This is the second of two guest blogs from Doug Fairbairn about Lambda magazine (which became VLSI Design) and the early days of VLSI Technology. The first blog is here.
VLSI Design, VLSI Technology
Amazingly enough, Xerox agreed to underwrite the second issue of LAMBDA, even though I had left the company. But that was the end of their largesse and I was on my own. Even though I was part of a new startup, VTI (VLSI Technology) was still in fund-raising mode and I had lots of time on my hands. I set about learning what it meant to be a magazine publisher, a business I had no clue about at the time.
First step—put the magazine on hold while I figured out a business plan. I journeyed to Anaheim CA, home of Disneyland to attend a magazine publisher’s conference. There I attended a seminar given by a guy I found was the guru of magazine startups. Following the Anaheim conference, I flew to New York City to meet him on his own turf…in a penthouse condo on Fifth Avenue. What was I doing here? He still sported the tan and shorts he was wearing when I saw him in California. He welcomed me into his home and gave me the instant course on starting a magazine…must have cost me thousands of dollars. But that was nothing. He told me I had to go see some marketing guru on Madison Ave. and have them put together a glossy promotional package aimed at determining if there was a market for my new publication. You know…the fancy envelope that comes in the mail with all sorts of full color promotional material and that letter signed in blue ink (the blue ink is important…generates more responses!) And don’t forget the sticker you have to remove from one piece and put it on the return postcard. A final complication was that it would take weeks to develop the package and there was no use mailing it during the summer as the return rates are too low… have to wait until September when people are back to work. OK – I’ve spent $20,000, been forced to wait until the fall, and I still don’t know if I have a business or not! I obviously didn’t know what I was doing. Then fate took control.
I was sitting in my home office, keeping myself busy while my magazine business was on hold when the phone rings. Some guy from Harris Semiconductor in Florida wanted to place an ad in the next issue! Uh… call you back! Now what? I don’t know if there will be a next issue! But wait, maybe this is it! A quick calculation shows I need $15,000 to pay the printing bill. If I sell 15 pages of ads for $1,000 each, I’ve got it covered. I called him back – sold him the back cover of the Fourth Quarter issue (never was a Third Quarter issue that year) and went to the work on the phones. I called all my friends and non-friends who I knew in the industry, and after 6 weeks of working the phones, I had it! Exactly 15 pages of ads! And what an issue! 80 pages of ads and quality editorial. Advertisers included Calma, Applicon, Sperry-Univac, Harris (of course) and many others. Jim Clark, Ron Rivest, Randy Bryant, Ed Cheng, and others who in the subsequent years would make major contributions to the field, authored eight featured articles. We were off!
Oh, what about the Madison Avenue circulation test? It went out in September, with results back in October and November. About the time our blockbuster issue hit the streets, Madison Ave. told me I had a loser. I hardly noticed. Had to get busy on the First Quarter 1981 issue!
About this time, VTI finally got funded, so I had two full-time jobs. There was never any doubt I knew silicon and design better than the magazine business so I gradually added staff to take over my duties at the magazine while I poured myself into the VTI startup. I had hired my assistant from Xerox back in 1980, added an ad sales rep by the beginning of 1981 and finally replaced myself primary technical editor in 1982.
There was one more magazine industry lesson I learned in 1981 – don’t be too clever when it comes to a name. In early 1981, I received a letter from Lambda Electronics saying that I was infringing their copyright and that I should cease using their name for the magazine. I had already discovered that although LAMBDA might seem like a clever name, it’s meaning was far from obvious to those who weren’t already “in the know”. People commented that they saw the magazine and assumed it was a power supply catalogue (that’s what Lambda Electronics made at the time). As I looked around, I discovered that magazines were normally pretty up front with their names: Newsweek, Playboy, House and Garden, Electronics, Electronic Times….you get the idea. So we took the opportunity to get off Lambda’s “sue ‘em” list and changed the name to “VLSI Design”.
The second form of outside recognition in 1981 was a little more positive. We were awarded a “Maggie” by the Western Publisher’s Association as the best Electronics and Data Processing Magazine. We joined the big time! The actual Maggie award is a true door-stop quality block of lucite which was a welcome recognition of the hard work we had put into launching the magazine.
In January, 1983 I woke up one morning and said to myself, “I can’t do this anymore!” Two startups are killing me! Again, fate played its hand. Within a week or two of this self-realization, I had two parties interested in buying the publication. By then it was a well-known, and well-respected industry magazine with a circulation in the 30,000 range. In February 1983, VTI went public. In May 1983, I sold the magazine to CMP Publications, the most respected electronics industry publisher of the day. We’ll put that down as a good year!
Outside of the excitement and learning around building a startup in an industry I knew nothing about I’m most proud of the impact the magazine had on the industry. It really did provide not only a communications vehicle, but a sense of community around these new ideas and helped speed their understanding and adoption. To this day I still run into people who have kept all their LAMBDA/VLSI Magazines. There clearly was something there beyond being another technical rag.