Nine Startup Lessons

Lesson one comes from the Microelectronics Center of North Carolina, or MCNC.

My first startup experience happened while I was still a grad student at Duke.

MCNC was a startup in Research Triangle Park, equidistant from the major universities who created it.

I helped found MCNC, which was aimed at semiconductor fabrication for the universities nearby.

They hired me to be one of its VPs because my PhD was all about designing semiconductor chips more easily and quickly than ever before.

The reason MCNC was such a big deal for North Carolina was that the major engineering and computer science universities in the country, Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Harvard, UPenn, the usual suspects, were rapidly gaining access to the very expensive facilities where semiconductor chips were fabricated, similar to what the likes of Intel, AMD, IBM had for themselves.

If the universities in North Carolina wanted to compete for the best engineering talent, both students and faculty, they knew they had better build one of these facilities, but none of them could afford it on their own.

So the state stepped in and brought the big three schools, Duke, UNC, Chapel Hill, and NC State, plus two other smaller schools, and formed MCNC.

It was to be governed by the chancellors of the five universities and a representative of the state legislature.

But the governor realized that adding this facility to Research Triangle Park would put North Carolina on the map as a high tech mecca.

So he, too, was intimately involved.

Everyone wanted to have their fingers in the pie.

Each university was not just one thing either.

Within each were multiple departments such as electrical engineering, computer science, even mechanical engineering.

And these departments were in competition with each other, and each school was in competition with the other schools.

Capacity at the fabrication facility was limited, so naturally people started to fight about why their chip designs deserved higher priority than anyone else to get fabricated.

As a very green VP at MCNC, I quickly found that all I did was go to meetings where these various groups fought with each other.

Frankly, it got to be ridiculous.

I was supposed to be turning my PhD into a system designed to help researchers and their students rapidly create working semiconductor chips and was also supposed to continue my own research since MCNC was supposed to be a research institution.

Ultimately, I got very frustrated.

And after two years, I went back to the Duke faculty to teach full time.

My experiences at MCNC taught me this.

When too many stakeholders have competing agendas, innovation suffocates.

The lesson here for you, if your startup has political complexity early, fix it or leave.

You cannot out-execute politics.