Growing Your Mind from the Inside Out

Excerpt from the book Unleash Your Inner Company by Guest Author John Chisholm

In my mid-thirties, I accepted the fact that I’m gay. Many folks don’t see that as an asset. I disagree. It has been an asset for me in at least five ways:

• People routinely assume that others are attracted to the opposite sex. I have long known—definitely—that those assumptions can be wrong. Being gay has thus made me more willing to challenge routine assumptions and the status quo, making me a better entrepreneur.

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Passion and Perseverance: A Positive Feedback Loop

Excerpt from the book Unleash Your Inner Company by Guest Author John Chisholm

In the first half of 2001, the dot-com bust, I would often wake up around 2 a.m. with sweat-soaked sheets sticking to my skin. CustomerSat’s second round of financing, long planned for that January, had refused to come together despite a flurry of meetings as we ran out of cash. Those nights I would get up, shower off the sweat, and try to get back to sleep. When my executive team and I finally grasped that the Series B round was not going to close, we huddled to decide what to do. First, we cut our salaries, then several weeks later those of all our employees, by 10 percent; I cut my own salary and that of my CFO by 50 percent. Debating and agonizing over every individual, we laid off 40 percent of our workforce. In our all-hands meeting immediately after, as I explained to our remaining employees that this was the only way we could keep together and stay afloat, my composure collapsed and I broke down sobbing. Our employees stood stunned, sympathetic, and embarrassed. >>>

John Chisholm

 John Chisholm, CEO of John Chisholm Ventures, has three decades of experience as entrepreneur, CEO, and investor. >>>

Design Driven Startup Cultures

By Guest Author Soren Petersen

Startup hubs are popping up like mushrooms across the world, each with its own culture, competitive advantages and opportunities for creating unique businesses. What might these hubs learn from each other to dial up their performance?

To answer this question we spoke with professionals in Copenhagen, Seoul and Los Angeles, analyzing their work and home cultures, risk-attitudes and other cultural characteristics. >>>

INDEX: Funding High Impact New Ventures

By Guest Author Soren Petersen

High-impact Design Driven Startups are investors’ darlings and the INDEX: Award is taking advantage of this by applying their unique design award evaluation process to vetting candidates for venture capital funding. The organization’s newly launched Danish Ventures – Investing in Design to Improve Life foundation is the next step in securing that high-impact, contextual and superior fashioned offerings are actualized. >>>

The No-VC Semiconductor Company

An adapted excerpt from Tough Things First by Guest Author Ray Zinn

Micrel was launched on my personal credit.

I wanted to avoid venture capital and family loans when starting my semiconductor company, so I approached three different banks. I knew that banks didn’t lend to start-ups with unproven management teams and no products. But given that the alternatives – VCs and family – were unacceptable, I decided to make it work, to make the banks lend me kick-start capital.

Two banks flatly refused, and in such a way I assumed I might be escorted out of the building. But I learned enough from those encounters to plan the third attempt. That was the First National Bank of San Jose which later became Bank of the West, and we are still their customer today. >>>

Blindness and Entrepreneurial Vision

An excerpt from Tough Things First by Guest Author Ray Zinn

Of all bodily senses, eyesight is the most essential. I lost mine shortly before Micrel issued its initial public offering.

I was in London on a leg of our IPO roadshow, where Micrel senior management was engaging investors in the last months before we went public. We were in a restaurant when it started. The menu appeared to have little pieces missing out of it, though everything around it looked right. At first I thought the menu had a printing quality error. I asked the guy seated next to me how his menu looked, and he said it was fine. So I took his menu, and it looked just as poorly printed as mine had. >>>

Ray Zinn

Raymond D. “Ray” Zinn is an inventor, entrepreneur, and the longest serving CEO of a publicly traded company in Silicon Valley. He is best known for creating and selling the first Wafer Stepper (an industry standard piece of semiconductor manufacturing equipment), and for co-founding semiconductor company, Micrel (acquired by Microchip in 2015), which provides essential components for smartphones, consumer electronics and enterprise networks. He served as Chief Executive Officer, Chairman of its Board of Directors, and President since Micrel’s inception in 1978 until his retirement in August 2015. Zinn’s philosophy on people, servant leadership, humanistic management and the ethics of corporate culture are credited with Micrel’s nearly unbroken profitability.

Zinn also holds over 20 patents for semiconductor design. A proud great-grandfather, he is actively-retired and mentoring entrepreneurs. More info can be found on Zinn’s social media pages: Linked In (https://www.linkedin.com/in/rayzinn) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/Ray_Zinn_) and at ToughThingsFirst.com.

His new book, Tough Things First (McGraw Hill), will be available on November 3, 2025 and is available for pre-order at ToughThingsFirst.com, Amazon and other fine booksellers until its release.

BOOK SUMMARY

Ray Zinn‘s new book, Tough Things First: Leadership Lessons from Silicon Valley’s Longest Serving CEO (November 3, 2015), features unique and fascinating leadership advice from his legendary career as CEO of Micrel. Tough Things First is a guide for people starting companies, leading enterprises, or even marshaling volunteers for community service. It’s the book you need in order to understand your entrepreneurial spirit, harness the creative power of your employees, and achieve your visions.

The key to your success, Zinn explains in Tough Things First, lies in each leader, who is the mind, eyes, and heart of the organization. This book shows you how to develop these interconnected skills, how to integrate them into your life and work, and how to learn to love doing what you hate to do. He reveals why discipline is the first and most important step?for the entrepreneur and the organization?and why people are your single most valuable resource. He offers practical advice on processes and procedures, finances and growth creation, changing markets, and new technology.