Dinner with the CEO

Since this is my last week at Excelics Semiconductor, my CEO, Tao Chow, took me out for dinner last night. We went to a nice seafood restaurant called the Fish Market in Sunnyvale.
During the course of our conversation, Tao asked me the inevitable question:

"What do you plan to do next?"

Now that this chapter of my life is coming to an end, I've been putting some thought into figuring out where I want to go from here. And the first thing that comes to my mind is that I want to join a small, high-energy, early-stage startup and make something that's really cool. But then again, if I think about it a little longer, I realize that I am actually pretty confused. There are way too many options out there! I could join a large company. I could become an Investment Banker at a big bank and make loads of money! I could do a Masters in Engg or an MBA. I could work in Singapore or come over to the US. I could even start my own company. All these options have their own pluses and minuses, making it all the more difficult for me to decide!

And so that's what I told Tao.

His suggestion was something that I didn't really expect from an entrepreneur. He said:

"Why do you want to plan so much into the future. Just take things as it comes! Just remember to do what you like!"

I thought he'd ask me to sit down and come up with a roadmap of what I would like to do in the next 2 years and all that stuff. But what he did say actually made a lot of sense! Firstly, it made me feel much better. I decided to stop overly worrying about what's going to happen and just do what I feel like doing! So for example, while choosing modules for my next semester at NUS, I'm not going to worry about which industry is hot right now. I'm not going to worry about which specialization will give me the best jobs. I'm just going to take the courses that sound cool and interesting to me. And I'm just going to be confident that things will eventually work out. This may not be the best thing to do, but I'm going to do just that.

Tao also went on to talk about how it is important to work in the industry for a few years before you start your own company - simply because it makes more sense from a business point of view. Business is all about risks and how you manage them. Working for a few years for another company allows you to minimize your risks and therefore is the smart thing to do.

After that, we went on to talk about how Tao actually started his career and why he decided to start his own company and so on. It's a pretty interesting story actually. He graduated from UCLA and came to Northern California to work for a company called Harris Semiconductor in the late 70s. After working there for about 7 years, he realized that he didn't really belong to a large corporation like Harris. He liked to be in a fast paced environment where things got done fast! He liked to call the shots. And so, he decided to call it quits and start his own company. Well, it wasn't exactly a split second decision. He said that he actually planned it out for about 2 years. He sat down every weekend and thought about every single aspect of the company he would start. He calculated every cost and expenditure and he tried to visualize every possible situation. After putting a lot of thought into it, he put in all his life savings and started his company - CNS Hybrid. And he ended up being quite successful at it! After many years of profitability and sustained growth, he sold the company in the late 90s to another company called REMEC. After a short break, he was called in to join Excelics as its CEO.

From my point of view, he's had a great career. He's done what he likes, he's enjoyed it, he's been successful and he's happy today. Well, that's a great career right. That's kinda where I wanna be 30 years from now. And I'm sure I will get there.

Prashant.
Photo courtesy: Brandon Cirillo, flickr.com

Grand Opening Ceremony

On a lighter note (to the previous post), the opening of the new wafer fab was accompanied by a Grand Opening Ceremony.
The ceremony started with the Company Communication Meeting by our CEO, Tao Chow, followed by:
1. Giving out gifts to the Recreation Committee members. I'm one of them :). We got these little alarm clocks for our desks.
2. Presentation about new wafer fab.
3. 5-year anniversary for employees
4. Raffles
5. Recognizing new employees

It ended with some great food and fresh orange juice :)

-Prashant.

A new day at Excelics

Excelics has just opened its new 4" wafer fab at the DeGuigne office. Prior to this, we had a 3" wafer fab at our Santa Clara office. Now, with the new and bigger wafer fab, production is expected to become more effective and efficient.
More importantly, it is an essential step towards achieving the revenue and profit projections that Tao outlined today in his presentation to the company. As of now, Excelics' bottom line is still red. And the company is 11 years old. However, the future seems to be looking good and the management is confident of breaking even soon and being quite profitable by 2010.
I think they're right. Although I've been here for less than a year, I can somehow sense a feeling of renewed hope around me. Something tells me that this company is actually going to hit or at least come really close to the ambitious projections that Tao has laid out.
In the 11 years of it's existence, Excelics has been unfortunately hit time and again by unforeseen circumstances that the company wasn't really prepared for. These included the Asian Economic Crisis as well as the Dot Com bust.
Now, however, sales have picked up again and we are at the border line of profitability. There has also been a greater investment in upgrading the facilities (new wafer fab), hiring more personnel and developing new products. The Transceiver, for example, that Excelics indigineously developed and started producing last year, has been a huge success. The demand is so high that Excelics finds it difficult to produce as many transceivers as the customers want. There have been some shuffles in the top management as well. My supervisor, Eric Casida, was bumped up to the CTO position and the old-CTO cum founder, RT Chen, was given the boot.
I will be writing my business case on Excelics Semiconductor pretty soon and in the process, finding out a lot more about this company. I guess my assessment would be more accurate at that stage and it would be interesting to compare it with what I've written now :)

-Prashant.

Guess who's back?!

Wow! Today's a great day for me! For 2 reasons actually.. one's private and the other is this:

Xiaoyuan is back!!!

I know, you're like ".........?!"  (the dont know what to say look interwoven with bits of the what the hell are you saying look)

Ok ok... flashback:
I came to work at Excelics (unfortunately) about 6 months back.. and there was just one IT employee here at that point - Xiaoyuan. This is understandable considering the fact that Excelics is a semiconductor company. And Xiaoyuan managed the ERP system for Excelics. I was supposed to work with her. I didn't know jack shit about ERP or .NET or C# or whatever the hell I was supposed to know. But I had intended to take my own cool time to pick it up. After all, I was going to be here for a whole year. Also, the ERP system was completely undocumented, which meant that you have to read through the code (all 100,000 lines of it!) to understand what was going on in the ERP. Still, I was about as worried as a 4-year old happily licking away from a cone of ice-cream. I always felt that as long as Xiaoyuan was there to clear my doubts n stuff, there wouldn't be any problem. And so, each day passed with me blissfully browsing the net or sending email or orkutting...

And then one fine day, Xiaoyuan announced that she's going off for 4 months on maternity leave!

I was like "...........?!"

From that day till today... every single day has been living hell over here! I was knocked out of my blissful ignorant perpetual holiday like a rat shot from a cannon. Suddenly I found myself handling the entire ERP system myself (NO ONE else in the company knew ANYTHING about it!). And this meant everything from troubleshooting to massive upgrades to backups to everything. It also meant that every time there was anything wrong with the system, all eyes were on me! The worst part was that the ERP is pretty crucial to production. There were a couple of times the entire production stopped bcoz of some problems in the ERP. I can still remember the time when the production manager and a few others were circling my cubicle nervously and I was there fumbling around with the code acting as if I had everything under control.

But I somehow managed to learn most of it and become familiar with the whole thing over a month or so. But still, I kept finding myself bogged down with a million things to do!

Now guess what? Xiaoyuan is finally back! (i guess i already said that... well, balls...)

And so I'm slowly sliding back into those pre-cannonball days! (See, I'm blogging from work right now.. :P)
hmmmm! it feels good to be back in the saddle again :)

And I just can't seem to get this huge smile on my face...

psycho.