Looking Back on My Engineering Career, Part 2: Start-up Mania
A brief professional biography (but long for Medium)
I’m on the verge of retirement (less than two years) so it’s a good time for me to look back on my career. Last time in Part 1, I covered my time working at two large corporations, Intel and Tandem Computers. Now, in Part 2, I’ll tell you about all the start-up companies I bounced through. I’m sure you’all have been looking forward to it!
As we left it in Part 1, a colleague of mind from my Intel days, Steve “Mr. Excitement” Sample, had recruited me out of Tandem Computers to join his start-up company, Quickturn Design Systems.
Quickturn’s big idea was to stick a bunch of high-density Xilinx programmable gate arrays (PGAs) into a box and write a bunch of software so they could be automatically configured to emulate any chip schematic. A Quickturn box would run tests on the design many orders of magnitude faster than software simulation. It worked, and became quite a thing in the industry. Quickturn was eventually bought out by a more successful competitor and wound up in Cadence Design Systems, still a leader in the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) field.
I used to joke that I didn’t get in on the ground floor of Quickturn because the office was on the second floor of a small office building in Mountain View. As a matter of fact, it happened to be next door to Silicon Graphics, an early 3D graphics workstation vendor that competed with industry leader Sun Microsystems. Directly behind our building was a big electronics surplus store where we acquired our lab workbenches for a song.
Quckturn’s initial product was a tower-type box that contained two flavors of boards. It could have one or several of the board that was packed with Xilinx chips. Steve designed that board. The other board, which I designed, was a master controller and embedded logic analyzer.
I left Quickturn after a little more than a year, before the first product shipped. My reason was the co-founder and CEO, who was a marketing dude whom I shall not name since I am saying bad things about him. This guy was so disorganized and all over the place that it made my life miserable. I didn’t believe the company could be successful under his leadership. I got that wrong, but I don’t regret leaving.
Another thing that was making my life at Quickturn less than ideal was that we had a hardware technician who thought he was smarter than the engineers, which he was not. Since I had one foot out the door anyway, I began letting him do whatever the hell he wanted to do. It turned out to be a valuable lesson for me, because I learned that things could get done even if I didn’t micro-manage them.
After Quickturn, I was spoiled for start-up companies and vowed never to work in a large corporation again. I worked for a small R&D office of Lexicon to build their first digital signal processor (DSP) based board, which never saw the light of day. I worked in few optical disk start-ups that eventually failed. I worked in a small company that built industrial handheld computers before smart phones existed. They were carried, for example, by delivery people to log their routes. Funny thing, at that job, my paycheck was signed by four different companies without me ever leaving my chair: I came in as a contractor employed by a contracting firm, then I got hired direct, then the company got swallowed by a larger company, and then a larger company again swallowed us. All in two years.
I spend around a year in most of these companies before they got acquired or went bankrupt. I began to joke to myself that maybe they all failed because I worked for them! At one point I became convinced that a person could make a good living coming to the office and never doing a lick of work because every place they worked was in the middle of an acquisition.
First rule of being laid off in an office shut down: Steal office supplies. I have so many staplers, tape dispensers, and hole punches that I stopped bothering to steal them. Also, get a few lab supplies, like a good soldering iron, before they are all gone. A good wire cutters and pliers. No inventory items, mind you, like computers, Xerox machines or oscilloscopes. Just consumables.
First rule of being acquired by a much larger company: If your office is not shut down immediately, it will be shut down in exactly one year.
Never commit to a first-generation product from a start-up company. They are lying about its performance and reliability — especially if they are venture capital funded. VCs deliberately accept schedules they know are unrealistic so the start-up has to come back for another round of funding and the VCs get a bigger, cheaper piece of the action. Then they push the product out the door before it is ready. I learned this by designing in a tape drive from a start-up company when I was with Tandem Computers, and then I learned it from the other side working in numerous start-ups.
Fun anecdote: At one of the optical disk companies, the VC investors decided to merge it with the optical disk division of Kodak (the photographic film company), which Kodak was getting rid of. When we took it over, several of us spent a couple of weeks simply cataloguing all the equipment on the shelves of their lab: PCs, oscilloscopes, power supplies, all manner of lab equipment. Some of us employees asked the executives if we could buy a PC or oscilloscope for a low price, but our wonderful but tight-assed CFO said no, they could only be sold at book value. Then the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake struck and all the equipment fell off the shelves into a big pile of rubble. Definitely decreased the book value.
