David Rosenthal: observation

Transcript context

…Right, it's this ecosystem mindset. We need to help invest to build the ecosystem around our products. Totally. He thinks this is brilliant. He takes this idea to the board and the board is like, “Absolutely not. That's a crazy idea. Whoever would want to do that?” Don, in typical Don fashion, he says, “Well, screw it. If the board’s not going to do this, I'm just going to start doing this on my own with my own money.” When he would be working on the technology marketing roadmaps for Fairchild in working with startups to help build applications, he would just start investing small amounts of money personally in these startups that he knew that he was going to make them into big companies. The only problem was, he's doing this personally, he doesn't have enough capital to really get these companies all the way to working. It's so funny how we joke here, “You’re raising money for a new startup,” and even today, in 2019, the answer for how much capital you need always comes back to somewhere between $1-$3 million to get off the ground and that was the case even back then. This is totally amazing. This is like one of my biggest tech themes, but it is crazy looking at their first five investments. Two of them were at $2 million and one of them was a $2.5 million, like it is today’s seed round and yet, what they're doing is they're building freaking semiconductor physical applications. They're using semiconductors to make another product physically manufacture it, like it is……

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