Great turnout at the Design Automation Conference.

We had a great first day at DAC. All the talk about recession and economic doom were hard to believe. People were enthusiastic and upbeat. Even the guys and gals looking for work were upbeat and were considering it to be a temporary phase.

We started early at 6:00 AM from San Jose. The drive on Route 280 was nice in the morning with almost no traffic. Clouds on top of the hills along the way were very nice.

Reached at 7:00 and got down to setting up the three laptops and a (borrowed) projector. We had already setup the booth on Saturday.

Many interesting people doing cool things dropped by to see the products, many had seen us on Gary Smith and John Cooley’s must see list. Many others simply came with no idea what we were doing and to their surprise, they realized they could use our solutions.

Interestingly a few people thought that we were doing natural language parsing in IDesignSpec. Oh well, some day, at some DAC!

Why is it difficult to make your first EDA tool sale?

As you know we have created a brand new EDA tool that saves people a lot of time and money. Ok you have heard that before. But this is real :) Ok so you have heard *that* before too! So how do I convince you to take a look at it.

a. I could hire a Sales person to find interesting ways to make inroads into your company.
b. I could hire a consultant who would do the same.
c. I could get a VC to fund us and then we blitz the Internet and other media to convince you to take a look at this new tool.

But, who pays for all this? Ofcourse, you do. Thats why, I believe, EDA tool prices are often out-of-whack.

We have a tool that we created with the minimum of resources, we could now pass all that saving onto you, but only if you would take us seriously without making us spend too much, which we would need to recover later. Won't you look at this new tool?