The early 1980s were a sort of a “between” era in semiconductors – between the era of predominantly manual chip design and fabrication and the era of computer-driven design and highly automated production.
One awesome aspect of working at LSI Logic in this “between” era was that so many of the founders and executives there had been in the semiconductor industry from the very beginning of its existence, or pretty darn close to the beginning. And they had stories to tell as they helped propel the industry forward.
In my first year at LSI I was in a meeting with Wilf Corrigan (co-founder/CEO) and a small group of executives from one of our customers – they were there to check out our fab and processes. One of these visiting executives was someone Wilf had worked with ages ago.
At a break in the meeting he and Wilf started swapping stories of the early days of the industry, back when he was a manufacturing engineer. He said something like “do you remember when we were at Transitron, and we’d hold the wafers with tweezers, dip them in acid to etch them, and then look at the second hand on the wall clock to time how long to keep them in the acid bath?”
Then they both laughed long and hard. Because that’s how they made semiconductors in the 1960s.
In the 1960s and 1970s semiconductor manufacturing was still largely manual. Wafers were literally carried from one manufacturing step to the next. Photolithography machines were manually set up, aimed, and operated.
In the 1980s all of that started to change. As a result of Moore’s law, the line widths of semiconductor traces were steadily shrinking, the density of devices per wafer were increasing, and the size of the wafers were themselves increasing – from 4 inch diameters in 1975, to 6 inch diameters in the early 1980s – to today’s 18 inch diameter wafers. And the reasoning is pure economics – an 18 inch wafer can produce 200x more chips than a 4 inch wafers.
An 18 inch wafer
This also meant that fabs had to get much cleaner. Contaminants smaller than specs of dust could get in the way of a photolithography trace or cause a short between two metal lines and as wafer sizes grew, process variations or human error were that much more prevalent.
So conditions you could tolerate in a fab in 1975 would cause serious manufacturing yield problems in the factories of the 1980s. This is when the concept of a “clean room” took hold – a manufacturing environment with a system that could control the amount and size of airborne particles.
That latter metric – size of particle – would become super important. In the early 1980s Class 10 fabs were just becoming necessary – so in a cubic foot of air in the fab, there could only be 10 particles whose size is 0.5 microns. Class 1 fabs were being talked about, but no one could afford them in the 1980s.
Today, clean rooms are orders of magnitude cleaner than Class 1.
This is also when “bunny suits” became mandatory. It was when automated wafer transport systems were just coming on line, so wafers could be stacked in sealed “boats” and these could be transported between manufacturing stations and removed only when the wafer was being operated on.
Back in the mid-1980s wafer defects were pretty evenly caused by airborne contamination (airborne particles), process errors, equipment errors, and human error. This has changed a lot, today automation has almost completely eliminated human error, and technology has almost completely eliminated airborne contamination.
Final yield ultimately determined how many chips met the specification the customer had ordered. Poor yield meant they were getting less than they expected – and would have to make some painful adjustments to their own manufacturing schedules and revenue plans. Good yield meant we could either sell the customer the excess or stockpile them for follow-on orders.
Back to the stories.
In my second year at LSI we hired a super talented VP of Manufacturing, Travis White. He was a talkative and friendly Texan and loved to wander into the cubicle area where the marketing folks were and tell us stories about “way back when.”
I remember him telling us a story about when he was running a fab for Texas Instruments, and their yield suddenly plummeted. It was a true crisis and he and his team spent days and weeks analyzing their manufacturing data and processes and couldn’t figure it out. They were running out of ideas and understandably, the CEO and TI’s customers were getting impatient. They’d gone through all their processes, checked all the machinery, again and again. But could not find what was killing their yield.
So Travis walked down to the fab and just spent time looking around, observing.
And then he saw it.
They’d changed suppliers of semiconductor boats and needed to secure them with rubber bands. And a well intentioned supervisor had gone out and purchased a container of rubber bands for each work station.
Rubber bands dusted with talc. To make the bands easier to pick up.
And with every ‘snap” those talc particles were floating through the air, finding their way onto the wafers. That was what was killing yield.
Travis was as horrified as he was amused that something that simple could wreak such havoc, and go unnoticed.
He could wander into the marketing area because we literally had a semiconductor fab attached to our building in Milpitas, CA. In fact, the fab was the majority of the building.
It was a key selling point for our customers. We could walk them to the back of the office portion of the building and they could look through observation windows to see a few steps of the manufacturing going on, with all the employees busy at work. Some of our competitors couldn’t afford their own fabs, or had other companies make their custom semiconductors. But we had our own fab and controlled that part of our destiny.
More generally back then there were lots of semiconductor fabs in the valley – AMD, Intel, HP, MMI, National Semiconductor and dozens of others. That’s where the “silicon” of silicon valley came from.
I believe only Intel has a fab in Silicon Valley today. Everyone else stared down the face of the multi-billion dollar investments required to stay on the leading edge of semiconductor technology and outsourced their manufacturing to a small number of companies in Asia who act as “foundries” – you give them your design and they make the finished chips. Companies like TSMC and Samsung.
Even Intel is staggered at the expense required to build state-of-the-art semiconductor processes and fabs, and has recently acknowledged it can’t compete with these foundries. They themselves may start using them, or be faced with some serious investments to keep up.
So I frequently think back to Travis White’s stories and Wilf’s stories. It was awesome to be working with them when this industry was truly growing up. A small window of time at a point of significant industry transformation.
To this day I smile when I come across a rubber band that has talcum powder on it. Or see a wall clock and think of Wilf Corrigan, holding a wafer with tweezers checking the second hand on that clock.
As the visibly angry man stormed across the break room holding an empty plastic container, I heard him bellow “where’s my damn pâté? Who the hell ate my pâté?”
It was the summer of 1985. I had arrived at this potential LSI Logic customer, Ardent Computer, minutes earlier and was walking with their head of engineering to a conference room to discuss the custom semiconductors they were interested in building.
What Al Michaels so desperately craved
And that man in search of his pâté? It was none other than Al Michaels: a silicon valley legend who had founded Convergent Technologies, a pioneer of multiprocessor computers.
And his ego — I realized just then — was as large as his reputation.
The head of engineering and I went to the conference room and he described the basic system architecture of the multiprocessor supercomputer and high performance graphics subsystem they wanted to build. They needed custom semiconductors to build the vector processors needed for the graphics subsystem. And there was a sense of urgency here.
You see, Al and his founders had this idea at almost the same time Bill Poduska decided to build a similar supercomputer in Boston. Bill was also a legend in computing, having founded Prime Computer and Apollo Computer. Al and Bill were effectively racing to market, believing the first one to deliver on their promised performance would get the majority of the huge potential.
