Kenneth Young

Consulting in Business Development, Marketing and Engineering who desire to grow more rapidly.

Sector: High Tech

President and CEO of an $86M venture capital backed privately held company. Hired by VC teams of Mayfield, USVP and Tallwood shortly after initial $11M Series A investment. Tasked with building a full team; Developing a ground-breaking technology (Thin-Capacitive-Coupled-Thyristor (TCCT)), Determining the marketing strategy, building a foundry partnership to create a custom technology, creating and establishing ‘best practice’ processes and procedures, Optimizing every dollar raised through three rounds of funding and creating and building a strong relationship with the board of directors.
Notable Accomplishments:
• Built the key executive team and quickly established the corporate goals and milestones.
• Established the key foundry partnership (Motorola) to enable process development.
• Demonstrated working memory cell arrays (Jan 2002) in silicon prior to successfully leading the raising of $35M Series B Funding (May 2002).
• Team delivered an18Mb chip to show-case the capabilities of the new technology built on 130nm Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) T
• Completed Quality and Reliability Qualification of the new TCCT technology.
• Raised $40M Series C (April 2005) to complete the development of the initial products.

Sector: Electronics and microelectronics

General Manager and Vice President of a $40M publicly held company. Successfully grew the company from losses on <$40M in annual revenue to profits on >$120M/revenue in <18 months. Hired by Founder, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Directors to turn-around the company and get it back onto its prior ‘road of successes. Challenges included: Severe quarterly losses for prior three years; Loss of all Tier 1 and 2 customers; Extremely high product return rate; Low employee and leadership morale; Product design problems; Lack of trust by Vendors and Operational problems.
Notable Accomplishments:
• Established a partnership with the other GM and set the strategy for a quick turn-around of the company fortunes.
• Recalled, fixed and replaced all questionable product at customers and vendors in first sixty days and got zero returns over 18 months.
• Personally called upon all key Tier 1 customers and distributors to listen to their issues and make and deliver upon commitments to correct deficiencies. Established both Cisco and 3COM as new Tier 1 customers in first 120 days.
• Oversaw new product definition and development with the team creating multiple new products, one of which enabled us to become the worlds #1 supplier for that product.
• Led the company to profitability in <6 months, from <$20M revenue to over $120M revenue (run-rate) and onward to over $1.4M revenue/employee (from <100K revenue/employee) in 15 months.

Sector: Electronics and microelectronics

Responsible for the transfer of multiple products from my company, acquired by ISSI, to the ISSI engineering and operations teams. Challenges included: Completing the successful transfer of Aptos Semiconductor products to ISSI; Reviewing and setting a product course for the company.
Notable Accomplishments:
• Transferred multiple products to ISSI from Aptos Semiconductor.
• Completed the sale of Aptos Semiconductor to ISSI.

Sector: Electronics and microelectronics

Responsible for all Operations and Engineering tasks in this privately held Start-up Company. Challenges included: Designing multiple products on a small budget; Establishing foundry, assembly and test relationships in a sold-out capacity market; Assisting Sales and Marketing in customer establishment; Exiting through a M&A with another company.
Notable Accomplishments:
• Managed design and production of multiple products on tight schedules and budgets.
• Created and managed all off-shore Operations in multiple countries.
• Assisted in the successful company exit by the selling of the company through and M&A.

Sector: Electronics and microelectronics

Firm started to serve the design needs of small to medium sized fab-less semiconductor companies. Challenges included: Designing products on a small budget; Hiring and managing contractors to do the high quality work required.
Notable Accomplishments:
• Hired key contractors to accomplish challenging designs.
• Designed several chips for PC and Networking applications including Cache Controllers and memory chips.
• Developed a custom set of design tools which cut chip design time by over 50%.
• Filed patents for high-speed Network Processor.

Sector: Electronics and microelectronics

Responsible for Design and Product Engineering, Computer Aided Design (CAD), plus off-shore foundry support. Challenges included: Building a team from scratch to design multiple logic chip set and memory chip for expanding personal computer market.
Notable Accomplishments:
• Managed $2M budget to build team and environment to design 486 chip set, cache controller and cache memory.
• Completed design and transferred to production 486 chip set, cache controller and cache memory.
• Identified multiple process problems in TSMC process being used, resulting in 10x improvement in yield and solution to quality and reliability problems.

Sector: Electronics and microelectronics

Responsible for the Design & Product Engineering of the SRAM division. Cypress was the worlds 1st creator of ‘High-Speed CMOS SRAM Memory Chips’. Co-founder (#18) of the company. Challenges included: Building a team from scratch to design multiple chips with a very small budget; Working closely with Quality and Reliability to determine and solve complex issues; Assisting Sales and Marketing on technical sales calls.
Notable Accomplishments:
• Designed or oversaw design of all SRAM products from 64 bit through 256K bit, whose revenue represented between 55% and 100% of the company’s revenue.
• Designed the first high-speed CMOS SRAM (1K bit), which was shipped to our first customer six months after I joined (Teamwork!)
• Led multiple ‘task-forces’ to solve numerous engineering and yield issues.
• Managed interface to Operations and Fab.
• Wrote and had granted two patents.

Sector: Electronics and microelectronics

Responsible for the Design & Product Engineering for EPROM and CMOS SRAM products. Challenges included: Building a new product (EPROM) and technology ‘from scratch’; Co-Designing the world’s first Battery Backup CMOS SRAM and managing multiple cost enhancements.
Notable Accomplishments:
• Designed multiple EPROM products from 256 bit to 32K bit, whose revenue exceeded $25M in the first 12 months of production.
• Co-designed the world’s first Battery Backup CMOS SRAM product, creating a entire new product category (later spun out to become Dallas Semiconductor).

Sector: Electronics and microelectronics