There are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen.
Right now, we’re living through one of those moments.
I’m excited to announce that I’m joining Creative Strategies to help the world’s top tech companies navigate this new reality.
This brings my journey full circle.
Semiconductors
I began working in semiconductors as an undergrad, studying semiconductor physics and computer architecture. Grad school took me even deeper, and I spent endless hours in the cleanroom and lab fabricating and measuring graphene-based transistors.
Yet this was the golden age of Y Combinator and Paul Graham essays. If you weren’t launching a startup, what were you even doing?
During grad school, I co-founded a startup with fellow UIUC grad students. What began as a conversation around a table in the Illini Union turned into launching a Kickstarter campaign, manufacturing and shipping products, and receiving revenue from real customers.
This was a fun and formative time; my cofounders were great people, and the company-building experience was empowering. You can just do things, even as an early-twenties nobody in the middle of nowhere. It also reinforced a simple truth from my Midwestern upbringing: show up, put in the work, and things happen. They might not all be good, but things will happen!
Yeah, we learned a lot of lessons the hard way too—like the importance of working capital.
After grad school, I joined Intel as a hardware engineer. I was working on an Intel Atom SoC for smartphones, which was not exactly “moving fast and building things customers want” like we did in startupland. It was a privilege to work at such a storied company and collaborate with some of the brightest engineers in the field, but the gravitational pull of startups was too strong. I left Intel to join a seed-stage startup as the second employee on a team of four.
Entrepreneurship
At the startup I wrote full-stack web and mobile app code while picking up more entrepreneurship lessons. We raised funds, pivoted from B2C to B2B, and learned the joys and pains of enterprise sales. Such huge contracts!!! But, oh, we have to do a six-month proof-of-concept first? And they want bespoke features too? Okay….
Still, we were building something from scratch, and my colleagues were dear friends. But growth stalled, and personal development with it. We had a great small business, but the market just wasn’t as large as we had hoped.
From there, I jumped into another early-stage venture as the first engineer. It was an intense, exciting year—but just as quickly as it started, it ended as the promised seed funding never came through. More entries for my life lessons journal!
Big Companies
This was as good a time as any to move closer to family, so my wife and I packed up our kids and moved back to the Midwest where I joined a big old company. My startup options and equity couldn’t buy diapers and a minivan, but BigCo salary could…
Of course, I still had my hard-earned sense of urgency; every business has a finite runway after all. Although I was working as a software engineer, I constantly pressed leadership with the questions learned from startupland: “How do we know people want this feature?” and “Are they willing to pay for it?”
I dove into customer feedback (thousands of untouched SurveyMonkey responses!) and saw an opportunity for the company to build an app to satisfy unmet user needs. Lo and behold, I was now a product manager. With a small but motivated team, we quickly built and launched the app. It’s since been downloaded millions of times, and billions of dollars in sales have flowed through it.
Another life lesson: large companies can build products customers actually want!
I also saw the power of scale and distribution 🤌
By this point, I had drifted far from my starting point in semiconductors and high tech. I wasn’t at Intel, Apple, Nvidia, or Microsoft. Instead, I was further down the value chain at enterprises that bought from said tech companies. I was learning industry lessons from the enterprise customer’s point of view.
During this time, I also chipped away at an MBA at night. One doesn’t need an MBA to be entrepreneurial or succeed in product management. But I love figuring out how things work, and the MBA gave me the vocabulary and domain knowledge to understand the corporate world and its incentives.
AI, Semis, Writing
I hit the growth ceiling at BigCo, so I moved over into a tech gem centered in the Midwest — AgTech. I eventually made my way to product management of John Deere autonomous tractors—giant self-driving robots.
Agriculture is a significant field, and it’s surprisingly high-tech. I didn’t realize that modern tractors rely on iOS apps, SpaceX, Nvidia Jetson GPUs, and massive cloud data lakes — but they do! I was surprised to learn that Amazon Web Services receives millions of sensor measurements per second from John Deere tractors during peak seasons! [See 1, 2, 3]
AgTech was a sweet spot for me; I lived in the Midwest near the customers, but worked remotely with Silicon Valley engineers.
Yet, my roots are calling. An incredible amount is happening at the heart of high-tech right now—Nvidia, OpenAI, Intel’s five nodes in four years, Meta’s Llama and Orion, Apple Intelligence, DeepSeek, and more. I’ve been itching to get back. I spent the past year devouring everything I can on semiconductors and AI and launched Chipstrat to scratch that itch.
People and Next Steps
Through Chipstrat, I’ve met an incredible network of people at the center of the semiconductor and AI revolution—entrepreneurs launching companies, executives leading the charge, investors betting on the future, and analysts making sense of it all.
One of those connections, Ben Bajarin, has been a mentor in helping me figure out where I fit in. How do I combine everything I’ve learned—engineering, research, product strategy, entrepreneurship, thought leadership—into something meaningful for the industry?
As it turns out, my skills and experiences align perfectly with what Ben and his team do daily. As he explained to Ben Thompson (lightly edited for brevity)
Ben Bajarin: Creative Strategies has been a market research industry analyst firm since 1969—more on the boutique side. We spend most of our time in the trenches with our clients—most big tech companies—helping them navigate technology roadmaps and new trends. We work with many semiconductor companies, cloud companies, and consumer companies.
We stay ear-to-the-ground and in the trenches. We like to get our hands dirty with much of the stuff we’re involved in.
Creative Strategies was very early in the technology industry, from the earliest days in personal computing with IBM, Microsoft, and Apple.
We have a long history of being very early in understanding trends, adoption cycles, and behavior—which is not just at a consumer level. We do a lot of consumer and product research, so that helps inform our perspectives on what’s working and what’s not working in the marketplace.
This sounds like the perfect place for a high-tech futurist, engineer, and strategist. In other words, me!
In my new role, I’ll team up with companies as their trusted advisor, helping them uncover competitive and sustainable advantages in this GenAI future.
What’s next for Chipstrat? Only good things. I’ll still be writing—now with a broader and deeper perspective than ever. I’ll have more time to read academic papers, consume market research, talk to companies, and attend industry events.
I’ll have time to meet with folks, too. Send me an email if you want to connect.
Of course, if your company could benefit from teaming up, let’s talk. I’d love to help.
Finally, I’m speaking at the Edge AI Foundation Austin 2025 conference (formerly tinyML) later this month in Austin, TX. Let me know if you’ll be there!
Thanks for all your support, and I’m looking forward to year two of Chipstrat together.