But that was pretty much 10am on any random Tuesday back in the mid-to-late 80s in silicon valley.
The advent of rapidly customizable semiconductors had unleashed a tidal wave of innovation and startups, all rushing to market. With everyone predicting their product would be the big winner and they’d deliver thousands and thousands of products, even millions, to their customers.
As I mentioned in my earlier blog post, all these companies forecasting huge volume were a blessing and a curse for a semiconductor company. There is a finite amount of capacity in a semiconductor fab, and more than one chip company went under by making poor choices about who to allocate that fixed capacity to. Allocate it to a company that failed in the market and your fab would be empty and your company would have no revenue. Allocate it to a company that succeeded and you’d have that fab running 24/7 shipping crates of completed product.
The ’90s would not be kind to Stardent
So while the head of engineering was explaining the nature of the chips they needed built, the sales rep and I had been trained to ask a lot of questions to understand their readiness – where were they on staffing, how complete was the system design, what other dependencies did they have on getting to production, who their investors were.
Our sales reps were bringing multi-million dollar deals to us almost every day. Or rather, “potential” multi-million dollar deals. Part of my job running marketing for Northern California was trying to assess these deals and then sorting out which ones looked the most likely to succeed.
But in reality, it was like I was floating in a fast moving stream and all I was doing was trying not to drown. Too often I would follow the path of a deal rather than affect the path. I was young. I was still finding my voice and experience base. So more often than not I would let momentum dictate the path of a deal
Eventually all deals would flow into a review with all the other marketing managers, the head of sales, the Bill O’Meara (CMO) and at times our Wilf Corrigan (CEO). Frequently my counterpart in sales would make the case for the opportunities in my region – these were their customers, and their literal paychecks on the line.
Ultimately it would fall to Bill and Wilf to make the harder calls. A lot of the less difficult ones my peers and I would work through with Brian Connors and Perry Constantine who headed up sales.
But when I look at my role honestly, I did not do a lot of the advocating, and instead worked furiously to help support the path the deals were already flowing in.
Just as Al Michaels and Bill Poduska were competing to get to market first, I was competing with my colleague, Rick Rasmussen who was responsible for product marketing for the east coast at LSI. Stellar Computer was his potential customer. And we both were likely to need the same allocation of fab capacity.
One of the many reasons I loved the culture at LSI Logic was that we were fierce competitors – in the market. But inside the company there was none of that fierce competitiveness across departments or within departments. We all knew what we were trying to do, and it was to create a blockbuster category and the company that dominated it.
So while Rick and I were competing fiercely for this fab capacity, there was zero animosity between us. In fact, Rick and I were good friends, Rick was the guy I worked with at Fairchild who got recruited to LSI Logic, and it was Rick who recommended they bring me over from Fairchild. [Rick and I would work together at C-Cube Microsystems later in the the 1990s]
But make no mistake, we each knew fab capacity would be tight and we wanted our respective customer to be first in line.
Once I had enough information, I put together a proposed set of pricing for the chips Ardent needed. Our proposals had two components
The fee to produce the prototypes. This included time in our design center, support from our applications engineers to help with any design issues, the time to run the simulations on our IBM mainframe, the cost of developing the metalization layer mask set for production, and finally, a small wafer set run through production.
The per-unit price of the completed chips in volume production. We would ask the prospective customer what their forecasted volume ranges would be – and these typically spanned 2-3 years, and then price the chips accordingly.
We pioneered the category of these custom semiconductors and were acknowledged as the market leader, and we had competitors who were nipping at our heels quite aggressively. I had surmised from my conversations with the folks at Ardent that we were the favored supplier.
But LSI had this weird pricing schizophrenia. We tended to come in with a proposal that presumed that as the pioneer and leader, we could charge a premium. And we would generally submit pricing proposals with a pretty hefty premium. The customer would get the proposal and be shocked at how expensive it was. So they would head straight to our competitors and come back with a set of pricing from them that was 50% of what we had proposed.
And what would we do? We’d drop our prices 50% to take the deal. I was in my mid 20s and I just didn’t know any better to question this. Knowing what I know now, this was a stupid self-inflicted wound and the today “me” would have stopped the process and asked a lot of questions about whether we really thought this was a fair price, did this price represent our brand and values? But 26 year-old me was all wrapped up in the headiness of crafting deals like this and working with everyone to bring them home..
I think the origin of our approach to pricing was\ simply hubris. We invented the category. We absolutely knew we were hands-down the best. So I think our corporate ego demanded that we price with a hefty premium. But that same corporate ego was a ruthless competitor and we hated losing business.
It was a stupid move because those customers would react to our suddenly cheaper proposal with a wary eye. “What was that first proposal then? If I had gone with that I would have been paying twice what I am now, and you wouldn’t have told me?”
And that’s what happened at Ardent. My followup meeting with the head of engineering was awkward. He said that Al Michaels was incensed at how we had dropped the price and had no intention of giving us the order. The head of engineering was super frustrated and upset. He and I had gotten to know each other well and spent a lot of time together. He really didn’t want this order to go to our competitor, but our whole pricing process had created a huge mess for him.
And remember, Ardent was competing with Stellar to get to market first. Changing to the competitor chip supplier was going to cost Ardent time. And it was going to make the life of this head of engineering miserable.
He and I both wanted this deal to go to LSI. So I asked if it would help if Bill O’Meara came over and met with Al Michaels. At a minimum this would let Al tell Bill exactly what he thought of our pricing practices. And maybe it would help salvage the deal.
So the meeting got set. I drove over there with Bill and our sales rep along with the rep’s manager. We went into Ardent’s board room and got as settled as we could given the awkwardness of the circumstances. The Ardent team trickled in. About ten minutes after the meeting was supposed to start, Al Michaels came in.
I can’t remember who spoke first, but the head of engineering and I each took turns explaining how hard we all had worked to get this proposal together, how much we respected the other’s time and attention.
Al cut in and said – in the same tone and volume he had expressed astonishment his pâté was missing – “These platitudes are nauseating. We’re here because you’ve wasted our time, which we don’t have a lot of. We worked with you for the past few months on this deal, and you show up with pricing that was so high it was insulting. And then you have the nerve to come back and cut your price in half – only because we got a competitor to give us a reasonable price. How can we possibly trust you? I’ve checked around and we’re not the only company you’ve pulled this on. But the real crime here is our wasted time.”
The room went silent.
Then Bill spoke up.
A bit about Bill. He was one of the four co-founders of LSI Logic and he was not a silicon valley wunderkind. He got started late in his technology career. Bill was a graduate of West Point. The license plate on his car was USMA59. He had learned to lead, he had learned how to earn the respect of his troops. How to motivate and inspire. He was whip-smart and had an equally sharp sense of humor. If you looked up “inspirational leader” in the dictionary, there would be Bill’s photo.
