Advice From Silicon Valley’s Longest-Serving CEO

In 2015, when semiconductor company Micrel was acquired by Microchip Technology, it also marked the end of CEO Ray Zinn's 37-year tenure as the longest-serving CEO in Silicon Valley.

When Zinn, along with his co-founder Warren Muller, started Micrel they forewent the support of venture capital, wishing to maintain total control of the company, and instead built Micrel with $300,000 in savings and bank loans. Under Zinn's leadership the company was profitable in its first year. The company would later go on to have more than 20 years of consecutive profit until 2002, when it posted a $41 million loss. In May 2015, Microchip acquired the company for a $839 million.

Zinn himself is an engineer with more than 20 semiconductor design patents to his name. He's also credited with creating and selling the first Wafer Stepper for manufacturing semiconductors.

He was also known for having a few interesting policies at his company. A lifelong admirer of the Boy Scouts of America, he reportedly required top-level executives to memorize and be able to recite the Scout Oath. During his keynote at Sensors Expo 2016 he also said there was no swearing allowed in the Micrel offices (“If you did you could lose your job.”)

While answering questions from the audience, Zinn shared some of his thoughts on innovation, the role of government in manufacturing, advice on overcoming procrastination, and why companies shouldn't put customers first.

Don't Ask Customers About Innovation

Henry Ford is often credited with saying, “If I'd asked people [my customers] what they wanted, they would have said 'faster horses.'” While Zinn didn't quote Ford directly, much of what he told the audience fell in line with this thinking. He cautioned companies against looking to their customers when seeking a path toward innovation. “Your customers are not going to tell you what you need,” he said. “In fact, your customers are going to be resistant to change. They don't want to change. You have to convince them that [an] idea is going to solve their problem.”

“Ten years ago, if someone had said you're going to use your cellphone as a camera you'd laugh … And now we're talking about things like driverless cars,” Zinn added. “I'm legally blind, If you'd asked me 20 years ago would I be able to drive a car I'd have said no. But here we are.”

Embedded Hardware at Work. Get into the weeds on FPGA dev, modularization with system-on-modules & COTS, test bench technique, Verilog for hardware design & simulation, Arduino for pros, plus common design mistakes to avoid and more in the Embedded Hardware Design & Verification track at the Embedded Systems Conference. Sept. 21-22, 2016 in Minneapolis. Register here for the event, hosted by Design News’ parent company UBM.

The Role of Government in Manufacturing

With the Obama administration spearheading a series of manufacturing innovation institutes all over the US, an audience member asked Zinn his thoughts on the government's role in manufacturing going forward.

Zinn commented that he didn't think government could do much in the way of driving innovation. “We're not a Communist country or even a country like Japan where they can dictate how companies grow and how many can be involved in a business,” he said.

However, he believes the government could do more in the way of protecting American-made technology. “Our government is really more of a hands-off government,” he said. “The sad thing is they're allowing us to sell our technology around the world and they could control that.” He cited the tape recording industry, which was eventually overtaken by foreign competitors as a prime example. “It happened with the tape recording industry. We lost that because we gave the technology away to Japan,” he said. “We're doing that now in other areas. It won't be long before everybody will have the technology and be able to compete with us … I don't think the government can do much but it could protect our technology a little better and not let it proliferate so much.”

On Work-Life Balance and Procrastination

Zinn's wife was by his side on stage throughout his keynote. An audience member noted that Zinn seemed to have a successful marriage in addition to a successful company and asked how he maintained his work/life balance through the decades.