The longest and most successful start-up I did was R-Byte, which designed a low cost 3.5" DDS data storage drive using 4mm digital audio tape (DAT) cartridges. It is a helical scan technology similar to VCRs, but smaller — 4mm wide tape instead of 8mm. I don’t know how we ever got VC funded because the competition was Hewlitt Packard, who had invented the technology. However, their product was 5–1/4" form factor and rather pricey. We had a design approach that would be much lower cost and the smaller form-factor.
Actually, I do know how we raised funds. Our CEO was a charming British chap named Ian Turner who had also led the optical disk start-ups I had done. Ian was a technical type (and a physics type), but he could also sell ice cubes to Eskimos. He once asked me, “Do you know what my job is right after I close a round of funding? It is to start raising the next round!”
I was Director of Engineering. I took a lot of trips to the Far East, many of them with Ian, to source parts and contract manufacturers. We had to get the helical scan head drum from a Japanese manufacturer. I think we got it from Sony. We got the drive built in Singapore. Ian warned me, “Enjoy the travel because one day it will suddenly stop and you’ll look back on it fondly.” He showed me how to live it up on the company dime when our funds were strong. Later the flights became steerage instead of business class. I look back fondly at the travel experiences.
It took us several years but we managed to ship our first product. However, by that time, HP was shipping 3.5" models and had already moved on to the next generation, higher density model. Our drive worked but the error rate was higher than it ought to be and we never could completely crack that problem. It is a tough technology! By the time we shipped, the market demanded that we also have a tape cartridge “stacker” that could automatically feed a stack of a half-dozen tapes to the drive. We did one, but it wasn’t greatly reliable.
As we embarked on our second generation product, the VC funders decided it was time to cash out. The company was sold to Exabyte, a successful manufacturer of 8mm helical scan data storage tape drives, i.e., based on video tape technology. The acquisition was successful but the meetings to transfer the technology were political and frustrating. After one long meeting at their headquarters in Colorado, I walked out into the parking lot and vomited.
I quit the job and resolved never to be in management again. I would look only for individual contributor roles from now on.
In the acquisition, the VCs got their investment back, which put it in their win column, and the employees made a little bit of money for their stock and in retention bonuses. The board of directors wanted to reward only top management, but Ian, being a really good fellow, insisted that the booty be shared among every employee of the company. I made enough for a really nice car, but not enough for a house. It was the only money I ever made from a start-up, outside of salary.
The best non-salary money I ever made was on incentive stock options at Intel. When I left, I cashed out every option I could lay my hands on. The next Monday was the famous stock market crash of 1981. Lucky me!
When I changed my sex (male to female) at the beginning of the new century, a funny thing happened professionally. Suddenly my judgement as a hardware engineer was being questioned and second-guessed. To be fair, I don’t know if it was because of being female, or because they thought I must be crazy to have changed my sex.
I got laid off about a year later and I that was fine by me. I decided I didn’t wany to be a hardware engineer anymore because, besides the judgement-questioning issue, the job had gotten way boring. It seemed I was just gluing chips to a board following the manufacturer’s application note, and not creatively designing anything. In addition, I was sick and tired of people dropping heaps of equipment on my desk and saying, “It’s broken. Please fix it.” In addition, my eyesight was aging just as the components were getting smaller and smaller. I couldn’t even see the little 0402 surface-mount resistors without a microscope.
I tried to get back into custom integrated circuit design but nobody would hire me because I didn’t have experience with the big expensive EDA tools that were necessary these days. My start-ups always had to do things on a budget.
I tried to get a software engineering job because I enjoyed the little bit of coding I had done over the years. And besides, software engineers had the coolest tools. But nobody was going to hire a hardware engineer to do software.
Unlike almost all engineers, I’d always enjoyed the technical writing part of the job so I thought I would get a tech writer position. But nobody would hire me for that. They said I need some type of certification in the field.
I even considered getting into nursing school for a real change of pace, but the schools were too full. And the pay would be lousy. I would have to stay in the technology field if I wanted to continue to earn good money.
What to do, what to do?
Coming up next, Part 3: Beyond Hardware Engineering
— Lannie Rose, June 2023
preferred pronouns: she/her/hers
GPT-4 (bing.com/new) used heavily for research, but not at all for writing.