And as you might expect from someone who had been responsible for other people’s lives, he had a disarming ability to connect with people. When you were speaking with Bill it felt like you were the most important person in the world to him right then. Well, because it was true. He was a phenomenal leader.
And as I shared with my Gucci Luggage experience, he had an unshakable sense of ethics. He took full responsibility for his mistakes, and in this case, the mistakes of someone in his organization – me.
He began with “you are right to be outraged and to question whether you can trust us. It was wrong for us to give you such a high priced first proposal and I take full responsibility for how we got here. We were full of ourselves, overconfident and we clearly have to clean up our act. You have my commitment that whether we win this business back or not, we will do the work we need to in order to not repeat this with you or anyone.”
“But I can tell you one reason we priced the way we did is because we also know that we are the best at building custom semiconductors. We invented this category. We have the most reliable technology and process. And we realize your time is precious. What you can count on with us is that once you commit that design to silicon, it will work. And we can scale your production. You can count on that. I’m sorry we broke your trust, but I can assure you we can get you to market faster than anyone.”
Acknowledging our mistake and owning it created an aperture that enabled another twenty minutes of conversation between Bill and Al. The meeting ended and Al said they would have a decision within the next 24 hours.
I believe this meeting was a turning point for LSI Logic. We did examine our proposal process and amended our pricing – not to meet our competitors – to be more competitive with our first proposal.
What Bill didn’t say? What role I had had in the proposal or the role the sales rep and sales manager had had in the proposal. He took complete responsibility. And I believe he did this for a simple reason. If we won this business the salesperson and I were going to have to show up at Ardent frequently. He preserved our relationships.
The story of Silicon Valley
And while the semiconductor project moved forward, Ardent’s overall product development struggled for reasons not related to our semiconductors. They battled getting the cost of the system down, and as a reset their system design ran into some serious delays.
It turns out so did Stellar’s. In their race to market both companies ran into similar system design challenges. And they were burning cash at a furious rate.
The companies combined forces and changed their name to Stardent (a horribly clunky name, but one that could be logically explained). And they, like so many other promising startups went out of business in the 1990s, a victim of being too expensive for the performance they delivered.
I learned a lot from this experience. I learned about leadership and personal relationships that would eventually show up when I was an executive.
Bill O’Meara’s owning up to when he or the company was wrong, owning when he screwed up made a deep impression on me. In a lot of respects he passed along to me his definition of “ accountability” he learned as an Army commander – something that I would never personally know. And as important he imprinted on me his ability to accept personal responsibility for a mistake someone in his organization might have made.
More than once as an executive I have had to say “I screwed up” or “I made a mistake” – whether I personally made the mistake or someone in my organization did. As the leader of that organization it doesn’t matter who made the mistake. Ultimately the mistake is mine.
Years and years after hearing “Where’s my damn pâté” the Ardent fiasco informed my behavior when I was CMO of SPS Commerce. One of the super, super talented product managers on my team was about to introduce a fundamental redesign of our core product – a product tied to 80% of our revenue. The stakes were incredibly high. We were a public company and this product launch had to go very smoothly.
The week of the launch, I pulled the product manager aside and told her “This is your product, you’ve put 18 months into leading and orchestrating the redesign and have done a fabulous job. This week as you’re on stage launching this to the company and all our customers, I’m not going be anywhere visible. This is your product and your time in the limelight. But if anything happens, if anything goes wrong for whatever reason, I will be out front and be very visible. So go out there and soak it all in, and do that knowing I have your back the whole time.”
And because she was so damn good at her job, that whole week no one saw me.
Managing the product marketing at LSI Logic for silicon valley and the greater Bay Area in the 1980s was equal parts daunting and thrilling. I wrote earlier about how groundbreaking LSI’s custom semiconductor technology was and how it helped unleash a massive wave of innovation across the landscape of computing.
LSI made it possible for a startup to come up with a product, and build it in just a few months. We helped lower the cost of starting a company, and shortened the feedback loop to that company finding out of their product hit the mark. And at this point in the computing industry, Apple had proven the merits of a personal computer with the Apple II (launched in 1977), and IBM validated Apple’s direction by introducing the IBM PC (launched in 1981).
But the world (and users) needed so much more to make these tools really productive. Bigger disk drives. Better graphics cards. Support for printers. So these Apple and IBM – along a host of other IBM PC clone makers (Texas Instruments, AT&T, Radio Shack, HP, Commodore,..and literally 100+ others) – stormed into the market to get their share, and add their value.
And the rapidly customized semiconductors we invented at LSI Logic fueled and enabled them all. It seemed like every new customer we met with was planning for a big future – either with a truly novel new product or a quick copy of someone else’s – they all had production volume forecasts in that classic “hockey stick” growth curve.
I was a year or two out of college, and my days were spent meeting with customers or prospects, spending time with our salespeople, and crafting six and seven figure revenue deals those hockey stick volume curves promised.
It wasn’t exactly a bubble forming, it was more that entirely new categories of computing appeared on the scene, and there was a scramble to fill the voids this innovation created. The two big areas we saw our customers furiously attacking were the markets for graphics cards and disk drives. I was literally in meetings from 8am to 6pm every day with companies bringing products to those markets.
[And I learned that this would be my “normal” for most of my career. In meetings all day accumulating work to follow up on, then spending most of the night and early morning getting all that work done. This really never changed. In my last two roles as CMO of two tech companies it was the same. All that changed was the nature of the work I was doing, but the pattern remained the same throughout.]
And unlike today’s elastic cloud computing world of software where supply is never an issue, in the semiconductor industry, supply is always the issue – just ask anyone in the auto industry, like General Motors, right now. There’s a finite number of chips on a wafer. A finite number of wafers that can be processed each day. And capacity increases are generally measured in “buildings” – so ramping capacity takes lots of time and lots of money.
So while we were furiously meeting with all these companies storming into the graphics card and disk drive markets, we were also having to assess their likelihoods of succeeding, and try to figure out who would get what allocation of our finite supply of wafers. This was a real issue, 98% of these graphics card companies went bankrupt or were sold for scrap eventually. The same for disk drive companies.
Consolidation in the disk drive industry at a high level
Allocating capacity to a company who failed in the market meant we would not ship those wafers/chips and collect OUR revenue – and as a public company, our revenue forecasts mattered a lot. So every new piece of business of any significance was something we all scrutinized, frequently meeting with the CMO (Bill O’Meara) or the CEO (Wilf Corrigan) before closing a deal.
