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The complexity of knowledge and skill transfer

danluu.com · 1,833 words · saved by 1 readers

Software teams full of kids who are just out of school (or just dropped out of school) regularly produce valuable companies. Why should microprocessors be any different? You never hear about a new team successfully making a high-performance microprocessor. Sure, PA Semi's acquisition by Apple was a moderately successful exit, but where did that team come from? They were the SiByte team, which left after SiByte was acquired by Broadcom, and SiByte was composed of many people from DEC who had been working together for over a decade. My old company was similar: an IBM fellow collected the best people he worked with at IBM who was a very early Dell employee and then exec (back when Dell still did interesting design work), then split off to create a chip startup. A hardware team where most of the people are smart new grads usually spends on the order of $100 million over five or six years only to find that they don't have a competitive product (or, more likely, don't even have anything that

Why hardware development is hard In CPU design, most successful teams have a fairly long lineage and rely heavily on experienced engineers. When we look at CPU startups, teams that have a successful exist often have a core team that's been together for decades. For example, PA Semi's acquisition by Apple was a moderately successful exit, but where did that team come from? They were the SiByte team, which left after SiByte was acquired by Broadcom, and SiByte was composed of many people from DEC who had been working together for over a decade. My old company was similar: an IBM fellow collected

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