Letter #301: Wilf Corrigan (1986)
Founder of LSI Logic and CEO of Fairchild Semiconductor | The Genesis of LSI Logic
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Wilf Corrigan was the Cofounder and CEO of LSI Logic. Wilf started his career at Motorola Semiconductor, before joining Fairchild Semiconductor. He rose the ranks at Fairchild to eventually become President and CEO for five years, before selling the company to Schlumberger. Just two years after selling Fairchild, he founded LSI Logic, which merged with Agere Systems before being acquired by Avago for $6.6B.
Today’s letter is the transcript of a speech Wilf gave at LSI Logic’s 1986 Sales Conference about the genesis of the company and the culture of the company. He speaks of starting the company in his family room, visiting customers, and being told he was crazy. He then shares how he gathered insights from his customers, recruited team members, raised capital, and discovered the differences between an established company and a startup, including depositing a large check, developing a sales process, architecting a marketing team, the emergence of the company’s unique culture, the difficulty of pricing, the importance of making money, the company’s positioning and optimistic outlook for the next few years, how everything starts with the customer and the salesman, before ending his talk with words of encouragement for a bright next year.
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did!
[Transcripts and any errors are mine.]
Related Resources
LSI Logic
Fairchild Semiconductor
Transcript
George Wells: I get to do all kinds of nice things. And this one is a real pleasure too, because I've been in The Valley 16 years now, and I've seen the emergence of some true leaders in the semiconductor industry. And the guy you're about to hear from them, as far as I'm concerned, he's the daddy of them all: Wilf Corrigan.
Wilf Corrigan: Gee, I've never been called a daddy before. And you got to--particularly from this particular guy, because when I first arrived in the States, I was a young bachelor. And it was a whole bunch of us that work at Transitron. And so I moved into a rooming house, and at that time, the daddy was the only married guy with a wife and a kid. And that was George. So he got the big room on the ground floor. But that was 25 years ago.
Many of the people here tonight are relatively new with the company. And I know this week you've had a data dump, and I'm sure many of you are saturated with foils and slides and your head is probably spinning with all the data that you got. So I thought what I'd talk about tonight, and you're going to hear from George tomorrow, and I think you've heard from most of the principal guys, or if you haven't yet, you will tomorrow.
So I thought I'd talk a little bit about the genesis of the company and a little bit about the culture of the company, because I think the culture of this company is a little different. As I drove in tonight, I came in off Lawrence Expressway, and as I was driving in here, I remembered that we used to come to this place for lunch when the company started. And just across this water here is what's called the horizontal skyscraper. And if you look out in the morning, you'd understand why we call it the horizontal skyscraper. Because a huge long glass building that lies on its side. And that's where the company started. And, well, at least that's where the company started in the sense of after January the 19th.
But the real company started before that. And sometimes people say this company kind of feels a little bit like a family. And I think that's because it started in my family room. So the--how it started in 1980 was--started where it should start--and that is with the customer. And I spent a lot of time in 1980 visiting customers. And mainly people that I knew. And I asked them all the same question. I said, I'm going to start a semiconductor company. And they all attempted to dissuade me, told me I was crazy, and so on. And I said, Well look, I'm gonna do it anyway, so you might as well tell me what you need in the way of semiconductors.
And they gave me a long list of what they didn't need. What they didn't need was another memory supplier, another microprocessor supplier, and so on. But the thing that started to pop out was what they did need was custom circuits of a variety of different kinds, and it was obvious that you couldn't do linear custom circuits--a lot of different circuits. And they wanted all these things that seem obvious to us today. They wanted the low power, they wanted to be able to design them quickly, they wanted them to always work right the first time, and so on and so forth. And most of these customers were actually doing it themselves, mainly because the big semiconductor manufacturers had said, No, we don't do that sort of thing. The thing that's made this industry great is the old Henry Ford concept of You can have it any color you want, as long as it's black. I decided that, well, maybe we could--maybe this was a chink in the armor.