The flip side of that was every company we met with was convinced (as they should be) that THEIR revenue plan was rock solid. And since it was a competitive market (generally we competed against smaller firms like VLSI Technology, or the custom chip divisions of larger semiconductor companies, like National Semiconductor) we had to fight hard to get orders.
This all created a wild environment, and whenever there’s loads of demand coupled with a constraint on supply, weird behavior starts to show up.
DID WE JUST HEAR THAT?
I remember going to meet with a customer in Berkeley who made popular graphics cards. I went with our sales rep who happened to have recently come to the US from Ireland and I think part of his enjoyment was experiencing this industry in the context of American culture. He was super smart and had an awesome sense of humor. He picked me up and off we went up the freeway to the customer.
The salesperson, Fra Drumm, had been meeting with this customer for weeks, and had been told they were ready to place a $1M+ order for a new graphics chip they wanted us to make for them. And they were also speaking to our main rival, VLSI Technology. It was going to be super competitive. This was an important piece of business we wanted, and we’d had a meeting with Bill O’Meara reviewing the terms we were going to propose and what room we had to negotiate.
Bill wanted me to call him as soon as we left the meeting to let him know how the negotiation went.
Vintage Gucci Luggage Set
We got to the company and were seated in the Purchasing Manager’s office, made introductions, and quickly reviewed the outlines of the potential order. When we pressed for an indication of how competitive we were the Purchasing Manager waited a bit, and then said that they liked Gucci luggage. And I thought, “not my style, but lots of people like it” and I said something like “that’s interesting, a lot of people love that.”
Silence
The Purchasing Manager again said that they liked Gucci luggage.
I glanced over at Fra real quickly and he gave me a look that said “WTF? Did we just hear that?”
It dawned on us both, at that very moment, that we were being asked to buy this person some Gucci luggage to get the order.
And we both had the same reaction. We quickly apologized for having to leave, but we had another meeting to get to and would be in touch.
And we left.
I was pretty bewildered. There was no way I was going to bribe this person, but I also wondered if I had blown up a big piece of business over the cost of some luggage, and immediately got worried about the reaction Bill and the other sales leaders would have to this.
This was right about the time that “car phones” were a thing, and when we got into Fra’s car I dialed Bill and told him about the Gucci luggage “hint.”
He asked what I did, and I told him we got out of there as fast as we could.
He had a quick and curt reply: “Good” followed by “that’s not how we work.”
At the time I was relieved. It is only with hindsight that I can see that something I had taken for granted was the integrity of Bill and the other leaders at LSI Logic. I’d only known Bill for months, and never really had an issue like this crop up. It was reassuring at the time, to say the least. BTW, that graphics card company was out of business within the next year. We dodged an allocation bullet there.
But as I progressed in my career I came to realize just how unique the culture at LSI Logic was. How important it was that we built that business with integrity.
At some point in the next year one of the sales reps at a distribution partner got ahold of the price list for VLSI Techology’s products and brought it to our office. For a nanosecond we were thrilled. When Wilf Corrigan found out about he was livid (and he was unambiguous with his anger) and instructed us to get it out of the building. Now. Which we did. Unambiguously.
Going back to Bill O’Meara’s reaction, he provided me with an internal reference for how to behave under pressure, how to keep clarity on what really mattered. At various points in later in my career I worked in organizations where I witnessed salespeople lying to get orders. In some cases lying to me in my role as an executive to get an order. And in those organizations the CEOs did not have Wilf and Bill’s integrity, and reacted with “but we got the order.”
No surprise that I left those companies and wondered how I chose to work there in the first place because it is critically important that you work with people who have uncompromising integrity. Because every business runs into problems. And it’s when you’re facing those problems you want the people above and around you making decisions you can stand behind.
For the first 2+ years of my tenure at LSI Logic I was the product marketing manager for Northern California and the Pacific Northwest. I didn’t ask for this geography, it was the job they offered me. I took it without fully appreciating what I was about to get into, and accepted it largely on the basis of the quality of the people I knew there, and met during my interviews.
All of them were super, super smart. Ambitious. Uncompromising. Kind and fair.
I had spent the past year (to the day) as a Product Marketing Engineer at Fairchild Semiconductor, responsible for their high performance ECL (emitter coupled logic) product line. And a colleague there got recruited to LSI. Within a month or so, I was also recruited to join the company. In 1983. I believe I was employee #87.
The co-founder and CEO of LSI Logic had been the CEO of Fairchild, hence there were lots of Fairchild folks jumping ship to join him.
[BTW, Fairchild Semiconductor was formed when the traitorous eight fled Schockley Semiconductor. Among those eight: Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore (founders of Intel) and Eugene Kleiner, co-founder of the legendary VC firm, Keliner Perkins). Fairchild is truly the foundation of what became Silicon Valley]
All I knew about LSI Logic was the reputation it had for creating a new category of semiconductors. Semiconductors that could be easily and rapidly customized. Back in the early 1980s it could take two years to create a custom semiconductor, because the entire chip had to be designed from top to bottom. And computer simulation tools were still in their infancy, so a fully custom chip pretty much had to be designed by hand.
Semiconductors are sort of like a pizza. There’s a silicon substrate, and on top of that different chemicals are added to different portions of the chip to affect the conductivity (or resistivity) of the silicon. And then layers of insulators are added, that are put down in such a way to keep openings for layers of metal to be added, connecting the spots needed for electricity to run.
So a fully custom semiconductor required that everything – all the way down to the substrate – had to be designed and built. And since ultimately the cost of a chip is proportional to the amount of silicon it takes up, a lot of work went into laying the chip out in such a way as to pack everything together as tightly as possible. Custom chips were incredibly expensive and time consuming to build. So they were really only used for highly specialized and valuable products – that could put up with a two year development timeline.
The founders of LSI Logic – Wilf Corrigan, Rob Walker, Bill O’Meara and Mick Bohn – saw a huge opportunity to disrupt this market. Making it possible to create a customized semiconductor in less than twelve weeks. Yes, twelve weeks.
The first innovation was in separating the semiconductor fabrication process into two parts – creating a standardized substrate and then a customized metalization layer on top of that. Rather than starting with raw silicon, LSI started with a large array of transistor “gates” – initially 1,000s of these, later millions. These base wafers could be mass produced by contracted semiconductor fabs and sent to LSI’s facility in Milpitas. And in the Milpitas facility we could connect those gates in the metalization process to create the specific functionality the customer designed.
Let’s pause for a bit to talk about how semiconductors chips are made. With a base layer of transistors laid down, those transistors can be connected to each other by laying down metal – in very thin lines – across the chip. Which means that you need a pattern of where the metal should go, as well as a pattern where you need to insulate transistors used for other parts of the design from the ones you want to connect.
