Stable Genius
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I found this interesting business case study on ARM, what stood out was the timelines involved. Signing licensees at the start and getting to royalties takes a looong time, but my take is that it is like a snowball on a mountain…slowly builds into an unstoppable force and likely to be a wild ride. Strap in or bail out depending on your risk tolerance!
A very interesting read @Moonshot.
We’re very lucky to have someone like RT, whose experience with ARM would be invaluable. Especially given we are using a similar IP sales model ourselves. He’s already walked the walk!
I found these paragraphs quite relevant:
Customer-Centricity
Another key focus area for the team at ARM was customer-centricity. Talking about the “customer is king” mentality, Urquhart commented, “Too often start-ups get so hung up on their wonderful technology they forget that they have to understand the market and customers and develop their product to meet the customers’ needs (at the right price).” He recollected the early years at ARM, and their constant focus on the customer,
Eco-system
One limiting feature of the IP licensing business model was the time it took to generate revenue— it could take years from the time a license was signed until the royalties started to kick in. But as the ARM architecture became more and more widely licensed, ARM put a lot of effort into building a partnership ecosystem of fabricators, OEM’s, circuit design tool producers and third- party suppliers of software libraries (for graphics, sensors, networking, etc.); so that anything that an ARM licensee might need would be available from its ecosystem (refer to Exhibit 3 for ARM Business model).
Cheers