Lip-Bu Tan Honored with SVBJ C-Suite Award

For the last few years, the Silicon Valley Business Journal has honored occupants of the C-suites in Silicon Valley companies: CEOs, CTOs, corporate counsels, CIOs, CFOs, and so on. As the journal explains on its website:

In the fourth annual C-Suite Awards, the Silicon Valley Business Journal honors 14 exceptional business leaders who navigated their companies through an unexpected crisis of global proportions. Hear from them as they talk about the strategies and guiding philosophies they took to keep their employees, partners, clients and customers moving forward during the pandemic.

This year, one of the honorees is Lip-Bu Tan, Cadence's CEO. Lip-Bu took over as CEO in the depths of the financial recession a little over a decade ago. He had been a Cadence board member for five years before that, so he was able to hit the ground running, already familiar with the company's operations.

He has been wildly successful in the role. As the Business Journal says:

The venture capitalist-turned-CEO has tripled Cadence’s revenues while raising its market value from about $1 billion in 2009 to $30 billion today [$40B as I write this].

It is not strictly true to say that he is "venture capitalist-turned-CEO ", since that implies he is no longer a venture capitalist. But he continues to be the Chairman of Walden International, focusing on semiconductor/components, cloud/edge infrastructure, data management and security, and AI/machine learning. I actually think that this combination of jobs gives Lip-Bu a unique insight into the semiconductor industry. As CEO of Cadence, he meets with all the major companies designing semiconductors. As Chairman of Walden International, almost every semiconductor startup crosses his desk. He gets to see the entire industry up close.

The Silicon Valley Business Journal interviewed Lip-Bu. Here are a couple of highlights:

What have you learned about yourself or your company by leading through this crisis?

One of the most valuable things I relied on during this crisis are the experiences and insights from other CEOs. I am fortunate to be connected with many other CEOs, and I spent a lot of time listening to their advice, learning from them and comparing notes on how to take care of our employees, how to handle various business decisions, etc.

Were there any lessons you learned from the Great Recession that apply to the pandemic?

One important thing is to be prepared. You can never predict when a global pandemic is going to happen, but you can be prepared for contingencies. As soon as it hit, my executive team and I prepared several scenarios for how serious the pandemic is going to be, what the recovery might look like, and how it will impact our business. We were prepared for every scenario, and through the hard work and teamwork I mentioned above, we continued to deliver to our customers and our shareholders.
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The world will never return back to the way it was, and in the “new normal” there will be new opportunities in how we work, live, and interact with each other. Our customers want to transform themselves and accelerate their innovation, and we need to identify what the new trends are and capitalize on them.

What do you attribute the secret to your success?

There’s really no secret — it is through staying humble, continuous learning, a lot of hard work (and a little bit of luck). You put in the effort to really understand the customers and know their needs, and then you work like crazy so you can exceed their expectations and delight them.

More

You can read the full interview with Lip-Bu.

You can see all the 14 honorees. There are interviews with all of them, which you can find starting from this page.

If you want to attend the actual award event, you can purchase tickets. The event will be held on Zoom from 4:00pm to 5:30pm on March 4 (today!).

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