The result is a series of masking steps that are performed. You might produce a masking pattern of insulation, followed by a different masking pattern of metal connections, and then add another insulation masking pattern on top of that protecting and exposing different connections, and add another layer of connections. The set of “masks” would be the recipe to create the functions of the chip you were fabricating.
So by separately creating the base layer of transistor gate arrays there was no need to as tightly pack the transistors together. You gave up some real estate for overall speed and flexibility of production. And the real value came in the process of connecting all those transistors together to perform the specific function the customer needed.
The second innovation was creating powerful semiconductor design and simulation software (running on IBM 370 mainframes) that would enable a customer to take a logical design of the custom product they wanted to build and simulate its performance. Up until this point companies had to build a physical prototype of a product using a collection of building block, general purpose chips to see if the product would work. And then begin the process of converting that into a custom chip. One of the factors driving the 2+ year custom chip timelines.
An IBM 370 Installation – about the size of our computer center at LSI
LSI’s third innovation was that the computer simulation could produce the connection pattern for those base wafers – to produce the design the customer wanted – and create all the “mask” information needed for a mask vendor to create all the fabrication templates needed to build that custom chip.
Once the mask set was sent back to LSI, then our fab in Milpitas (which only needed to manufacture the connection pattern) could produce a set of prototypes in about 10-12 weeks.
If the customer had a well thought through design when they showed up at our simulation center, they could have that design simulated and validated in a few weeks. All told, from showing up at our facility to having prototype chips in hand could be as little as 3-4 months.
This was earth shattering for a number of reasons. First was simply shrinking that time to prototypes. From years to months. Second was the economics. Because we were typically taking designs that would have required tens or hundreds of discrete semiconductors and turning all of that into one chip, our products would pay for themselves in cost savings to the customer. And the resulting product could be dramatically smaller, physically. So entire new categories of products became possible. The IBM PC, the Macintosh, disk drives, network routers, Sun Microsystem workstations and servers. Eventually cell phones and digital audio and video.
But even more important than economics, what we did at LSI Logic was disrupt how rapidly a company could bring a product to market. And speed up the tempo of innovation in a market. Forget about cost savings. The value of dramatically speeding the pace of innovation is what transformed the market.
Going back to taking that offer to join LSI. My territory was Northern California and the Pacific Northwest. My customers – who were startups back then – were Sun Microsystems, Seagate, Silicon Graphics, Apple, Cisco. We put those companies in the positions they soon commanded, to transform their industries through the rapid pace of their own innovation.
And when these customers came to us with their new product designs, delivering the resulting prototypes became a treasured ritual. I remember walking into Silicon Graphics with the prototypes that would power their first workstation. And later seeing them boot up the system and load Flight Simulator – and the tens of people crowded around the engineer flying an airplane on a computer screen.
So, what LSI Logic made possible was taking the functions that would fill a computer the size of a refrigerator and shrinking that onto a single chip. And making it possible for that single chip to go from design to prototypes in ~12 weeks.
We fundamentally changed the economics of computing and the pace of innovation.
You can listen to Wilf Corrigan tell the origin story of LSI Logic in this recording of his keynote from our 1986 Sales Conference, which was held in Sunnyvale. I was in the room for this, and it is just as thrilling today as it was back then. And Wilf does an excellent job highlighting the many talented folks who made our business and technology so successful.
And I thought that everybody got a job like this out of college. I mean I didn’t exactly look for this job. Someone I worked with at Fairchild called me and asked me to join him there. I came over for an afternoon of interviews and was offered the job. Responsible for perhaps the greatest single concentration of computing innovation in the world.
It is only with hindsight that I can appreciate how fortunate I was. It’s also where I now see the pattern that fueled and informed my career in high growth technology companies: working with highly talented, highly ethical people. And those people tend to congregate with other good people.
Steve Jobs did a wonderful job explaining the impossibility of predicting career paths in his Stanford Commencement speech – that you can only connect the dots of your career path in hindsight. Joining LSI Logic fundamentally shaped the path of my career in a few ways.
First, it taught me how important it is that you work in a company where the definition of “good” is far, far greater than what other people experience. “Good” at LSI Logic was making it possible for Cisco to deliver its first router. For Seagate to ship its first hard drives. For Sun Microsystems to ship its first SPARC workstation.
“Good” meant that you delivered a product that was 10x what the customer was expecting or even imagined. LSI Logic was at the forefront of that “10x, not 10%” mentality that causes a business to create an entirely new category.
And to do that, the company needed embrace another Jobs-ian tenet: “A players hire A players, B players hire C players.” Bill O’Meara ended up taking over as CEO of C-Cube Microsystems and enabling digital film and digital TV (and brought a lot of us LSI folks along with him). My colleagues JenSen Huang founded Nvidia, Bill Tai became a world class venture capitalist, David Baillie became CEO of not one, but two technology companies, and John Daane became CEO of Altera.
We all left our tenure at LSI Logic clearly understanding what it took to build a business that invented an entirely new class of computing technologies, what it meant to disrupt a market, and how to fundamentally change what your customers thought was possible.
I left LSI Logic after nearly seven years there to go to business school, but shortly after graduating and right after getting married, I got a call from Bill O’Meara, telling me about a company he had just become the CEO of – C-Cube Microsystems – and asked me to join him there. And the next adventure unfolded.
One perspective I’ve gained of having worked in lots of different places (the Bay Area, Boston, Seattle, the Midwest) is that you can see the variety of experiences you can take advantage of, and the impact that can have on your skillset and career path.
Today, I would say that the Bay Area, Seattle and Boston (NYC as well) share a lot in common. Tremendous innovation, extensive ranks of startups — largely founded by experienced, successful entrepreneurs — and available capital. And those high-growth companies tend to share or are adjacent to categories with lots of competitors.
What does this mean to your career path, and most importantly, your personal experience base?
Well, you will have the opportunity to work for a lot of different companies in and around your field, exposing you to new challenges, company cultures, managers, partners and customers. This is going to help you get out of your comfort zone, learn unexpected things, and become more resilient in the face of change and uncertainty.
That last part is super important. Uncertainty and ambiguity are prevalent in high-growth technology companies. As much as we all crave stability and consistency, those conditions will be few and far between when you chart your course in the tech sector. In fact, your ability to learn and grow is diminished in stable, predictable environments.
I just finished reading “Range” by David Epstein, and much of his book is devoted to research-based evidence that the more varied our experiences, the better we become at our jobs. It’s not just about resiliency, but about decision making. In a rather counter-intuitive manner, Epstein shows how knowing a little about a lot of different areas of expertise enables you to make better decisions about any one area.
