By way of introduction, I'm David Scott Carlick and I have been in the ‘entrepreneurial ecosystem’ now for almost thirty years. I started an ad agency in the late 1970s in Silicon Valley to serve the needs of startups, which I eventually found out were backed by ‘venture capital.’ Over that time, I worked with hundreds of companies and thousands of new products and ideas, some of which became institutions, some of which blossomed and then withered, and most of which never got anywhere meaningful. So I have a lot of experience, and experience, as you all know, is what you get when you don’t get the money.
The more notable of the companies I had a material effort helping were (in alphabetical order) Cirrus Logic, Cypress Semiconductor, Daisy Systems, Netscape, Network Equipment Technologies, Network General, Osborne Computer, Personal Computing Magazine, Silicon Graphics, SuperMac, Synopsys, and Toshiba Portable Computers (TAIS).
Ten years ago I switched to the venture capital side of the business, joining the then boutique VantagePoint Venture Partners where I have worked in some capacity or other, investing in twelve companies, seeing the first seven implode during the dotcom bust, and seeing others go on to success, including most notably Intermix Media, which spawned and owned MySpace and which sold to Fox in 2005.
I have lots of opinions on this subject. (Those of you who know venture capitalists know that the mere anointment of that title bestows the ability to speak authoritatively on any subject.) And I have any number of comments to make on venture startups and engineers, from comments Dilbert to comments on marketing communications, which Dilbert regularly subjects to appropriate abuse. (I have long maintained that those who do, do. Those who can’t do, teach. Those who can’t teach, teach P.E. Those who can’t teach P.E. go into marketing. Those who can’t do marketing go into marketing communications. Of course, I can make this point because I did exactly that, and because now my entire portfolio is new companies that are using technology to redefine marketing communications.)
So I am going to dedicate my first entry to the IEEE Spectrum Venture Learnings blog to an engineer. Aart DeGeus, the founder of Synopsys.
Aart spun Synopsys out of General Electric (I recall) which also spawned Calma Systems, one of the earliest computer workstations for engineers. Harvey Jones worked at Calma, then helped found Daisy Systems (along with the renowned Vinod Khosla, who went on to start Sun and then join Kleiner Perkins, one of the most famous VC funds). Harvey was recruited by venture capitalists to be an Entrepreneur In Residence, which means Looking For A Deal To Run. The deal they found was Synopsys, and the engineer who was there was Aart.
Harvey Jones has a golden touch in high technology, but ultimately Aart DeGeus stayed on with Synopsys, became the Chairman and CEO, and runs the company to this day.
In all of my many many times working with companies to try to market their products, I really knew the company was on to something when the engineers could describe the product and its benefits clearly and understandably. There are lots of people who will spray you with jargon. They are fully buzzword compliant.
But the higher you go in any quality organization, the more simply and persuasively the people can define and explain the organization.
And the more simply and persuasively an engineer can define and explain their products, the higher that engineer will rise within the organization.
And if you don’t believe me, ask Aart, who had a profound and persuasive way to describe the business benefits of allowing engineers to work productively with increasing levels of abstraction, moving to concepts from details and letting the hardware and software do the dirty work.
