> Case in point: Why doesn't literally any CPU engineer at Intel, or airline engineer at Boeing, or hardware engineer at Apple, start their own company? Sure, sometimes it happens, but it only happens once or twice a decade for tens, if not hundreds of thousands of really, really smart people. And none of those companies so far have become industry titans that challenged their original company.
The CPU industry is rife with engineers leaving and starting their own successful company. Intel itself was started when Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce (an engineer and a physicist) left Fairchild Semiconductor as part of the "Traitorous Eight". Federico Faggin and Ralph Ungermann (both engineers) left Intel to form Zilog. Chuck Peddle left Motorola and formed MOS Technology and create the 6502. CPU design in fact is one of those fields that almost requires real world experience somewhere before you can really innovate in the field. There's just too many tradeoffs to be balanced.
Why haven't we seen that recently? I think it's the leftovers of the 80s, with financiers being unwilling to commit capital to engineer heavy executive teams in capital intensive fields like CPU production anymore. Talking with financiers, there's almost this infantilizing group think that engineers can't be trusted with money and MBAs are required to hold the purse strings. The same thought process that decided that hospitals shouldn't be run by doctors anymore and that universities shouldn't be run by professors anymore, leading to the rise of the administration class and incredible amounts of unfortunate externalities from those decisions.
I think that's why we're starting to see a renaissance in CPU design. The tail end of Moore's law is democratizing access to high end CPU design, allowing individuals (albeit with relatively high net worth from previous CPU design) like Jim Keller to put their money where their mouth is and work with a small team of very good engineers to create companies without involving much in the way of traditional VC.
There are more examples. Pretty much every every successful company in the CPU design space was headed by engineers.
The point is that hard engineering companies used to be formed and headed by engineers, including most of the juggernauts of today.
So when the parent said
> And none of those companies so far have become industry titans that challenged their original company.
I feel like that's untrue. Just about every major company in the space was formed by engineers forming a new company after getting fed up with their job, creating a titan that challenged their original company.
Small correction: MOS Technology was an already existing company known for its calculator chips when Peddle took his team from Motorola to work there.
A very interesting recentish example was Andreas Olofsson leaving Analog Devices in 2008 (where he had been designing DSP chips) to found Adapteva to create his Epiphany chip with 16 (and later 64, with 1024 planned) RISC processors essentially in his home. He had a bit of success with the Parallella board on Kickstarter to show off the chip.
The CPU industry is rife with engineers leaving and starting their own successful company. Intel itself was started when Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce (an engineer and a physicist) left Fairchild Semiconductor as part of the "Traitorous Eight". Federico Faggin and Ralph Ungermann (both engineers) left Intel to form Zilog. Chuck Peddle left Motorola and formed MOS Technology and create the 6502. CPU design in fact is one of those fields that almost requires real world experience somewhere before you can really innovate in the field. There's just too many tradeoffs to be balanced.
Why haven't we seen that recently? I think it's the leftovers of the 80s, with financiers being unwilling to commit capital to engineer heavy executive teams in capital intensive fields like CPU production anymore. Talking with financiers, there's almost this infantilizing group think that engineers can't be trusted with money and MBAs are required to hold the purse strings. The same thought process that decided that hospitals shouldn't be run by doctors anymore and that universities shouldn't be run by professors anymore, leading to the rise of the administration class and incredible amounts of unfortunate externalities from those decisions.
I think that's why we're starting to see a renaissance in CPU design. The tail end of Moore's law is democratizing access to high end CPU design, allowing individuals (albeit with relatively high net worth from previous CPU design) like Jim Keller to put their money where their mouth is and work with a small team of very good engineers to create companies without involving much in the way of traditional VC.