamed enough to request that a company changes its product to fit your need, sometimes you switch to a competing product that will do what you want, sometimes you jump on the Dentaltown.com message boards and find out what other dentists are using, or sometimes you just keep using the same product even though you'd prefer to throw it through a wall. It's rare, but sometimes there are those, rather than waiting for a corporate workaround, who will make change themselves.

In Nguyen's case, his personal mantra of "making things better" began with himself when he was in high school. Nguyen was simply an average student with a 2.85 GPA and limited prospects on the horizon. Around the time his older brother, Ray, was accepted into USC's dental school was when Nguyen realized he needed to change his life - and fast. He began a stringent self-imposed program of development and improvement in order to achieve his new goal: to become a dentist.

"I owe my entire success to my drive to try to get into dental school," says a beaming Nguyen. "I had entered junior college and transferred to UCLA to graduate with a 3.94 overall GPA, which is still my most proudest accomplishment."

Nguyen says he was on the waiting list to get into Harvard's dental school and he was accepted to Columbia, but he passed up those opportunities to go to USC. When I ask, "Why USC?" Nguyen says, "USC might not top the charts of nationwide dental schools, but it offered something no other school offered - freedom. Freedom to do anything you want, from learning dentistry to learning other life skills in business and politics."

Learning the Business
For the most part, Nguyen is confident, outgoing and proud of his achievements. Socially, you can tell he is a little bit of a late bloomer. You can catch little glimpses of the introverted, shy person he used to be in some of his mannerisms. He tells me how much he's grown, personally, since he started on his road to self-betterment. Upon achieving his academic goals, he says, "The powers of knowledge were worthless unless I could convey them effectively." Thus, he realized he had to learn how to connect better with people and network on a grander social scale. An opportunity to do so came in the form of used dental equipment.

"Graduating seniors had no more use for their equipment, so they tried selling it to freshmen," says Nguyen. "That didn't work because those freshmen already had equipment of their own. So, I unearthed one of the few guaranteed cyclical trends in the world. I purchased many of the seniors' equipment at 10 cents on the dollar since no one wanted it, held onto it for a semester, and resold it all to incoming freshmen. The money was nice, but the real value was in learning about patience, sales, how to recognize opportunities, values, how to mentally accept losses and how to negotiate. I used that money to help my friends and started to develop my network."

Seeing the Light
At the Townie Meeting booth, Nguyen invites me to put on a pair of loupes and asks me to get used to the weight and feel of them before he attaches his Feather Light LED headlight.

"Tell me if you feel any difference," he says, clicking the light into place. Try as I might, I can't really tell.

"What do you think?" he asks.

I just smile - he already knows what I think – and I ask him to tell me more about developing the light.

Nguyen created the Feather Light prototype because he kept hearing, "Why can't they make this better?" He and his fellow USCSD classmates were frustrated with the shadows produced by overhead lights, and the existing loupe lights felt large and bulky. Nguyen, tinkered around using various parts of unsold used dental equipment to develop the first prototype.

"I wasn't in it for the money, I was in it for the experience," Nguyen says. "I still have my original journal entry from when I was developing the prototype. The prediction was a net profit of $1,500."

Nguyen sold his first prototypes to friends of his who were astonished by how small and bright the light was. When they used them in clinics, their peers wanted to know where they could get one. Pretty soon, Nguyen was inundated with so many orders from his classmates that he hit a brick wall. He couldn't make them fast enough.

At that time, he owned a house with his brother and sister, which he immediately sold so he could hire engineers and a staff to continue developing this new light. "It was a leap of faith, but an opportunity to learn," Nguyen says. "If I had failed, I would have viewed it as ‘tuition' money for a real-world business class in entrepreneurship. From there, I used the power of 800 students and faculty from USC to gain insight into what needed to be done. The rest is history."

What evolved, through the immense grassroots support of his friends, family, classmates and even USCSD faculty, was the smallest and brightest LED loupe light for dentists on the market. Nguyen ran tests on optimum brightness and found that 3,600 foot candle lights tended to white out the subjects and cause retinal strain. The Feather Light operates at a maximum of 3,600 foot candles, but can be easily adjusted to 2,200 foot candles, which is the comfortable brightness for practicing dentists using 2.5x loupes, according to Nguyen (3,600 foot candles is comfortable for 4x loupes). The lights themselves, which are no larger than a dime, are rated to last longer than 50,000 hours and are powered by a high capacity lithium ion battery. Nguyen is able to keep his prices pretty low, considering much of his marketing is done by word of mouth, and word is spreading fast. Ultralight Optics was even awarded the Innovation of the Year award by USC's Steven's Institute for its versatility and impact on the dental profession.

Now Nguyen travels the country (when he can get away) to show dental professionals his unique product. After speaking with Nguyen, I hang around near his booth to watch him turn a few skeptics into believers; wowing one dentist at a time.

Nguyen is still committed to practicing dentistry upon graduation ("I was born to be a dentist," he says), and he is beginning to develop other ideas through his newest venture – DentaSharp, LLC. The new company will warehouse Nguyen's other inventions, which were financially restrictive prior to his success with Feather Light. Nguyen hopes to be seen as an inspiration for other young, aspiring entrepreneurs and inventors.

"Ultralight Optics isn't just a company, it's symbol to dental students across the United States who are developing their own inventions," says Nguyen. "Even now, several patents are being filed by USC students. New ideas are being put through processes that take it to the next level. Ultralight Optics, shows them that big companies and small students have the same potential for greatness. There were many hands above us that helped pull us up, and someday I hope we can reach down and support someone else's new idea."

For more information about Ultralight Optics, please visit www.ultralightoptics.com, www.loupelights.com, or call 323- 316-4514.
Dentaltown Magazine
September 2025
Dentaltown Magazine September 2025 Read Current Issue Read Archived Issues
Sponsors
Townie Perks
Townie® Poll
Who or what do you turn to for most financial advice regarding your practice?
  
Site Menu
Message Boards Magazine Continuing Education Podcasts Blogs Classifieds Dental News Events Townie® Poll Ebooks Townie Choice Awards
Company Info
Contact Us Advertise With Us Howard Farran DDS, MBA Policies and Agreements
Site Help
Sally Gross, Member Services Specialist
Phone: +1-480-445-9710
Email: sally@farranmedia.com
©2025 Dentaltown, a division of Farran Media • All Rights Reserved
9633 S. 48th Street Suite 200 • Phoenix, AZ 85044 • Phone:+1-480-598-0001 • Fax:+1-480-598-3450