So I came back, and I said, now, if we were going to do this, what sort of people would we need? And I went and consulted with an old friend of mine, Bob Ulrickson. And I said, I really want to put a team of guys together, and I know pretty much what we're gonna do in the in the marketing area. But in the engineering area, we all know a lot of guys, but if this is what we want--gonna want to do, who should we go after for that?
And he said to me, Well, how about Walker and Koford and Jones? And I said, Well, that's an interesting idea. And then he said something else, and I'm going to come back to that. And he said to me, They're the best. So I said, I think you're right. And so I went and dug those guys up, and I hadn't seen them for 10 years. And I said, Fellows, I'm thinking of starting a custom company. And they said--they'd left the custom business. In fact, they'd almost left the semiconductor business. And they said that was like unfinished business. That was something we really wanted to finish. So yeah, we're interested.
So then I called up Bill O'Meara--and I always call him "Bill Oh-mar-a," and some other people call him "Bill Oh-mare-uh," I always call him "Bill Oh-mar-a," and he's gotten used to it now. And I called up Bill, and I hadn't seen Bill for about 18 months, and I said, Hey, Bill, I'm thinking of starting a semiconductor company, would you like to be the VP of Marketing? So Bill said, of course. So I said, Okay, I'll call you in a week or so when we've got the plans gelled down.
And so we started down the road. Then shortly after that, Mick Bohn came on the team. And he was going to be our VP Finance. And then we had a couple of other guys that were going to be on the team--we had a guy that was going to head up manufacturing, and we were pretty close on the guy to head up R&D. But both of those guys, it turned out, decided that they couldn't make it to the party for a variety reasons--even after we were very close to raising the money. That cost them a lot of money. I used to hear these stories about when they started Intel, the guy that was invited to come to the meeting when they were going to start the company, and his wife wouldn't let him go, and he figured he cost her about $5mn. True story, by the way. So not long after that, we raised the money, and we had our $6mn. And by the way, that's another story.
When we were--you read about, you raised the money--and, seems very straightforward. When I was at Fairchild, whenever we raised money, all I knew as the President was that I'd go someplace with the--be a little champagne closing ceremony, I'd have to sign 20 or 30 different documents, shake hands with whoever it was, and I'd walk away. And however it happens, the money would somehow finish up in a bank account. I never ever saw it.
When we raised this particular $6mn, they--and ultimately, we had a fair number of investors--it must have been about 20 investors the first time we raised the $6mn, the closing ceremony was each person would come in, they'd sign the papers, and then they'd leave a check. And it got round to about five o'clock, six o'clock in the evening. The last guy came through and he left. Shook hands, left. And there's just me and a lawyer. And there's this 20 loose checks sitting there. And I noticed that they're all different sizes. They're like big ones, little ones. And it's like Bill and Mary Jones [in the song (ph)]--that's what it looked like.
And so I said to the lawyer, Well, now what do we do? And he said, Well, I don't know. I've never done this before either. So I said, Well, I suppose I take them, right? And he said, Well, I don't know. And I said, alright, this is what I'll do. So I just kind of shuffled them together and I put them in my pocket and went over to Bank of America and knocked on the door. And a lady came to the door and said, We're closed. And I said, Well, Bank of America is our bank, and I want to deposit $6mn, and because we're a little company, it's important--we want to get the money for overnight. And she said, We can't do that. So I said, Do you have a vice president? She said, Yes. I said, Well, go and get him. So she said, Okay, well, you stay right here.
And then she closed the door again, locked it, and after about five minutes, this guy appears, who's the local vice president, not knowing he was losing the business at this point in time. And I said, I've got $6mn that I want to deposit. He says, Well, it's really not convenient. So I said, I'm going to call Armacost. I know the guy, and I'm going to call him and tell him what you just--he said, Okay, come on in. So I said, And I'd like to get the overnight interest on it. [Inaudible] takes $6mn, and at that time, interest rates were pretty good, about 15%. And nope, no way. But he did accept the $6mn. So that's how you actually pick up the money. We don't--that doesn't happen anymore, Mick somehow takes care of it. So that's how we got started.
