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April 18, 2005 Vol. 76,
no. 13S
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THEY'RE COMING TO CAMPUS:
Meet alumni and successful entrepreneurs Sehat Sutardja and Weili
Dai on April 18, 4-5 p.m. in Sibley Auditorium. Reception to follow.
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Marvelous
Marvell: EECS alumni create NASDAQ-100 wonder company
Meet them in person! Monday, April 18, 4-5 p.m. in Sibley Auditorium
In the sixth grade, Sehat
Sutardja (M.S.'83, Ph.D.'88 EECS) told his parents he wanted a career
in electronics. This was the 1970s, and that meant repairing TVs and
radios. His parents wanted him to be a medical doctor, not a TV repairman.
But Sutardja loved electronics. At night, he dreamed about the wonderful
things electronics could do. Thirty years later, Sutardja still loves
the field. Together with two other Berkeley alumni, he's parlayed his
passion and dreams into a wildly successful technology company, Marvell
(pronounced mar-VELL) Semiconductor, for which he serves
as CEO.
It has taken Sunnyvale-based Marvell only ten years to grow from a three-person,
family-funded startup to a 1,800-employee, billion-dollar technology
company. Some would consider that extraordinary, given Silicon Valley's
tough times and the maturity of the semiconductor industry.
As Berkeley students, Sutardja and his brother Pantas (B.S.'83, M.S.'85,
Ph.D.'88 EECS) studied hard. Sehat worked under former
EECS professor and now executive vice chancellor and provost Paul Gray,
an expert in analog integrated circuit design. "By being close to the
top professors, it pushed all of us to work harder," says Sehat. "We
had to come up with results that were better than the other guys."
After graduation, the two brothers and Sehat's wife Weili Dai (B.A.'84
CS) went to work in the industry. Sutardja concentrated on analog signal
processing; seven years later both he and his brother were focusing
on digital, although at separate companies. After a few years, they
realized it wasn't just a black-and-white choice between analog or digital.
"You need both to solve future problems of communications," says Sutardja.
The two decided to combine analog and digital into a single company,
drawing on the combination of their expertise.
In 1995, the three partners formed Marvell. The early years were hard,
says Sutardja. They worked all the time, nights and weekends, struggling
to perfect their product. They didn't pay themselves salaries and lived
on the cheap. They hardly saw their families. Even when their first
product came out, they struggled to convince customers to buy it.
"We were too small, way too risky," recalls Sutardja. "That really got
to us. It was just luck getting our customers, but we were able to build
the products that our competitors couldn't. After three or four years,
we got one customer. The next year, another."
The three entrepreneurs made it. Two summers ago, Dai and the Sutardjas
were recognized for their collective passion for innovation, technology
leadership, and business success with Ernst & Young's coveted Entrepreneur
of the Year Award.
With all his success and experience, Sutardja has some advice for students.
"Learn as much as possible, in software, biology, advanced physics,
all the fields. It's not sufficient to know a single field of knowledge.
A lot of people stop learning when they want to become a businessperson.
That's the biggest mistake they can make."
For more about Marvell and Weili Dai,
please see:
Weili Dai (B.S. ’84 CS): Moving Forward Faster
Cool Alumni: Weili Dai, Sehat Sutardja, and Pantas Sutardja, founders of NASDAQ-100 wonder Marvell
Marvell Technology Group
Webcast of Marvell visit to UC Berkeley
College of Engineering Notable Alumni
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