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Hardly anyone these days dares to dream of starting a semiconductor startup which owns its own fabs. The costs of doing so are simply too prohibitive and thus most adventures minds in the semiconductor industry instead elect to pursue the fabless path. The other day, Dr. Rakesh Kumar, the founder and CEO of Technology Connextions, as well as the author of a recently published book tilted Fabless Semiconductor Implementation, and a long time semiconductor industry veteran gave a day long presentation at UT, Austin regarding implementing a fabless semiconductor startup. What follows below are some of the major takeaways from the presentation:

Earlier this year we covered Henry Nothhaft’s speech at the Innovation Alliance Conference titled “Start-up Reality: No Patent = No Funding, No Business, No Jobs.” During the course of the speech Henry eluded to a book titled “Great Again, Revitalizing America’s Entrepreneurial Leadership” which was published earlier this year in which he was to offer proof that when manufacturing moves abroad so does research and development. Well, we all would like to set aside some time for reading books, but the reality is that between working, eating, working more, working out, and maybe even something remotely resembling a social life outside of social networking, time for reading books is sparse at best. Good thing then, that on occasion it is possible to take a shortcut and get some cliff-notes so to say, as is the case with the recently published manifesto by Henry titled “What If, They Listed to Entrepreneurs” over at changethis.com. On a side note, if you have not had a chance to visit changethis.com you are missing out on some great short articles on a variety of topics written by very reputable authors at no charge to you.

You don’t come across someone ranking venture capital firms very often, but this is precisely what Andrew Metrick from the Yale School of Management and Ayako Yasuda from the Graduate School of Managment at UC Davis attempt in the second edition of their book titled “Venture Capital & the Finance of Innovation.” Now we won’t pretend to have read the whole book, and although it might be an interesting read, Chapter 5 titled the “The Best VCs” is freely available and a quick and interesting read itself. In addition to listing the top venture capital firms as perceived by the authors you also get a bit of supply and demand side economic theory. Explaining such things as to why venture capital firms tend to be reluctant to increase fund sizes significantly, with the exception of the dot-com boom period, and also why the carried interest on new funds charged by the VCs has remained relatively stable between 25 to 30 percent. The authors selected a total of 15 firms which they dived into groups A and B, shown in the table below. Essentially, group A contains VCs which have funds with committed capital in excess of $100 million and value multiples of 10 or greater. VCs in group B are selected based on different criteria which are are explained in detail in the chapter.

A little more than a year ago we reviewed a report by the Kauffman Foundation on future job creation titled “Where Will the Jobs Come From?” The report’s various charts led to a rather simple conclusion which stated that while large companies are important to the economy for a variety of reasons it is the small startups which in the United States have been the primary job creators. Since then it seems this notion only has been reinforced some more, this time by Henry Nothhaft during his recent speech at the Innovation Alliance Conference titled “Start-Up Reality: No Patent = No Funding, No Business, No Jobs.” Currently the president and CEO of Tessera, a company specializing in micro-electronic solutions as well as imaging and optics solutions and beforehand holding notable positions at several startups including Concentric, DSC Communications, GTE Telnet, Danger, and Endforce, Henry knows a thing or two about job creation.