Tackling EDA’s Broken Business Model: Blaze DFM CEO Jacob Jacobsson (Part 3)

SM: What was your next move after Xilinx?

JJ: I was eventually recruited to run a small fabless semiconductor company in the RFID space down in San Diego. My family did not follow me down there, so for a total of five years I was commuting.

SM: That is awful!

JJ: Yes! Reno Air was a small commuter airline and I was their first gold frequent flier. What you have to do if you are going to perform in that type of situation is work out a disciplined routine. When I was in San Diego I worked around the clock. When I came home I did not work at all. The exit for this was a Texas Instruments buyout.

Interestingly enough, my family never protested that I was CEO because it obviously gave me so much happiness to try and shape this. They did have a problem with the travel. My deal with my family after that was that it was OK to take on a similar role with a new company but it had to be local.
I went back to my design automation roots and took the job as CEO of Forte Design Systems, which is still around. Unfortunately, within that entire market segment we have been talking about high level design forever but it never materializes. The design community comes up with a way of subdividing the problem and deferring change. It will come eventually but I do not know when. Not in the next couple of years.

SM : How long were you with Forte?

JJ: I was there five years. It was an amicable parting. I came to the conclusion it was not going to go anywhere so I was not a good CEO for them. By the way, I was probably wrong about that. I was not going to take them anywhere, but someone else could probably.

SM: When you lose conviction it is hard to find energy to lead your people.

JJ: I had a couple of take-aways. One is more appreciation for what you can do with a small group of people. The other is that is you have to have conviction. No matter how professional you are, it is going to show if you don’t have conviction.

SM: You have to pull very long hours, spend a lot of energy, and just plain work hard, which is hard to motivate yourself to do.

JJ: That is my personal one. The other thing is that it’s your job to motivate your people and instill that conviction.

SM: That cannot be faked.

JJ: For four years I did a great job because I believed in it. The fifth year I did badly. It was good for both them and me that we parted ways.

After that I was going to leave the entire electronics segment. I was thinking of finishing the PhD in linguistics, but Dave Reed was busy starting a new company called Blaze. He got wind I was out and called me up. He asked if I wanted to talk about a new job and I declined but offered to listen and give some suggestions.

We met and he sold me on this idea that because of what Blaze did you could actually imagine selling what they do as a portion of the semiconductor revenue as opposed to a standalone software product, addressing EDA’s core problem of value extraction. First of all, since I had been thinking of this since Daisy he had to spend a good eight or nine hours convincing me. Once he had convinced me, I basically came home to my wife and said, “Well, I am gone for another 10 years.” My wife just looked at me and said she had been convinced all along that I wasn’t serious about the PhD.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Tackling EDA’s Broken Business Model: Blaze DFM CEO Jacob Jacobsson
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