NYTimes. But when she was raising money for Crimson Hexagon, a start-up company she co-founded in 2007, she recalls one venture capitalist telling her that it didn’t matter that she didn’t have business cards, because all they would say was “Mom.” Another potential backer, reports Claire Cain Miller in The New York Times, invited her for a weekend yachting excursion by showing her a picture of himself on the boat — without clothes. When a third financier discovered that her husband was also a biking enthusiast, she says, he spent more time asking if riding affected her husband’s reproductive capabilities than he did focusing on her business plan.

Ultimately, none of the 30 venture firms she pitched financed her company. She finally raised $1.8 million in March 2008 from angel investors including Golden Seeds, a fund that emphasizes investing in start-ups led by women.

On the other hand

She learned how to handle male-dominated pitches early in her career, when Rivals.com was buying another start-up. She was in the conference room, pouring a cup of coffee, when the other company’s executives and lawyers walked in. They proceeded to discuss the lowest bid they would accept, as if she wasn’t there.

“They assumed I was the admin,” or secretary, she says. When the group sat down to negotiate, she adds, “Their faces went white as ghosts.”

Priceless

Upon seeing an error report saying the following loop body was dead code

“No, that’s a false positive; a loop executes at least once.”

Another thing they found is that “it’s more of a guideline than a rule” is a common theory among compiler writers – something that is an interesting problem when your program has to parse code to understand it. Microsoft’s “precompiled” header files feature is a great example of a non-value add. Here’s an amazing observation:

On the other hand, C# and Java have been easier, since we analyze the bytecode they compile to rather than their source.

What that says about the state of the art in abstract specification of programming languages is important. Perhaps byte code is a better target for all sorts of other program transformations including efforts to extract parallelism.

The article also gives a flavor of what its like to fall out of the university programming environment and wander across the strange lands of commercial practice where fossils still walk, unsolvable problems are routinely solved, and solved problems are impossible.

I liked the advice to make presentations to as large a group as possible in the interests of attracting at least one smart person who will get it. There’s nothing more  despiriting than a presentation to a technical group that is in that sort of sullen defensive mood in which lousy practice and ignorance is a fortress of job protection.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA–(Marketwire – 11/10/09) – Cavium Networks (NASDAQ:CAVM – News), a leading provider of highly integrated semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for networking, wireless, storage and video applications, today announced that it is has signed a definitive agreement to acquire MontaVista Software for $50 million, comprised of approximately $16 million in cash and approximately $34 million in Cavium Networks common stock.

Not much of a return on $90 at least $90 million of investment – although to be fair, some of that investment was from semiconductor companies that took it out in services, so to speak.

Yodaiken’s Rule: Anyone can create a $50M/year break even embedded Linux services company given enough investment.

(Thanks to JK for the snotty punctuation remark. Feh).

The company I work for now really does not care about IP. I design low-cost consumer products that get shipped offshore to be produced. The big deal is time-to-market and being first. After something is successful and commoditized, it will be copied and driven to the lowest possible cost. Thus, there is no longer a need for a high-cost EE. There is a need for a high-cost EE to turn local ideas into workable concepts quickly. —lroee

From the current EETimes.

If anything, Wind River’s inability to breakout, despite a once Microsoft-like position of dominance, is a by-product of their failure to meaningfully go “up the stack” and away from their historical focus on the silicon layer as a primary differentiation point.

In other words, if Wind River had enabled the next generation of Cisco and Apple killers by providing more differentiated OEM-in-a-Box offerings, ala what Google is now trying to do with Android, they would not be staring at a $900M market cap and relatively flat revenues, margins and stock price.

Well, that’s an argument. Embedded is a tough beat, but Wind did not exactly set the world on fire developing new concepts and software. Intel’s history in software is not glorious either – so it’s going to be an interesting challenge for the new entity.

Although the payoff of a small niche may be less than that of a large, growing market, the competion may often also be less intense. The majority-fallacy concept states that appraisals of fast growing  segments overlook of minimize the likelihood that many competitors will be attracted. This explains why growth areas often stimulate destructive overcapacity and why a more modest product-market scope may be a preferable choice.

