Simon Butler's Fireside Chat with Jim Hogan

Way back in what now seems like the distant past, but was early March, I wrote a post From Bootstrapped Startup to Profitability—with Lunch about an upcoming ESD Alliance event. Of course the event was rescheduled and went online...and lunch was whatever you had in your refrigerator. However, it was still an interview of Methodics' CEO Simon Butler by Jim Hogan. Or "industry luminary" Jim Hogan as he is so often called.

Bob Smith

The meeting was opened by Bob Smith, the executive director of the ESD Alliance. You can read more about both Bob and the ESD Alliance in my post Bob Smith on ESD Alliance, ES Design West...with Wine. Of course, Bob encouraged anyone watching the webinar whose company is not yet a member of ESD Alliance to join. He showed the chart here showing how the design ecosystem, roughly a $10B industry (depending on exactly who you include), fits into the $500B semiconductor industry, and, in turn, into the over $2T electronics industry.

Jim and Simon

He then introduced Jim Hogan. I've known Jim for years, certainly since the late 1990s when Cadence acquired Ambit and I worked with Jim for over three years in what I call "my first tour of duty" here at Cadence (yeah, I'm a navy brat so tours of duty were a thing growing up). Jim eventually became the principal of Vista Ventures, which is a vehicle for him to manage his own money as an angel investor. One company he is involved in is Methodics, where he is on the board. He was also on the board of an EDA startup called Envis (actually Envision Technology when I was first involved with it). I was consulting with them a couple of days a week doing their marketing when I was asked to take over as CEO at ten minutes notice. So Jim was on my board for the year I did that job.

Simon is another Brit. He started his career working for Fujitsu in the UK doing semiconductors for digital signal processing (DSP). Charlie Janac, now CEO of Arteris, but then President of HLD Systems, persuaded him to relocate to the US to join HLDS, which was an EDA company focused on floorplanning. That was 1994. Three years later, Cadence acquired them in 1997.

Another thing Jim and Simon have in common is music. Jim plays the guitar and writes music. Simon said:

I’m a budding jazz musician. I even went back to music school after doing a few years of work.

Simon didn't stay long at Cadence after the HLDS acquisition. "I was a core comp guy for a few months". He then joined a company, SandCraft, doing MIPS core designs, one of the earliest companies trying to do an IP-based business.

By the way, MIPS is back in the news today having had a winding path: independent, acquired by Silicon Graphics, spun out again, acquired by Imagination, sold to Tallwood, acquired by Wave Computing, and now I'm not sure what is happening since apparently Wave Computing is out of business. "MIPS will live on, I'm sure," Jim said.

SandCraft didn't make it and so Simon started a consulting business integrating a lot of tools into Cadence flows, using lots of SKILL programming. SKILL was developed over 40 years ago (largely by a guy that I shared on an office with at Edinburgh University back when we were both doing our PhDs). That business went well enough that Simon hired some other people. In particular, one colleague/friend from Fujitsu days in the UK, Fergus Slorach, came over to the US. They worked with one company, Netlogic, where they had done a lot of integration around IP. That was where the idea of Methodics came from. Simon went back to the VP Engineering, Demetrios Demetrelis, and suggested that he took the technology, productized it, and then would see if he could sell it. Demetrios was "super cool" as long as he got what he needed for his business. 

Methodics

So Simon and Fergus founded Methodics. Initially, it was based around Virtuoso since all the consulting was around mixed signal. But it was obvious that there was more than mixed signal that people wanted to manage. What became a theme as they engaged with customers that people wanted more re-use, to have a bill-of-materials (BoM), and manage the IP lifecycle, also including embedded software.

Mixed signal we had a handle on. So we started to pull in the digital stuff. We were the single source of truth. That was the beginning in 2011. We were self-funded. Early on we were doing a lot of consulting and had a bunch of supportive customers. But after a few moments, we scaled up and hired people. One of the issuees was that people have a lot of requirements so it was a big cliff to get to something we could sell. We got through that and got to a point where we had a compelling solution to IP management.

Jim asked whether it was robust (I think, knowing the answer was "no").

Simon said that Methodics did some initial deployments but realized early on that at the enterprise level they would need to change. They were doing deployments of thousands of seats.

The EDA development model of build it quick, get it out, get feedback...that doesn't work on that sort of wide deployment. One early customer we did joint development with and then there were managerial changes. They didn't have the resources on their end and so it didn't work out. But we learned a lot from that discussion. We had a much clearer idea of what we needed. We started to hire more system folks: database experts, Peter [Theunis], our CTO, joined in 2015 from Yahoo. He understands how to scale up large dataasets and manage performance.

As it happened I interviewed Peter in a post Why Would You Leave Yahoo to Go Into EDA? And I even took a photo that day in the Methodics office, which was a ten-minute walk from where I lived at the time. One thing Peter told me in that interview would be important for Methodics:

Nothing off the shelf works for Yahoo. Vendors would come by and they would ask “will it scale to 600M people” and the vendor would have to admit that it wouldn’t really. I also learned the importance of requirements and, for a company like Yahoo, latency, throughput, scalability, and capacity.

Jim asked about moving away from pure EDA.

We had a lot of system requirements and we were having more discussions with IT folks. We were getting into more PLM [project lifecycle management] discussion, less than on point tools. Customers were more interested in how we could manage a multi-disciplinary BoM since we had a better platform, we knew what was in-flight, and could leverage assets from all over. it was a precursor to the IP-centric flow that people have embraced now. But that was always our model from way back in 2011.

Jim said that Methodics had gone from adding value to Virtuoso, a business that continues to be super-solid, and now the datacentric flow, too. Jim asked how many employees? Simon said about twelve. But in parallel with the running business they decided they needed to do a complete re-write.

We had all those requirements, we knew what the tool should do. and we had learned a lot. IP lifecycle management was a new thing. So we found these new needs and spun up a new group, one to suppport existing customers and one with the key architetects, the A-team, rewriting the product, using a new database, adding a lot of decisions related to scale. We ran two teams for a couple of years. It was pretty expensive and scary. But we sat down and realized this was a platform with lots of nuances.

We pulled in a very large customer with many thousands of seats, very demanding, but with great ideas. Didn’t need an army of support folk with the investment in the infrastructure and tests. Obvious extension to invites customers to our planning sessions, onboard their requirements, and bake them in in a structured way. The big thing was the scale, their scale is large, like no one else’s.

New Verticals

Jim congratulated Simon on doing a great job in the IC vertical but asked if there are others.

Yes, other verticals. Once you build some credibility you get intorduced to all the different groups. Add metadata. We bring a lot of value to the functional safety ISO 26262 stuff. We built this platform and on top we build vertical, “solutions” we call them. Embedded software, FuSa, IP security, fingerprinting, threat protection, document management in the planning phase. These are all workflows that sit on top but now we can offer these to quickstart. Embedded software has a diferent structure but still there are touchpoints between the two BoMs. We’ve had conversations with games companies with hierarchical trees of binary assets. Also digital animation studios.

Having a PLM life-cycle tied into the design phase is a unique offering. Something we brought to the table. We provide end-to-end traceability. For example, in an auto functional safety project I can tell you which IPs are used where. Digital asset management. We started very engineering-centric but now we have clients who are just functional safety managers, not doing design at all, with different care-abouts.

Jim wrapped up: "You were a kid working at Fujitsu playing jazz guitar on the weekend, you married a Brazilian girl, have a couple of kids, and now we are where we are. I'm very happy you asked me to get involved, so thank you very much."

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