Bricks for a Fool's Paradise

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When number of years you have passed through seems larger than what you expect to have before you, decision processes are different. Personal needs have been met, thoughts turn to caring for others and matters of legacy.

Late nineties were heady days if you were in IT industry and a company my friends, Mark, Brenda and I had started was doing very well, doubling revenue every year. I was a silent partner. It was time to think of business expansion. Many issues; what technical area to work in, at what rate to build the company, how to arrange for the required wealth, where to start the company. Since these discussions were taking place in Dallas, which country of the world the venture was set up was immaterial.

One by one, slowly the answers came, more philosophical than commercial. With my experience of having started a high quality IC design group in Texas Instruments in 1988-89 in Bangalore, which had an enviable 97% retention, it was a natural choice to build something in this space. Analog chip design is a difficult area of chip design, at that time it had about 10000 engineers world-wide and about 600 RF engineers compared to close to a million engineers in digital design engineers. It was contiguous area of our work and had a higher immunity to economic forces. The venture would have been successful anywhere in the world, the mode of it's build-up would be vastly different. We wanted at least one percent of world population of analog engineers, hopefully more of RF engineers.

My friends, though from financially modest families, had always worked with several foreigners and believed that foreigners also should also move forward. This opened up the possible choice of location, it could be set up anywhere. It resonated with my philosophy, learnt at my mother's side, that others deserve as much as want for ourselves. We also typically hired people that wanted to start something since such people tended to be self-driven.

There was a television show, that showed three (I think) girls sitting in front of a table with marshmallows. ( These are soft cotton like candy!). They had a choice of eating one immediately or two if they waited till the announcer ran an errand and came back. Stanford followed these girls for many years and girls who waited and ate two marshmallows were more successful in their lives. They showed that more than intelligence or hard work, delayed gratification, was a strong precursor to future success. You want such people in your company.

I was also fascinated by Israel. One fine day a team from Israel in some complicated technical area would show up at a big company. They knew so many minute details of a new technology, such as communication, it scared many in the established company. It turns out that Israel incubated such companies and sheltered them to grow to a critical mass.

Complexity of the work we chose meant that people needed to freely interchange ideas, work as a team. We decided therefore that we will train a bunch of engineers and build the company starting with a strong team culture. It was also imperative that the team stay together for a long time, the comfortable conversation between engineers meant that knowledge resided between them as well as with them.

Though because of personal issues, India was a possible destination, we came to the conclusion, it needed to be India. If experienced engineers were available, on the job training was an option but in my experience less desirable. Cost of training engineers instead of their earning for the company made India a natural choice. Teamwork was also natural to Indians, it blossomed under proper encouragement, again an observation from earlier experience. Gurukul system suited Chip Design well, even if it has not been tried before.

My earlier experience in India was that there were very few graduates from colleges who could do the type of work we planned. Taking the few analog engineers within the country from other companies did not make sense, it did not increase the net pool of qualified engineers. So we started on a venture which initially would us cost more but had goals that were very long, if we survived. Economically counterintutive, STUPID! There was a comfort that we were unlikely to harm anyone (First do no harm!), worst that would happen was that the venture would fail and there would another dozen analog engineers in the country.

Now the time to embellish. This moves fast.

It was always fascinating that engineers could work from Lake Tahoe, 200 miles from San Jose. There were amusing products which provided solar power to laptop computers. Couple that with the fact that first call that goes out from an engineer who has got a raise is to his mother, who does not understand why but is happy. Link seems to be that for a long term, we work hard to please parents and elders, being away is a recent phenomenon goverend by cost of capital. It was possible to imagine that in a few years when fibre optics would criss cross the country, it was possible to do world class work from villages. Knowledge industry is different, this cost of information transfer reduced, upsetting the old apple cart. Working close to home became possible and therefore is preferable. Even if it the norm these days is to move out of home, it is unnatural.

If you want to be in a difficult area of technology, it is preferable to have a stable group, in order to build you have to look at long term, which means you have to treat your potential employee fairly today as you would 10 years later. One gripe in big companies is lack of control, so change that, move from an employee as a cog in the system to the employee as owner of the enterprise. If making money is not a primary objective, why not have employees be masters - provide huge participation in the share capital. Once you believe employees are as smart as you are, why solve the problem of predicting the future alone, build a biological organization, let employees determine what is best.

Politics enters an organization when relationships are impersonal, when a group is large. Why should the groups be large? In older days with large capital, economic size required size. Large companies spend a lot of energy trying to exert control to get divisions to align. It should be equally possible to motivate co-operation between small companies. If virtually you have a large companies, it could be broken up into many small companies. Less politics, better connection between an engineer's toil and the results, better ownership. If in the long term, it is an engineers' company, they should know all aspects of the company. Make rules and tell engineer's why of them so they can modify rules when necessary. Many many more.. it is fun to find synergies.

Only hitch is that such companies do not exist, so be the change you want to be, you will be the first. We are usually not comfortable with the idea of being the first, but we should be.

To be continued....