From Aaker, Strategic Market Management.

She mentions three particular structural tensions that we need still to work out in order to move on: investments continue to be focused on short-term gain, not on long-term production and growth; the social system continues to foster an unstable environment in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer; and there is too much idle money chasing and inflating assets like housing and not going into expanding the demand needed to soak up all the excess supply being produced.”

And from the Wall Street Journal in April 2009:

The Mushahar in Bihar are part of a political and economic shift that is building across the Indian countryside. The transformation, largely driven by development spending by national and state policy makers, will be put to a test starting next week. The world’s largest democracy kicks off a month of polling April 16 in which many of the leaders behind these experiments are seeking re-election.

Growth has slowed in the new India of technology outsourcing, property development and securities trade. But old India — the rural sector that is home to 700 million of the country’s billion-plus people — shows signs it can pick up the slack. The rural awakening helps explain why India continues to grow even as the U.S. recession drags on the world economy.

The very idea of the “elevator pitch” encodes a complex economic theory in which investment ideas are supposed to be reducible to 1minute sound bites that professional money managers have the judgment and expertise to screen.  To me, one of the problems in the US economic system is that too much power is concentrated in the hands of professional money managers – from bankers to venture capitalists to investment advisors.  For 30 years or more, we in the US have been force fed a theory that the government doesn’t have the expertise to pick winners and losers compared to the nimble and efficient market. And certainly, it is clear that the government can blow lots of money on nonsense. But compare the Internet, developed by a government monopoly and by DARPA and then NSF, to Pets.com or, worse,  Countrywide, and ask which was a better considered, smarter investment.

1. Alan Turing Era – minimize processor time and memory use (machines are few and very expensive)
2. Gene Amdahl/Seymour Cray Era – maximize throughput (big batch jobs in expensive machines)
3. Gordon Bell Era – maximize responsiveness (suddenly we have terminals and impatient people screaming at them.)
4. Bill Gates Era (client server era) – minimize programmer time and maximize functionality.  This is the era marked by three inspiring principles:

   Can’t we get these 4000 poorly educated, poorly treated code  monkeys to produce something valuable?

   No matter how crappy this is, it will work better after more memory and more processors.

   Get it out the door and let the customers debug it (or “Ready, Fire, Aim” as a former boss used to put it before our company went bankrupt!).

5. The Al Gore Era -  power use/functionality becomes important.

Something like that.

All the recent progress in cell phone handsets has come from companies that defied the BOM process. Instead of trying to sell items into the “stack”, RIM and Apple both have been able to imagine the handset as a complete product and innovate. Google is also changing the game by bearing down on what services can be delivered over a mobile device. These companies are in the business of creating products for end users and not in the business of selling parts to buyers of components. If you create products, BOM issues don’t go away, but they do not dominate.

The BOM process can dominate even in what appear to be more open markets. In a previous note, I discussed Dell’s efforts to sell against Apple to the people and businesses found at SXSW. Even though, as Jay Pinkert points out, Dell has improved design for cases, it labors under a disadvantage against Apple, because Apple can do end-to-end product design and Dell is forced to live at least in part in the BOM process world. Apple is not only designing the case, they control the operating system, the windowing environment, the middleware, and they can strongly influence and package application software. So Apple can look at what a conference organizer or musician wants or maybe what they will want once someone shows it to them, and try to design a product that will be compelling in totality. A company like Dell is constrained to delivering what is ultimately just a vehicle for vanilla Windows (or Linux) – a component of a stack. While the packaging can be improved, they cannot reach the customer in the same way that Apple can. Musicians and conference organizers and marketing agents want to have an aesthetically pleasing communications/graphics design machine or email/composing system or presentation device or some combination of these. None of them demand Vista or OS/10 or an intel processor or any of the technical parts. Of course, the traditional downfall of companies like Apple is that they grow an internal BOM process that transforms their own engineering staff into integrators and parts vendors.