Startup Blurbs

Dean Takahashi, a regular contributor to VentureBeat.com, posted yesterday a very interesting article over at the Industry Standard regarding Montalvo Systems failure and what it might mean for future x86 startups. We wrote about Sun’s acquisition of Montalvo Systems a couple of months ago, highlighting the more than $70 million dollars that the company was able to raise and the rather paltry sum for which it was eventually acquired. Dean’s postmortem gives us a concise history about how Memory Logix evolved from their initial synthesizable cores charter to eventually become Montalvo. We get a good look at some of the major players behind Montalvo including Vinod Dham, the co-founding partner of New Path Ventures, Mike Yamamura, Greg Favor, Peter Glaskowsky, Laurent Moll, and of course Peter Song who started Memory Logix.

It seems that from the start Montalvo had a hard time deciding on what to build. Ideas contemplated were: a processor incorporating a graphics chip, a partial x86 compatible chip only capable of running Linux, a non-x86 cell phone chip, and finally a four-core chip with asymmetric cores for the mobile space. The last one, being quite different from what AMD and Intel offered at that time, was probably what allowed the company to obtain the initial round of venture capital funding between the years of 2004 to 2006. However, it seems that around 2007 things started falling apart. The company was expanding rapidly and burning through cash very quickly while at the same time falling behind schedule. An interesting observation that Dean makes is that Bangalore, where the company hired a lot of talent, become such a hot area of recruitment that even there engineers were no longer cheap, further not helping the company. Soon, the company dropped the asymmetric core idea and decider on a simpler core with four identical cores. This might have been the major strategic mistake that the company made. Suddenly, the chip became indistinguishable from what the big guys would offer over the next few years. On the performance side it would have to compete against Intel’s latest Core 2 Duo processor while on the power side the recently introduced Intel Atom would have surely become a nail in Montalvo’s coffin.

Interestingly, Dean reveals that several investors were nevertheless willing to throw another $150 million dollars at the company to let them finish the initial chip and maybe a second version after that, but one of the major investors advised against it. Too bad in a way, since it would have been really interesting to see what the Montalvo team could have delivered – some small teams are capable or extraordinary achievement. On the business side of things, the lesson to be learned here is that when market conditions change, the product has to be modified to address the new circumstances, but one has to be really careful not to change it such that it looses the uniqueness and with it any advantage or niche that it was targeting.  Sun Tzu said that good warriors prevailed when it was easy to prevail because they knew themselves and properly assessed the situation, thus positioning themselves on ground where they would surely win. Montalvo on the other hand had a identity crisis right from the beginning, followed by poor product positioning in the end, thus severely diminishing any chances of victory that the company might have had – which explains why the money eventually dried up.
Ironically, just the other day Montalvo was granted its first patent, according to Peter Glaskowsky, titled Adaptive Computing Ensemble Microprocessor Architecture. Of course, given the recent acquisition of the company, the patent assignee is now Sun Microsystems.

Many individuals dream of working for a startup and striking it rich, but never seem to find the right opportunity for which they would be willing to leave the security of their current employer. On the other side of the spectrum are startups, which might have great ideas, but whether by choice or not, are little known and struggle in finding the right talent. For these individuals and startups, the major job-sites usually return less than satisfying results: Finding startups on these sites is not easy, and similarly the quantity of resumes received by startups is likely to trump the quality of the applicants. A few months ago we profiled VentureLoop.com, which by now has amassed over 5000 jobs from about 700 venture-backed companies. VentureLoop’s strength comes from having many of the top venture capital firms as their clients, thus gaining access to jobs at startups that might not be available elsewhere.

