20-Year Journey of a Fat Startup with Major Pivots: Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was your role in that founding team?

Scott Sellers: I was in the hardware engineering team. I managed the team and did a lot of coding and Verilog to do the chip design. We did all of our backend chip design in-house. I sat on the Board and raised money. It’s always the most entertaining part about building a company. It’s wonderful when you’re successful too. It’s so exciting when you’re at that inception point. It’s nothing other than the potential that you’re talking about.

Sramana Mitra: At that time, it was old-school venture capital. All these concepts of lean startups had not come up yet. Companies were difficult to start. I started my first company in 1994. Companies were much more expensive to start at that time.

Scott Sellers: Absolutely. Even the concept of a PC that had enough horsepower to do anything real other than spreadsheets was just beginning. In fact, the original Pentium came out around that time frame. Part of our innovation was to use PCs to do chip design. No one had really done that before. We were also very innovative in terms of thinking about how to use the much lower-cost platforms to do these things.

Sramana Mitra: Very quickly, what were the highlights of this company?

Scott Sellers: We started in 1995. We really did some phenomenal things in capturing the hearts and minds of both consumers and game developers. Most people would look back to that era and credit 3dfx for creating the market for 3D graphics on PCs. Our business took off. We went public within two years. We made a number of acquisitions along the way. Ultimately, we sold 3dfx to Nvidia in 2000. It was truly one of those rocket-ship types of stories. I was with it from cradle to grave.

Sramana Mitra: Did you stay with Nvidia?

Scott Sellers: I didn’t. The majority of the engineers from 3dfx ended up going to Nvidia. That was a big part of the acquisition. We just had a tremendous engineering team. Ten plus years in graphics, I was really interested in taking on a different market and learning. I felt that it was time to part ways with the graphics world. I was particularly interested in the enterprise side of things. That’s when I started looking and assessing what kind of market opportunities might exist in a more enterprise segment.

Sramana Mitra: What did you start?

Scott Sellers: We started Azul. We founded Azul in 2002. It wasn’t originally named Azul. It was named Chestnut Systems. If you’re familiar with Menlo Park, in the corner of Santa Cruz and Chestnut, there’s is a little coffee shop. That’s where we have our meetings. In those early days, you had to find places that had internet connection and WiFi. For lack of any other better name, our working title was Chestnut Systems.

I met the other two founders through a mutual friend I had hired at 3dfx. They were talking about a variety of things. We started talking about opportunities in the enterprise. Specifically, we started talking about this new programming language called Java. Java had completely revolutionized the way that developers develop applications whether for enterprise use or mobile use. That clicked with me.

Changing developer architectures and how developers go about developing applications, is not measured every couple of years. These are decade-long trends. As we investigated, it felt that the move away from legacy languages was a really strong migration. We felt that there were some great opportunities to come up with unique solutions for the enterprise.

This segment is part 2 in the series : 20-Year Journey of a Fat Startup with Major Pivots: Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul
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