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“Brett, I wanted to let you know I am going to retire,” Dave said to me.
“What? Why!” I said getting my bearings. “You can’t retire! You’re too young to retire.”
“I don’t want to retire,” Dave said. “But I’m being pushed out by ‘Ted’.”
Dave was a cofounder of Maxim, one of the most successful companies ever in the analog semiconductor business. Our revenue was at $500M/year when Dave told me he was retiring, and I’d say that at least $200M of the $500M was directly attributable to Dave’s innovations.
Ted was managing Maxim’s design review process. This meant that every tape-out (this is the information the fabrication facility needs to manufacture an integrated circuit) of a chip had to be signed off by Ted before it was released to our fabrication facility.
You need to be flexible when you are managing creatives.
Ted was really strict about the level of detail he required our design engineers to have before he approved a tape out. And Dave, to be nice about it, was just not a detail oriented guy.
But we had developed a workaround for Dave. Several years earlier, the company hired Peter to work with Dave.
