SM: How are you charging for your software? Are you competing for EDA dollars? JJ: We recently made an announcement with TSMC, and I think this is the way we will continue to do business.
SM: Can you talk about Blaze’s value proposition and business model? JJ: We change the way a process works from an insider’s point of view. You have certain manufacturing processes with certain leakage, power, and performance characteristics. We change those to something more favorable.
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: You have seen , I have been endlessly beating on Cadence and Synopsys on this issue. What has created this dynamic? Why is EDA so undervalued in general? JJ: When you sell software the cost of goods is almost zero. When I was working with semiconductors, we could always point back and say there
There is a common phrase, ‘don’t bite the hand that feeds you’. Business, high tech business in particular, has a series of interdependencies which have evolved into an ecosystem. This is particularly apparent in EDA, where Intel and AMD rely on the tools provided by EDA vendors to design a chip.
SM: What has amazed me about the last five years of the Internet is the inability to segment, which is Marketing 101. Why is it so difficult to get segmentation? It is the most fundamental and most powerful element of marketing! SA: Exactly! Steve Jobs talks about when he joined Pixar he saw that people
SM: My position on this dichotomy between content destination and ad network is that in the future, all media companies will have to do both. SA: We believe we are redefining what a media company is. We epitomize what you just said. All media companies have to recognize that pre-web 2.0, you could own and
SM: I always like it when a pioneering company takes a new approach with a solid business model already in place. SA: I will tell you something about Glam’s history we have not talked about before. Most startups come to a decision point in the first two or three years after launch, where the original