And then we were in this horizontal skyscraper, just next door here. And when we didn't go to the deli, when we were feeling real good, we came over here for lunch. And one of the things that I think many of you that are starting in these new offices are going to find out is that when you starting something entirely new, and you, you're there, and you arrive, and yesterday, there wasn't a company, and today there's a company, and we had, I think, we got six offices in one of these service operations.
And we all got our pencils, and our pads, and all the erasers, and our little set of pins, and so on, and we all have our desk, and there we are, and we're in business! Great, what do we do? Phone doesn't ring. And you immediately start to learn that the only phone calls that you get are callbacks from people that you called, and they're returning your call. And if you don't actually make the phone calls, your phone never rings. And that's a very tough thing to get used to. Because once you're an established company, if you just sit there for a while, eventually your phone will ring. But once you've got enough callbacks going, you get this sense of momentum. Until you go on a trip. You go for a two day trip, you come back, you're right back to zero again, the phone doesn't ring anymore, because all the residual callbacks have all been used up. So that's what you gotta get used to.
That was around the time that my venture capital investors would ask me, How's your marketing guy doing? And I said, Oh, he seems to be doing fine. They said, Is he worried? And I said, No, no, he doesn't seem worried to me, he seems fine. And they said, Well, that's usually where we get the first problem in the startup, is with the marketing guy, because he's usually sent out, and usually he's come from a bigger company and he's used to having people to talk to and he's got salesmen working for him and so on. And suddenly, he's in this new environment of out visiting customers. And the customer is--the typical thing, what's the name of your company? Do we need you? Have we ever done business with you before? What do you make? Exactly? How long have you been in business? You know, we just started last week. But we're gonna be very big. And they said, you know, typically, the mortality rate is extremely high for the VP of marketing in the startup company. Because the the other guys can sit around in between finance on the to do and they can talk to each other and convince each other that everything's going fine. Whereas the marketing guy is out there getting rejected, and he doesn't have anybody to talk to. And so I said, No, he seems to be fine.
Fortunately, Bill seemed to have a big reservoir of ability to deal with rejection. But anyway, things proceeded--then we got Jackie Higbee in. And Jack came in and Jack was used to running plants. And so we gave him his office and his desk and his paperclips and his pad. And we said, Jack, start worrying about the factory. And we were all worried about trying to get customers, so on. I went back to talk to Jack after a day or so, and Jack's sitting there, at his desk, terrified. He said, This desk terrifies me. Because he's got this phantom factory that doesn't exist. There isn't anybody to talk to. We don't know yet what we're gonna make. And--because at that time, we're an ECL gate array company. A lot of people forgotten that. We started out as an ECL gate array company. And after we've got our plans together, after about six weeks or so, we said, Let's go and do our first customer tour. And so we went out to see all the ECL gate array customers. And up until that time, I'd been the only one that had really talked to all these customers. And these were all the guys that I knew very well from Fairchild, and that I'd gone the talk to them in the middle of the summer. And they're all these guys like CDC and Honeywell, all the guys around Minneapolis. Burroughs--you name them--all the big ECL guys. And they said, Boy, do we need you. If you can make this stuff, dynamite. So we went on our big swing, and it was the usual thing, where you got to do everything in five days. And we're trying to keep down the hotel bills and all that. And we started to hit these customers.
And I think it was Thursday in Chicago. And we were all sitting around a dinner table. All pumping each other up. And one of us said, You know, I think we got the wrong product. And we're selling it to the wrong customer base. And the now in the middle of a computer recession, so it's at the wrong time. But otherwise, we're doing good.
So we all agreed that we'd all separately have the same idea. And so on the plane coming back, we redrafted the business plan. And Monday morning, we were high density CMOS gate array company. Proceeding on. And I swear to this day, I don't think our venture capital investors ever knew that we changed the plan. Now that salesmanship. We got them to give us $6mn based on an ECL gate array plan. We turned the baby around and delivered it as a high density CMOS gate. And they didn't even know the difference. Now that's salesmanship. But I think it underlines flexibility. As a company, we're very flexible. And we have been from the beginning. And that's what we're going to have to continue to be.
