Founder Story

Rajeev Madhavan is Chairman and CEO of Magma Design Automation, a public EDA company that’s a broad supplier. Madhavan is a serial entrepreneur, helping to found Logic Vision, Ambit, and Magma in the last 17 years. Ambit in particular was an ambitious startup, Rajeev went head to head with Synopsys and carved out a chunk of the synthesis market. But it was hard to get started, after he came away empty handed on Sand Hill Road he did an angel round with 25 seed investors who four years later were happy to have taken part when Ambit was acquired by Cadence for $260 million.

John Sanguinetti was the founder and CEO of Chronologic Simulation, a startup that developed a compiled code approach to Verilog simulation. I am working on an interview with John and came across a very interesting position statement he gave as a part of a panel at DAC 98 called “The EDA Startup Experience: The First Product.” The key ingredient to launching a successful EDA startup is customers. Having a particular type of customer in mind, and a particular customer if possible, and knowing what their needs are is the key.

Francis Adanza worked for us in a project management role for the better part of two years  before taking a business development role with Global West Communications. He was back in the Bay Area last week and attended last Friday’s Bootstrappers Breakfast and we had a chance to catch up. He sent me a short e-mail on his perspective on  “entrepreneurial roller coaster” afterward.

When you are very angry, think about how momentary a man’s life is. Marcus Aurelius I worked in the router software marketing group at Cisco in the early 90’s. I had left engineering and taken up residence in the marketing department. I was playing asteroid to a number of dinosaur protocols: we had realized that it wasn’t about supporting as many different protocols as possible (PUP, Chaosnet, Arcnet come to mind as examples) but to be really good at supporting IP.