Seattle has an ecosystem chock full of companies breaking new ground, creating new categories, and changing the directions of computing. No surprise that the Bay Area does too. So when you have reached the limits of what you can learn from one role, you can move to another company (with effort) and expand your experience and fluency with a different set of business problems and technology solutions.
You can also learn what it is like to build a business across different company cultures, CEOs and executive teams, direct managers and co-workers. This matters a lot and is super valuable. The enlightened CEO is a very rare occurrence. Friction-free relationships between Product and Dev teams happen less frequently than you’d imagine. It’s the same with friction between sales and marketing teams.
So you learn how to manage around or change with these fractured department relationships, or you move on to a more productive next role. Tenure in these three highly competitive geographies can be measured in months. Sometimes years. Rarely a decade.
I would argue the ecosystem dynamic is completely different in the Midwest — this region has a much thinner entrepreneurial ecosystem. There are high-growth tech companies there, but generally only one in a category and little-to-no competitively adjacent companies. This means that to expand your experience base in that geography, you need to change industries or change categories that are far apart within an industry.
This is really hard to do.
A recruiter I worked with years ago summed it up this way: “You can change categories or industries keeping the same role, or change roles within the same category, but you can’t do both at once. It’s too risky for the employer.”
What this means in these competitively thin geographies is that employees tend to stay at the companies they were hired into. For a long time. And because there tend to be few adjacent competitors in these regional hubs, if the job you got hired into doesn’t work out, you’re facing a transfer within the company to a different role — further insulating you from broader experience.
Or you can relocate to another geography to stay within or adjacent to the category you’re already in. Or you can remain where you live, change career paths and start close to the beginning. Both of those options are hard. So you tend to stay put.
Most people are going to stay put. They will tolerate a poor culture, or poor manager. They will tolerate poor relationships across departments. But staying put is the safest of the options. This means the culture of the company you work is the only one you are likely to know. The experiences you bring to your role and threaded through this one company. Tenure matters more than broad experience or innovative thinking. Tenure gets measured in 5/10/15 year increments.
What does this all mean? It all depends on what you want for a career. If you really want to stay at the forefront of your field, it’s clear that getting broad exposure to a variety of roles and company cultures is critical. You’ll be exposed to more unknowns, personalities, and methods, which will help you shape your skillset and experience foundation.
And if you want that broad experience base but are living in a competitively thin geography, this also means you will need to be super international about embracing those new roles, and the sacrifices you may need to make in the short and medium term, to gain that broad experience foundation that could fuel your medium- and long-term ambitions.
It’s that intentionality that is the important part. What do you aspire to do and become? It may be more important to you to push at the forefront of your discipline and be the agent of change in your role and industry. It may be more important that you live in an area you love, and that giving up on career innovation is less important.
Recently, my world has been totally rocked with the multi-player game “7 Days to Die” which is a zombie apocalypse game that my children and I play together, even when scattered across the country. Sunday at 7 is our time, and we generally play with me in one city, each of our kids in other cities, and some of their friends in other cities as well.
7DTD is a game where every seven nights (in game) a zombie horde attacks, and the rhythm of the game is to spend your time between hordes preparing. It’s all about cooperating, and dividing up the work – where the work can be scavenging supplies, making building materials and tools, crafting weapons and ammunition. And developing a plan to defend ourselves. We all log on, and setup a group phone call, and there’s a constant stream of updates, suggestions, and help.
Here’s the base we’ve created. My main skill is converting rocks and sand into concrete. You can see how we put that to use. BTW, this base was shredded later that night (horde night). We survived, but the base took tremendous damage. Which caused us to assess what had gone right, wrong, and what our next defense setup would need to look like. We figure out what’s working, what’s not, and adapt. This is what I do at work every day. Except for the zombie horde. At work it’s competitors.
It’s an easy way to spend five hours without even realizing it. And it is a rock solid environment to hone the kinds of skills any of us needs to get through life, and succeed in our careers.
But every week it’s the same focus. We develop a plan to build defenses, a plan for how we’ll cooperate and support each other because we all have different skills and resources. And like all plans, they become obsolete the moment the zombie horde arrives. Here we are at night, my avatar’s name is RaceCondition (inside computing joke there) and the view is from one of my son’s avatar. We’re all so relaxed because since hordes swarm every seven days, and it’s day 58, we can more easily gather like this at night (in this shot we’re at an abandoned city looting).
But before going on, let me tell you about how my children (and their friends) and I got here.
It may be that our family is unique, but I really doubt it. Our kids grew up playing video games. Freddi Fish was a big hit when they were little. They played them on the desktop computer we had way back then.
But even then the play had a strong social component to it, since we had four kids in five years, there was lots of group play involved. Two or three of our kids would be crowded around the monitor watching the other play, and there’d be banter throughout the game.
When the subject of getting a video game console came up, my wife and I proceeded cautiously. We’d “heard” so many scary stories about them. About how people’s kids would disappear for hours/days/weeks into a basement TV room and waste away there, living this solitary existence staring into a screen.
What we got wrong about video games is how incredibly social they are. And how much the games foster problem solving and collaboration.
We started slowly, with a Nintendo Wii. And it was fun. Mostly family fun. And soon the topic of an Xbox surfaced. Their friends had them, and over time we reluctantly agreed. There we some conditions, the biggest was that the kids would need to pay for it themselves, along with the games they wanted. So they saved, and did.
What ended up happening totally surprised us. This was full-on social pandemonium. There’d be upwards of a dozen kids at time in our basement – some playing – but most watching the others play. And the conversations, laughter, and screams of delight that grew and grew as the games progressed could be heard throughout the house.
We also witnessed our kids spending so many hours playing with all their friends and spending those hours talking…about the game, about life, about anything and everything. And there’s a growing amount of research showing video game play does create better career skills.
Which is why I was so touched when our youngest child, four years ago, suggested I learn to play Halo. He was patient, it took me literally almost a year before I didn’t feel completely incompetent. But we played through Halo 2, then Halo Reach (as far as our children are concerned, the franchise effectively stopped there). Eventually I would even get invited down when all the other friends were there and play with them, and hold my own.
The more I observed how our kids played these games with their friends the more it looked like the environment I like to foster on my teams at work: goal-focused, team-oriented, sharing data to make better decisions. The more it looked like the environment I strive to live up to in my User Manual.
So of the many good decisions my wife and I made as parents, one was being open minded about video games, and trusting our children to make good decisions about how to embrace video games. We learned a lot as a family there, that has helped prepare our children for career success.
Part Four: Product has the obligation to set the tempo of transformation
Every business needs to have a laser focus on the needs of their customers. Look no further than Amazon, who has a legendary, systemic, DNA around customers. Literally their customer obsession.
