Category Archives: management

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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Acquisitions: cull the managers

When a company acquires another one, not just in EDA, there is often an internal group already doing something similar. For example, Intuit has just acquired mint.com and they already have a product, Quicken Online that competes in pretty much … Continue reading

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Interview questions

A friend of mine is interviewing for a marketing position at an EDA startup. I’d better leave everything anonymous to protect the innocent. He (or maybe it was she) asked me what good questions to ask would be. There are … Continue reading

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Spending money effectively

People die because they run out of oxygen. It doesn’t matter what the reason is—trauma, cancer, heart attack—lack of oxygen is what finally kills us. In the same way, startups die because they run out of cash. It doesn’t matter … Continue reading

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How long should you stay in a job?

How long should you stay in a job? The answer will depend a bit on your personality. But I think a job is interesting so long as you’re learning a lot and that seems to mean that you should stay … Continue reading

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Mergers and acquisitions

There were three interesting acquisitions in the last week or so: Apache aquired Sequence, Synfora acquired Esterel Studio and Global Foundries acquired Chartered. The Apache/Sequence acquisition is interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that both companies are private and … Continue reading

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Being CEO

I talked earlier about how you get to be CEO (basically, luck the first time; track record after that). But what does being a CEO entail? I think all senior management jobs consist of two separate dimensions that have two … Continue reading

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Big company guys don’t do small

Big company guys think that they can run startups because they’ve run small divisions of big companies. So that must be the same, right? Actually the two things are very different and not many people seem to be good at … 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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Integration and differentiation

EDA acquisitions are very tricky to manage in most cases. This is because most acquisitions are acquiring two things: a business and a technology. In the long run the technology is usually the most important aspect of the acquisition but … Continue reading

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