Then as we went on in the marketing area, after a while, things were going real good. We weren't shipping anything. But we'd got a lot of customer contacts, and we felt, Boy, that's a sign of progress. So we needed to start adding other people. And I forget the exact sequence, but I know I was in Tokyo in the middle of negotiating a deal with Fujitsu. And I was very preoccupied with the deal. And I was back in my hotel room. And the way this deal went was, I'd go negotiate, and then I'd go back to my hotel room, redraft the agreement, get the hotel type--lady on the typewriter to go type it up. And then I'd go back and negotiate some more with Fujitsu.
And then in the middle of this, in one of my days where I'm back rewriting the agreement in the hotel room, and I get a call. And it's Perry. And Perry says Hey, it's Perry. I'd like to get together with you. And I said, Perry, I'm right in the middle of drafting this contract--and then--I wanna talk to you. So I said Well come on up. So he came up to the room, and he said, I want to join the company. And I said, Well gee, Perry, I don't know that we need another marketing guy. We've got it overmanned already with Bill. And he said, No--I want to join the company. So not long after, that he came on board.
I think at that time, we were talking to [Donald Rock] as well. And he was a real hard sell. I think he was a little nervous about this startup sort of thing. And also, we were talking to Dave. He was an even harder sell. The number of times we went out to Minneapolis to go talk to Dave--as you know, Dave's a very conservative guy. And this seemed like a flaky deal. Because he's sitting in the Midwest, he's got this $150 million a year region or area. And it seemed pretty good to him. And he just didn't see the handwriting on the wall. That was what we were telling him. But I think it took us what, three months to persuade Dave? Was it six months? It seemed like a long time.
But piece by piece, we managed to put together the marketing guys. And I remember that when we got Perry in--and Dave--Bill and I had to give them lessons on how to carry a bag. Going back to selling themselves, rather than directing other people, was tough. They used to quiver as they went out of the door. We'd have to push them out saying it's okay guys, you can do it, you can do it. And they did learn, after a while [laughs].
But when you start a company with no business, it's amazing how customer sensitive you get. Now that we got a lot more business, the thing I worry about is we get less customer sensitive. You almost have to go back to having no business just to get sensitized again.
And one stage, we really moving up in the big time. So we--I was interested tonight, talking to Freddie and his 11,000 square feet and so on. When we moved up to a 5,000 square feet out of the horizontal skyscraper, we moved about a block or so away to the corner of Scott Boulevard. And this was 5,000 square feet. And there was carpet on the floor. And I know a couple of guys said, Are you sure we're not moving too far up market here? With 5,000 square feet and real nice carpet on the floor, and so on. And then of course we moved the computer in, and this was into regular office space, and it was an old National Computer. And the air conditioning, we kind of jerry-rigged the air conditioning. So we made the place look like home pretty fast.
But at that time, at one stage, we were doing 10 presentos a day. And it worries me, at times, that I see that--I get the feeling that we had more customers coming through Scott Boulevard than I see coming through Milpitas today. We were doing 10 presentos a day--we'd all go home at nights hoarse. We never gotten the business in those days, but at least we gave lots of presentos. But I always think that that's when you learn the most, is when you you have that little sense of desperation.
But after a while, I think a culture started to take hold. I don't know if you've ever read Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations. And he talks about the markets and the invisible hand that guides things. After a while, we started to find that there was an invisible hand, which was this entity called LSI Logic, that the company starts to take on a character and a culture. And it isn't me, and it isn't the founders. There's kind of this invisible person that's called the company that starts to kind of take hold. And that's what you mean by a culture. And I think it was on about our fourth or fifth month that we realized that we got this extra thing called The Company, which was kind of synthesis of all of us, and our thinking. And after a while, it really takes hold on, and it starts to reject things. I've been surprised at times that I'll make a suggestion and people look at me blankly and say, The company wouldn't like it. So okay, all right. But it does happen.
