John Sanguinetti on an EDA Startup’s First Product

May 17th, 2009 Sean Murphy

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. In my case the original customer prototype was myself, since I had been a design verification engineer and used Verilog for regression testing. Very early on, we identified a particular customer, Sun, to be our target customer. We figured that if we made Sun happy, we would make other people happy, too. This turned out to be true.

We also identified the problem we were solving–simulation speed. We focused almost entirely on that, from company slogan (The Fast Verilog Company), to advertising, to customer benchmarks. The acceptance criterion for our product in competitive benchmarks was always “how much faster is it than the competition.” This focus was used internally in making design decisions as it was externally in  positioning the company and product against competition.

If there is anything that can be generalized from Chronologic’s experience it is the value of a single focus on a real customer problem.

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