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“What are we going to do about the DAC (Digital to Analog Converter) design?” I asked my co-founder and VP Engineering, Jeroen. “It’s floundering.”
“I know,” Jeroen said. “I think we need to make a change.”
If you can announce five different products or SKUs (Stock Keeping Unit) from one analog chip design, then you’re doing pretty well. However, the DAC was the mother lode for us. We were going to get forty different products from this one design.
At $700,000 per year in peak revenue, this design would generate $28 million per year in revenue for at least five years. The success of this design would literally make our company a success.
Jeroen and I had worked with Tim, the engineer we had assigned to develop the DAC, before, and he was an excellent engineer. Yet, things were going really poorly.
Tim was behind schedule, and the interim design review he had was a disaster. There were over one hundred action items (you can think of these as bugs) for him to complete.
I didn’t have any confidence Tim would get the design right, and neither did Jeroen.