I mean, this company has a very unique culture, all of its own. And it decides what it wants to do, and decides what it doesn't want to do. And if we attempt to impose on this company things that it doesn't want to do, nothing happens. You have a mismatch of impedances and you get zero transfer of energy. I mean, I see that happening a lot. And usually the company's right. Now that's what we call the DNA. That's how you transfer the genetic information. It's the culture of the company.
And one thing I worry a little bit about with the field sales guys is that we don't cycle you guys through the company enough, and I worry about that with our international guys, that really, to get a total transfer of the information, what I'd really like to do is to have each of you come and spend a--probably a couple of months, and somehow get immersed in it so that when you go out, it's like with the Catholic Church, when they send out the Jesuit priests, they got them so well programmed that they can be gone for 10 years, and it's like a gyroscope--they're still pointing in the same direction even if you haven't seen them for 10 years. We need to get that sort of programming. And the field, I think, is the only place where we don't quite do that. And maybe that said [one's (ph)] problem to figure out how to get that sort of information over.
If we talk about the ASIC business, I think at LSI Logic, we have hit the harmonic frequency in the ASIC business. Now either we hit the harmonic frequency or we are the harmonic frequency. The net result is the same. And maybe it's because in many ways, we wrote the book on this business.
LSI is five years old this week. Last Sunday, we were five years old as a company. And to a large extent, we've been five years in the development stage. I've never really felt in the last five years that we always felt that we were kind of developing towards something, whereas when you're in another bigger company, at earlier times, it was Oh, this was a good year, that was a bad year, this product did well, that one is growing, and so on. That one is is dying. But I've always felt for the last five years at LSI Logic that we've been developing for--toward something. And if you take everything that we've done today, whether it's in marketing, or whether it's in engineering, whether it's in manufacturing, whether it's in [ken], in a way, I think has been preparing for the main event. And I really think that the main event is happening this year.
The Olympics come every four years--now the semiconductor industry usually follows four year cycles. And we've been training for this particular Olympics for five years. Now most of our American competitors have just started. They just started the training. They don't have they have the ASIC culture. They don't have the focus. They don't have the conviction. And they don't have the credibility. And what's more, in '85, they were on a starvation diet. And this is going into the Olympics. Even worse, they've been shooting their own troops. Now the Japanese are different. They have the technology, they have the desire, they have a very strong culture.
But in the US, they have the wrong culture, at least of the customer interface. Now this is a war of maneuver. It requires flexibility and relationships, technology, software--all these things are the keys. LSI's had five years--five years of evolution. And we've had consistency, we've had no turnover--five years of penetration. Every one of those little designs that we've done in the past five years is another little piece of penetration.
And I know that the pricing is tough. And I know there's a lot of competitors that want in. And I know that we do screw up at times. And that we have lots of growth pains. But remember, we grew 65% last year, when the industry declined by 30%. Now that's significant. And we do have momentum--and momentum is an important word. Ask the guys at Intel--do they have momentum? Ask the guys at AMD--do they have momentum? I'm really not concerned with competitors who started last month. We did zero in revenues in our first year, and we did $5mn in our second year. Anybody else coming into this business has got to pay their dues in the same way. The main events have started. I think we in this room know that the main event started. Most of our competitors are arguing as whether or not the gun has gone off.
We know that it happened. I was talking the other night to Bruce [Entin], and I said, Bruce, last year we made more money than Intel, National, AMD, and TI combined. And he said, Last year I made more money than AMD, National, TI combined. But then he thought about it some more, and he said, And my kids allowance was more.
But I think that's significant. We're making money. We're not making as much money as we'd like to make, but we're making money while we're running at 30% of capacity. Now the other guy's complaining, how can you make money if you're not running at 70% of capacity? We're making money and we're running at 30% of capacity. And we're adding capacity.
Last quarter, we spent $17mn in capital. And remember, '85s a bad year. Last quarter, National Semiconductor spent $3mn on capital. And they're proud of the jump they didn't get in the capital spending down. We're thinking differently to what they are.
