You wake up with a new idea. Your technical background assures you that it can—and should—become a business. With proper due diligence, you convince yourself to take the entrepreneur’s leap. You write the business plan, which seems straightforward: build the team, develop the reference design, raise some money, launch sales and marketing, then sit back and relax. The anticipation of business success, industry respect, and ample profits is intoxicating. You start browsing yachts for those winter months. Life is good!
From a high level, your plan and the opportunity may indeed be right. But the line between success and failure in a new venture is often thin, fragile, or blurred. In my experience—spanning global sales leadership at Power Integrations and Cree’s SiC power division (later Wolfspeed), to founding and monetizing real estate companies and Pre-Switch’s soft-switching technology for eliminating switching losses in highpower inverters—the value of a business is determined by hundreds of small decisions the entrepreneur can directly influence.
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