Female Founder Puts EDA in the Cloud

　　A problem designing a demo board for a trade show led Natasha Baker to a career as an entrepreneur. Her story shines a light on the status of online design tools and provides a role model for women in tech.

　　As an employee of National Instruments, Baker was using a reference design to build an accelerator board linked to a steering wheel and a Nintendo emulator. A datasheet called for design symbols and footprints that she couldn’t find in her software tool. In her frustration, she saw the need for an online source of electronic design content, and the idea for SnapEDA was born.

　　At 25, Baker lacked the money as well as the programming and business skills to start an online software company. But she had plenty of drive.

　　“I tried to learn to code, but couldn’t find enough time with my full-time job at NI, so I quit and started learning how to program with online tutorials,” recalled Baker. “I’m an EE in analog electronics from the University of Toronto — that’s why I didn’t know how to code that well.”

　　The self-education worked. Her initial code base became the starting point for SnapEDA, which now serves more than 80,000 users in nearly 200 countries. She was the startup’s first customer and investor, bootstrapping her efforts for four years with contract work writing technical columns for Reuters and Forbes and programming for other websites.

　　In 2015, SnapEDA was admitted into the Y Combinator startup program. She moved to a house in Silicon Valley, where she lived and worked with her first few employees.

　　“We funded her because she had all the founder skills we look for,” said Dalton Caldwell, a partner at the Silicon Valley incubator that helped launch AirBnB and DropBox, among others.

　　“Her technical background was impressive and, having worked as a journalist, she was an effective communicator and had good industry connections — and she had a prototype built with real users.”

　　Later, the fledgling company became one of the first to get funding from Angels By The Sea in nearby Santa Cruz.

　　“I was president of the group at the time and didn’t do much work as a class manager for startups, but for Natasha, I was willing because the company was in my field of electronics and I wanted to mentor a woman,” said Judy Owen, an EE who co-founded the investment group after a career working at Intel, SGI, and Chips and Technologies.

　　“Natasha’s a bright and wonderful person, very motivated, and she responds quickly to inputs.”

　　Through the Angels group, EDA veterans Chris Rowen and Jim Hogan became SnapEDA investors.

　　“I found her story compelling and invested, and after a short time, I upped my investment significantly — I’ve doubled down on every contact with Natasha because she continues to impress me with her ability,” said Rowen, who founded Tensilica, now part of Cadence.

　　Baker is an example of the delicate balance of skills that CEOs need, said Rowen. “You have to be confident enough to jump out of the airplane, but still ready to take help from any and everyone you meet on the way to Earth — it’s an unusual combination.”

　　Cloud-based board design is still plagued by worries about the security of intellectual property and a lack of interoperable tools. Thus, today’s design environment is a hybrid of mainly secured proprietary tools on a local server or desktop with some services like SnapEDA in the cloud.

　　“A lot of cloud tools have been launched for sharing, but people didn’t want to switch or couldn’t,” said Baker. “For the short term, its content online and design offline, but price and availability should drive more work to the cloud.”

　　The top EDA companies have made their chip design tools available as cloud services but so far seen little traction for them, said Wally Rhines, chief executive of Mentor Graphics. Security concerns have eased since EDA vendors and web giants such as Amazon are now hosting the design services, but the biggest chip designers maintain their own server farms and prefer keeping designs inside the firewall.

　　A representative of Amazon said that the web giant is seeing an increase in online design, citing work with NXP. Rhines said that board design is typically less compute-intensive, noting that Digi-Key offers online board design tools.

　　In this environment, SnapEDA has been eking out a business since 2013 as an adjunct providing vendor-neutral symbols, footprints, and other design elements. It now provides more than 2 million models in nine formats, with plug-ins for tools such as Altium, Eagle, and PCB123 serving an estimated 5,000 active designs a week.

　　Baker sees potential for another funding round to fuel growth in the number and variety of models that SnapEDA supplies, such as 3D, thermal, signal integrity, and functional simulation models.

　　“Today, engineers are finding dubious content or they make it themselves or they are just not simulating if they can’t find models — we look at ourselves as a content company serving them; we’re almost like a media company that’s very, very technical,” she said.

　　Baker said that she has not directly experienced gender discrimination. She adopts an approach of focusing on the work rather than the gender of people doing it.

　　Less than 10% of her EE graduation class was female. Now about half of the employees in her 10-person startup are women — “not because I wanted to keep things equal; I just hired the best people for the job,” she said.

　　Overall, “I think we need more women in tech … the way to get there is to do cool tech things. I hope I can inspire other women just by doing it.”

　　Y Combinator has been making a conscious effort to fund startups with female founders. A search capability on its website shows that it funded more than 40 women-led startups last year, up from a handful just a few years ago. Its biggest success to date, Ginko Bioworks, is worth more than a billion dollars based on its Series D funding, said Caldwell.

　　Like Baker, Owen of Angels By The Bay said that there weren’t many women in her EE graduating class in Wisconsin or at her first big job in 1976 at Intel.

　　“With the rise of computer science, I suspect that it’s growing,” said Owen. “Intel was a good company for women even though it didn’t have many at that time. Its approach of management by objectives lets everyone be viewed openly.”

　　“At the time, it was like most women didn’t want to be in engineering,” she recalled. “I don’t know why there is a stigma, but it’s about more than women; it’s Americans in general — maybe it’s because the math is seen as hard … even when I was hiring, we had to go out of the country to hire engineers because we aren’t producing enough of them.”

　　Silicon Valley is clearly not immune to gender discrimination, as controversies at Google and the case of Ellen Pao at Kleiner Perkins have shown. The good news, said Owen, is that engineers tend to focus on “differentiation based on skills.”