Category Archives: investment

30th Anniversary of Funding of VLSI Technology

Doug Fairbairn reminds me that today is the 30th anniversary of the funding of VLSI Techology. VLSI was really the first company to embrace the idea that integrated circuits could be designed by people outside the priesthood of the semiconductor … Continue reading

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Vertical integration back in fashion: re-aggregation again

I was on a board meeting of Tuscany this morning and Trevor Loy, the board-member representing Flywheel Ventures painted an interesting view of what Wall Streets received wisdom is about what is going to happen in technology in general. The … Continue reading

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Apple is chasing down Exxon

Apple just became the most valuable tech company in the the world, surpassing Microsoft. It is now chasing ExxonMobil, the most valuable company in the world and the only one ahead of it. Apple is valued at $291B and with … Continue reading

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So you want to start an EDA company?

As I have said repeatedly, the old model for innovation in EDA has died. The old model was largely that venture capitalists would fund teams of engineers, they would produce products to solve some problem that was looming on the … Continue reading

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Ticonderoga

When I was at Cadence, one of my jobs was to be the technical interface to investors and analysts. The finance organization, with its investor relations department, could handle all the numbers but if anyone wanted to talk about technology … Continue reading

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Entrepreneurs’ ages

Entrepreneurs are all twenty-somethings straight out of college these days aren’t they? Not so fast, it turns out that this is an illusion. It’s probably true in some areas, such as social networking, where the young are the target audience … Continue reading

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Barriers to entry

When I looked around at DAC last month (well, the month before last, what happened to August?) one thing that is in some ways surprising is that, given the poor growth prospects of the EDA industry, there are so many … Continue reading

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CEO pay

If you are an investor, what do you think the best predictors for success for a startup are? If you could pick only one metric, which one would you use? Peter Thiel, who invested in both PayPal and Facebook so … Continue reading

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Being too early to market

Startups have a singular focus on getting their product to market as quickly as possible. Given that focus, you’d think that the primary mode of failure for a startup would be being too late to market, but it’s actually hard … Continue reading

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DAC: VC panel

I went to Lucio Lanza’s panel session on how much it matters that VC investment for fabless semiconductor companies and EDA companies has dried up. The rest of the panel was Sanjay Shrivastava from Denali, Gunjeet Baweja from Needham and … Continue reading

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