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When I worked at Maxim Integrated Products, one of the most successful startups ever in the semiconductor industry, we used to have our planning meetings over at the Peppermill restaurant in Cupertino. I think the Peppermill is gone now, but it was a great venue for us to meet at.
The Peppermill was great because, well, there weren’t a lot of people in the restaurant at 8:30AM, so we could be ourselves. That meant we could have the animated discussions we always had with lots of yelling at, and over, each other.
The breakfast meetings were always on a Tuesday. The usual group was Jack Gifford, the CEO, Dave Fullagar, the VP of R&D, Len Sherman or Charlie Allen representing technical applications, and whatever business unit was presenting.
I would attend this meeting about once a month. And this particular Tuesday, I brought with me Dave Bingham, one of Maxim’s founders.
Dave was a brilliant engineer. Dave’s brilliance came from a combination of wicked creativity and a healthy sense of pragmatism.
About one month prior, Dave had come up with an unbelievably clever way to cut our production costs in half on our flagship product line. The insight Dave had was a way to take advantage of the tools we were using to fabricate our chips to cut the…