Now, VentureLoop has a new competitor in town, namely StartupAgents.com. The brain child of Lee Diamond, StartupAgents intends to bring startups and agents, meaning individuals interested in working for startups, together with a social networking twist. Think of StartupAgents, as a LinkedIn with a startup focus and a few extra features. As usual, after registering, one has the option of setting up a profile similar to most social networking sites. All the basics are there such as location, experience, education, languages, etc. A more interesting feature is the inclusion of a video resume in the profile if you choose to do so. I suppose, many people will shy away from this, but a few confident and creative individuals might use this to set themselves apart from others. Of course, weather startups looking for talent will watch these videos is an entirely different matter. Another interesting profile section is the work-preferences which in addition to selecting positions of interest and sectors of interest also enables you to specify top values such as innovation, integrity, etc. Finally, connections, rather than friends or acquaintances, are intended to be people with whom you would want to work in the future. The idea being, that startups ought to be able to utilize these connections to hire entire teams of people that want to work together in the first place, thus quickly creating harmonious and efficient teams – If you’ve ever worked on a team where not all members are looking in the same direction, you know exactly how important this is.

Before you get too excited, there are some reasons that StartupAgens is still in beta. First of all, you have to get past the registration. No, I’m not insulating your intelligence by doubting you will get past the mathematical captcha authentication. It simply might be the case that the registration server will not like your email address. I had to try three different addresses before I finally obtained a registration email! Another major limitation is that at this point only startups are allowed to search for talent, and not the other way around. Reverse functionality is promised in future releases, but for now all you can do is setup your profile, invite friends, and then wait. Maybe, StartupAgents is waiting to sign-up enough startups so that there is actually something worth searching through. All in all though, the interface is clean and user friendly, and if you are looking for a startup gig setting up a profile will most likely not hurt your chances.

Austin, Texas is well known for live music, the always busy 6th street, the SxSW music festival, and most recently a slew of web startups. While often referred to as silicon-hills, Austin has recently produced relatively few semiconductor startups. All the established players are still there with AMD, Freescale, IBM and Intel all having major campuses in the city. Additionally TI, ARM, nVidia, Qualcomm and a few others can also be found scattered around the city. But looking for job opportunities with semiconductor startups is a little more challenging, unless you are leaning towards green technology. So it is good to see that the guys at AustinStartup.com have taken it upon themselves in creating a nice little list of Austin's top 100 emerging startups that they intend on updating on a regular basis. An undertaking like this one also tells you a little bit about the positive energy and genuine interest in Austin regarding startups, which bodes well for the city.

The criteria for the list are relatively simple: Companies have to be headquartered in Austin, must be growing, hiring, attracting capital, and ought to be relatively young. Obviously, companies that have been acquired or are publically traded are not eligible for inclusion in this list. Not surprising, the list is dominated by software, bio-engineering, and green technology startups, however it is good to see that several semiconductor startups also made list:

• Alereon - a startup providing Ultrawideband (UWB) wireless chipsets
• Black Sand Technologies - a startup focused on analog and digital circuits for the wireless industry which we profiled in this post
• Coldwatt - a startup specializing in ultra efficient power supplies
• D2Audio  - a startup designing intelligent digital amplifiers for audio components 
• Intrinsity - a little surprising that Intrinsity made the list since they have been around for while now. In any case, the company provides tools, technologies, and IP for digital logic design. It is best known for their proprietary Fast14 technology and their FastCores IP.
• IntegralWave Technologies - a startup developing power conversion ICs
• Luminary Micro - a startup specializing in 32-bit ARM microcontrollers
• Nascentric - a startup focused on delivering fast and accurate SPICE simulation software for the semiconductor industry
• Nuventix - a startup working on package cooling solutions using SynJet technology
• Pulsewave RF - a startup developing Class M power digital RF amplifiers
• Zilker Labs - a startup specializing in digital power ICs
  

There might be a few more semiconductor startups on the list that I missed, so I highly encourage you to take a look at the list yourself. In addition to more detailed descriptions than the ones above, the list also contains links to the companies’ news sections and jobs listings. One thing that would be useful would be that ability for users to sort the list by industry type, but nevertheless it is a nice first start and a useful resource.