A few years ago I had an opportunity to speak with an Amazon exec about the business he was running and the priorities he had in building it. This business was a direct competitor to a business of Apple’s, and I noticed the Amazon exec was using both an iPhone and a MacBook Pro. I asked him, “why are you using products from your competitors, effectively helping fund them?” – his answer was disarmingly reflexive and sincere. He simply stated “why would it serve my customers better for me to use products that made me less effective at doing my job?”
What does this have to do with product led organizations?
Bringing a category to life and Amazon have the same customer focus.
I wrote earlier about when you’re building a category it’s important to not listen to your customers – don’t let them dominate your near term product priorities. You owe your customers the maniacal focus on your bold vision, and bringing that to life over time, not attending to their long list of improvements in their limited field of view.
Which means product will have complicated relationship with sales and customer success. Sales and customer success are faced daily with enormous input and demands about the here and now. And they should focus maniacally on how to win today’s prospect sale and ensure today’s customers get the value they were promised. But the product team needs to be super careful to include only the most critical few of those customer and prospect needs in the roadmap. The category is the high order bit here.
Your category gets built by bringing tomorrow’s promise to life. I’ve seen companies falter and stall when they take their eye off the category defining focus and shift it to the priorities of their sales teams or their customer success teams. Worse, if the next 90 days of your backlog is the only commitment to your roadmap, you’re never going to build a category. You need to have appropriate commitments to what needs to get done three, six, nine, and 12 months from now.
The product leadership needs to behave like the CEO of their product. That means to operate with a strategic purpose and context. Sure, they need to hear the near term need from sales and customer success, but like a CEO, they’re measured on their ability to perform today but also ensure the company realizes its potential. This is so wonderfully captured in Ben Horowitz’ now legendary 20+ year old essay, Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager. If you haven’t read this. Do so. Now.
Focusing on the bold future can introduce some awkward dynamics to organizations not used to thinking with a category mindset. In a product-led organization, sales and customer success are going to feel pressure to keep up. They’re going to have to become capable and fluent in understanding the trends and priorities that make the bold product vision important. They will need to fully internalize why the category is strategic and important and be able to explain it to their prospects and customers.
In sales or customer success led organizations, the opposite occurs. The product team will need to simplify and reduce the vision and explain the plan using the terms of today. No matter how well you do this, you’ll never build a category. You’ll just hit a forecast. For a while.
I’ve heard some executives at tech companies use the excuse that “we can’t let the salespeople know about the roadmap, because then they won’t sell what we have today.” If that really is true, then that’s the tell-tale sign that the company in question is not a category builder. Because category builders have salespeople who are experienced and savvy enough to sell what you have today, and who can also convey the compelling nature of what is coming. And why buying today’s product puts that customer on a more compelling and secure future.
No one less than Steve Jobs understood this with his typical clarity. Observing that the difference between technology companies that function as sales organizations versus technology companies that function as product companies is that the sales-led organizations will revert to today’s product. They’re not wired to think about or develop big, bold new products.
Companies like Salesforce have mastered “product-led” organizational behavior. Just watch one of Marc Benioff’s keynotes and you’ll see him talking about capabilities that likely won’t be real for years, but speaking to them as if they’re here now. Their salespeople know how to straddle these two realities. They know that you’re going to be better off getting on the platform now and be better off over the years as the promises get delivered.
Product-led organizations build categories, and categories are the product of a bold vision that the marketing organization communicates and aligns the company around, and a product strategy that brings the category vision to life. And that’s good for your customers. Give them something they can’t envision. It’s never been a better time to be a technology company CMO.
Part Two: Your vision is strategic, your customers’ vision is tactical
In my earlier post on category creation, I touched on how critically category creation depends on a bold strategic vision owned by the CEO. And that vision gets taken to market through a product that delivers a fundamentally different experience and value to customers from what they have today.
This is hard because your customers live in the world of today. With the product you have right now. That’s what your salespeople sell, and your customer success teams support.
But creating a category is about delivering something so much better than “today.” Ambitious, bold companies learn to live with and take advantage of the ambiguity separating today from the bold future you see possible.
And given the role the product strategy plays in creating a category, a disproportionate responsibility falls on the product and marketing teams. As a result, there are some subtle but critical factors a CMO needs to take into account.
First, do a 12+ month product plan.
Creating a category involves envisioning a future your customers can’t see. But you can. So fundamentally you are creating a product strategy – a framework that extends from today into the not so distant future.
This means, if you’re using Agile, you look out 12-18 months and understand what are the core capabilities you’ll need to figure out and master. How many of those require foundations to be built now? Work back from those to your field of view 6-12 months from now, and the deliverables will be clearer. More specific. The dev and product teams will have a clearer sense of what is straightforward, understood and what is hard, unknown.
Now look at the 3-6 month timeframe. Here you should have a pretty clear sense of scope and difficulty. The iteration in thinking between 3-6 month windows and 7-12 month windows will likely reveal some dependencies and challenges.
Finally, you can think through what the next six sprints need to look like. Here you’re going to be fairly specific about use cases, personas, and technical scoping.
Every two weeks get everyone together and review where you are on the journey. Both with what has shipped, and what customers are telling you. Customer feedback is essential to checking your assumptions on the 3-6 and 7-12 month release plans. This is super important, and plays into the next two sections below.
If you don’t think Agile works this way you’re wrong. Here’s an awesome podcast from Command Line Heroes laying out Agile and why it’s suited for what I describe above. Agile isn’t about two week fields of view. It’s about rigor and discipline about what you’re doing every two weeks, and how you’re doing it. To have working software validate assumptions, or invalidate them.
Second, don’t listen to your customers
Does this contradict what I just said above? No. Your customers are helping you validate assumptions about your vision. What you don’t want to listen to is their long list of things they wish were better with the product you have right now. Category creation is about bringing something fundamentally different to market.
Customers want what they can see in front of them to be better notdifferent. They see what is sitting right in front of them. That’s what your sales people sold them. That’s what your customer success teams support.
When building a category around a bold vision of what’s possible, the sure sign you are losing your way is to devote most of your time into making your existing product better. And if you listen only to that or let customers drive more than 10-20% of your backlog or dev capacity making the product better, well then you’re not building a category.
Worse, driving your product priorities around “better” means you’re ensuring you will be competitively vulnerable. Then you’re really just building a business around your competitors. Because they too can listen to customers about today. About chasing better, not delivering different. If you focus on better, you’re building an product line that is structurally vulnerable to competitors. You’re solving for now. Not the future.
Third, test your roadmap
With the majority of your roadmap devoted to bringing your category to life, you can now devote your customer engagement to testing your category assumptions. Which also means testing whether or not your vision for what is possible is truly compelling.
