How Do You Keep Your Best Engineers From Quitting Your Startup?
“Brett, I wanted to let you know I am going to retire,” Dave Bingham said to me.
“What? Why!” I said getting my bearings. “You can’t retire! You’re too young to retire.”
“I don’t want to retire,” Bingham said. “But I’m being pushed out by ‘Ted’.”
Bingham was a cofounder of Maxim. Prior to joining Maxim, Bingham was named General Electric’s “Scientist of the year.” In short, he was a brilliant engineer.
Our revenue was at $500M/year when Bingham told me he was retiring, and I’d say that at least $200M of the $500M was directly attributable to Bingham’s innovations.
Ted was managing Maxim’s design review process. This meant that every tape-out (these are the instruction set used to make a chip) of a chip had to be signed off by Ted before it was released to our fabrication facility.
You need to be flexible when you are managing creatives.
Ted was really strict about the level of detail he required our design engineers to have before he approved a tape out. And Bingham, to be nice about it, was just not a detail oriented guy.
But we had developed a workaround for Bingham. Several years earlier the company hired Peter to work…
