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“We’re ready to push the button,” Jeroen, my co-founder and VP Engineering, said to me.
“You’ve signed off on all the design changes that needed to be made?” I asked Jeroen.
“Yes. Sid has done everything on the list,” Jeroen said.
“Okay, then let’s do it.”
And with my agreement, we just spent $180,000 “taping out” our first product.
I’d approved tape outs a million times before, so the process was nothing new to me. However, this was the first time, as founding CEO of my company, that I’d agreed to “push the button.”
By modern standards, spending $180,000 to tape out (this means sending the electronic file to your fabrication facility, so they have the instructions needed to make an integrated circuit) is a relatively small number. Cutting edge technologies, not the analog trailing edge technology we were using, could cost over $1 million to tape out.
Mistakes in some industries will put you out of business.
It’s like Jack Nicholson said in A Few Good Men, “We follow orders or people die.”
The same idea holds true in many industries. If we ran our company like Mark Zuckerberg ran…