I look on '86 as the year that we really move into the big league. I remember when I was at Fairchild and we'd talk about Intel. And we'd do a monthly review. And Intel's quarterly results would come out. And when they came out, we'd say Oh, they did $30mn last quarter. Boy, that's a $120mn a year rate. And then that somehow go out of your visibility, and you'd miss him for a couple of quarters. And then they were doing $60mn in a quarter. You'd say, Jesus, that's a $240mn dollar rate. The same thing is happening with us. A lot of people are looking at LSI Logic, and they tend to take the yearly figures, and if you look at our 1985 year, we went into the year as less than $100mn a year company, we went out of the year at a better than $165mn a year company. Now, that's almost doubling the size of the company.
Now if you say what's going to happen in the year '86? Now I said we're running at 30% of capacity, but we're about to change to 5in wafers. So if you guys don't do something, you're going to force us to 15% of capacity. Now we'll make money at 15% of capacity too--I'd sooner make a lot more money running at 50% of capacity. But I'd like to go out of this year at a $300mn run rate. I think we can do that. And if we can go out of this year at a $300mn run rate, what that means is that we got a crack at doing $400mn in '87. And now you started to get into the big league.
Now we got to do some things like that, to make that happen. We're going to add design centers, and I'm sure you've heard about that this week. We're going to be adding the equivalent of a 3081 KX every quarter this year. And then we'll start adding real capacity after that. Other people aren't doing that. Now that starts with orders. And I think what we need out of this group is a quarter of a billion dollars in orders.
Now, when we're sitting over there in the horizontal skyscraper, if Bill could come up with $5mn for that year, we'd very pleased. But hell, that was just one guy. So now, if I look at this room full of people, and believe me, we've got another room full of people in Europe, and we've got at least half a room full of people in Japan, a quarter of a billion dollars in orders doesn't seem that much. And I think we can do that. Now, very rarely in your career do you get a chance to be with the best. It doesn't happen very often. But in '86, despite all our warts and our problems, and the blemishes here and there, and that we didn't deliver something on time, and so on, in our particular business, we are the best. We're not one of the leaders. Not a good performer. We're the best. If you talk to our competitors, they admit that.
I had a meeting with Gordon Moore and Jack Carsten at Intel, and they've spent three months evaluating the ASIC business. I think they'll make--and Rob and I spent what, three days? Evaluating it before we decided what we have to do. They spent three or four months, and they haven't decided yet what to do. And Carsten said, Based on our survey, what we've found in the ASIC business is there's LSI logic, and the Seven Dwarfs. And Gordon said, I thought it was the 700 dwarves. And to a large extent, that's the position. And I hope we can stay in that position.
But what we can guarantee you is, in '86, we are the best. And this is the place to be in 1986. We just can't lose in '86. I mean, '86 is a slam dunk. But to build a great company, we should really use '86 as a springboard to make that great company. Remember, in 1960, IBM was just a $1bn company. And at this stage, we can start to see the billion dollars. I mean, it's not that far ahead. And I think we can just wrap up the ASIC business in '86. It's not just what we do--we do $200mn, we do $225mn, $240mn, that's nice. But if that's all we've done at the end of 1986, I think we shouldn't be disappointed.
The key thing in '86 is to just put the ASIC business to bed for good. By the end of '86, lets--our competitors steal--it really isn't worth competing. Any place that we want to compete. That's what we've got to do. And I think we can do that. We've got that position. And now is the time. There's never gonna be a time when the competition is weaker. And it's a little bit like Patton--and they wouldn't give him the gas to get to Berlin. Now, the gas in our case, is cash. And Mick Bohn has been able to make sure that this company is adequately filled with gas. And the tanks are ready, and all of the opposition is in disarray at this point in time. So I think now's the time to do it.
And in '86, believe me, if we only do $225mn, and that's all we've done--and we haven't got our systems in place, and we haven't developed the right products, and we haven't developed the right customer position, we'll have missed an opportunity that won't come our way again.
I mean, '86 is the year that it's all gonna happen. And I'd like to think that when we look back on it in five years time, that we say '86 was the year that we really did it. It was very nice to start the company, but '86, I think, is the birth of the giant company. And that's what we got to do. And it all starts here, with the customer, with the salesman. So let's go do it. Thank you.
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