Testing your roadmap with customers is a way to make sure your 3-12+ month release plan has integrity. It can confirm or question the validity of your core platform and functionality assumptions. It’s about being inherently curious. Being a voracious learner, and where being an optimist and not a cynic finds a comfortable home.
So that means being super hard core about why your roadmap, working all the way back to the next sprint, is creating and testing the building blocks of the future. The different. You may be shipping a “better” feature that customers care about today, but is there a way to build that “better” improvement in such a way that it also helps inform your progress towards “different?”
At every step along the way. From today’s standup to next year’s category-defining product launch has to be threaded through “am I staying focused on different?”
Go into this not being burdened with what you see today, and instead be driven by an optimism of what’s possible.
Your category vision should invigorate you, your team, and your company every single day. Your category vision should invigorate your customers and entice your prospects. Your product strategy brings all of that to life.
That’s the real role of being a CMO. Ensuring your very talented product and dev teams have struck the right balance around delivering on the strategic vision of different and not getting distracted with today’s noise of better.
I’ve been thinking about categories recently. A lot.
I’ve been fortunate to have been in three companies who had that bold vision, who could see that structural opportunity, and who zeroed in on the audience that was affected. At LSI Logic, we saw the opportunity to enable new categories of computing devices – personal computers and mobile devices. At C-Cube Microsystems we envisioned the impact that digital television and film could have on the broadcast and entertainment industries. And at RealNetworks it was as simple as enabling internet-delivered audio and video – developing the breakthroughs making Netflix and Spotify a reality.
Creating a category is easy to say and so hard to do. Or rather, it’s easy to see a company who has created a category and it sure looks obvious in hindsight. But in the early days, even in the middle phase, it’s nothing short of a free-for-all.
Table stakes are having a bold vision for what you think could be dramatically different for the customers you serve. Not better, but different. Not a little different. Fundamentally, earth shatteringly different. And with those words and the belief in them, you then need to have the audacity to live up to them.
The creators of categories dominate the market they create. Because they see a future their competitors don’t. Their competitors chase what the category creator makes visible. They will always be steps behind the category creator.
Creating a new category in the market begins and ends with aligning that bold vision for what’s possible with clarity of the mission of the company and more importantly, for the customers you serve. This is about getting precise about the words. The words matter.
But defining the category is more than words and sentences of a paragraph. And bringing a category vision to life is more than a marketing campaign. It is precisely where the company’s strategy and strategic intent are mobilized across the organization. Category creating is a holistic commitment of the business. It is the CEO’s personal obligation. If the CEO doesn’t personally own this ambition, no amount of over-functioning executives can make up for that. At some point the conversation gets shrill.
BRING THE CATEGORY TO LIFE
With the CEO owning the category vision, they don’t need to develop the framework that will enable the company to take advantage of and define the category. That can be handled by a member of their team. It has to be someone senior enough in the organization to have visibility and perspective, and also be someone who can work across teams, across execs, and orchestrate engagement. This includes:
Identifying the people, processes, and products required to fulfill the category potential.
Specifying how you will get from today to that future potential. The solution you have today and what you will build in the future to address the category problem
Identifying the ecosystem that will validate and accelerate the development of the category, and squeeze out your competitors
To bring a category to life depends on this strategic alignment first and foremost with the product strategy. The product needs to deliver this category promise to the users. Their experience validates the category potential, and literally brings it to life in the market. And this product alignment needs to be fully aligned with how these products are taken to market. The words that are literally used to attract prospects, engage them in learning more, and choosing the solution all have to map back to the category vision and definition.
In an age where essentially every sale is driven through some form of digital interaction, the good news is that search performance provides and awesome data-driven laboratory to ensure you get all of this right. You’ll know. The data will scream the results at you.
STEP UP AND LIVE YOUR AMBITION
This is where so many companies get scared. Especially once a company is in the midst of category creation. It’s easy to get frightened, chasing near term revenue and investments in the face of the riskier long term commitments that need to be made. Remember, you’re bringing to market something fundamentally different than what exists today. For the meek, that means there will be some pretty powerful forces pulling you back to…today. Today is familiar. It is safe.
Creating a category is lonely. Especially for the leadership of the company. The CEO and their team are the custodians of this vision, and for a long, long time, they may be the only true believers.That’s why it’s easy to get scared. Why it’s easy to back off. To retreat to the goals and tactics that produced the recent past, and not make the bolder choices to bet on the future.Bringing a category to life is a fully focused go-to-market campaign. Externally and Internally.
That internal part is key. Employees need to have clarity on what that different future will be and how to explain in an appropriate context, whey this journey is important. Customer Success needs to be trained and fluent spokespeople. Sales needs to be trained and fluent spokespeople. Everyone inside the company is on a mission. To fundamentally transform the lives of their customers.
INVIGORATE THE COMPANY
The day-to-day work of creating a category is the essential job of every employee. They need to be trained, to be fluent in, and have internalized the same understanding of the structural opportunity and the role the business has in realizing this opportunity.That’s why RealNetworks had a palpable intensity – every day – that employees were energized and motivated by.
It’s why my friend and RN colleague Dave Cotter remarked “I was probably young enough to believe it, but there really was a sense that we were fundamentally changing the world, and, actually, for a period of time we were.”Bringing a vision to life for customers and prospects goes hand in hand with bringing that vision to life for employees.
This is why the obligation for defining the category rests with the CEO, but how important it is that every employee is enlisted making the vision real to prospects and customers, every day.Category creation is not a board topic, it’s not an exec staff meeting topic.
It’s the CEO’s life mission. It’s internalized by every employee. It’s the lifeblood, the daily obsession, of everyone.
I was one one of Uber’s best fans – I must have recruited a dozen friends and colleagues to the service, because it fundamentally is just so much better than taxis or car services. Wonderfully inspired idea, and at the street level, brilliantly executed. I loved it.
And I use the past tense because I did love it. But not anymore. The trickle of moral lapses by Uber’s CEO, Travis Kalanick, have become a roaring torrent. Uber has an ethics problem, but most importantly it has an ethical leadership problem.
Which is why the details of the plan to smear journalists who create unflattering views of the service pushed me to the point of being all done with the service. So, on November 25 I sent my request to Uber to cancel my account, as “the moral cost to me of doing business with your firm is more than I can afford, and I have happily created my first accounts at Lyft and Curb.”
And in efficient Uber fashion, I received this confirmation of my account cancellation, which is sad. The service and drivers are great. But that’s not enough today. You have to believe in and trust the people at the top. And I can do neither with Uber the way it is being run right now. Travis – until you show some leadership and I won’t be back.
Open Ambition 