New-Tech Europe Magazine | April 2017

probably take a few copies, and then maybe lots later. No salesperson wanted to risk messing up a multi- million dollar deal for a few hundred thousand dollars on a product they knew little about. While there were some sales, the sales goals were missed by a lot. Another Cadence example was back in the same era. We had developed a lot of formal verification technology at the Cadence Berkeley Labs. This was then transferred to Cadence proper and productized under then name "Heck". This was not a good way to work anyway - you can only really move technology in people's heads - but that's a topic for another day. I have no idea if the technology was any good; in that era, formal verification was a niche market and very hard to use. But again, we never found out, since the sales team refused to sell it, and after about a year it was quietly dropped. Hunters and Farmers This is one reason that back in that era when you could sell a point tool without needing it to be completely integrated across the entire flow, startups could sell products. Their sales people were hunters, finding the early adopters to get the product across the chasm, as opposed to the sales forces of the big companies who were farmers, working the fields of the big customers. So the strategy of the ecosystem was to develop new technology in startups. They would get the product moving in the channel, then the big companies would buy the successful companies. Then the farmers would move in. If the big companies developed internal

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product was immature, and the salesperson and associated AE team would have to spend time addressing them. Everyone sat on their hands, waiting for others to go first so that when the product was mature, they could rush in. Nobody wanted to be the forlorn hope; the rewards were not big enough. This was brought home to me after Cadence acquired Ambit in the late 1990s (I was VP Engineering). We had a synthesis product (amusingly named BuildGates), and Cadence had recently canceled their own internal development on Synergy. It was important that the product be sold aggressively to justify the high purchase price (nearly $300M if I remember right). But the salesforce would not. The Cadence salesforce was accustomed to closing deals on the basis of trying to get the entire budget except for synthesis. Very few customers (Philips was the only one) were going to make a wholesale switch, but they would

focused on getting it open, and within 24 hours - without even a contract in place (thus breaking all the rules for contracting public works) - a demolition company was getting rid of the old bridge. The new one opened about 30 days later. So it is possible if what is important is delivering to the public, rather than patronage. And it wasn't always this way. Although the new span of the Bay Bridge only opened in 2014-25 years after the 1989 earthquake that showed up the problems - the original Bay Bridge was built in 3 years. We just don't seem to be able to do that anymore. New EDA Point Tools Things have changed a bit in the last few years in EDA, which I'll get to later, but it used to be extremely difficult to introduce a new product into the channel because the salespeople knew that going first was a recipe for problems. The

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