Tropian
2000 – Tropian was a startup, working on developing a transceiver chip for the cell phone market. I was the Vice President of Operations with responsibilities for all aspects of order fulfillment including manufacturing partner
relationships for wafer fab, assembly, test and shipping. I also had Product and Test Engineering, IC evaluation board design and manufacturing, all company Quality and Reliability issues, Corporate Information Technology Services, Facilities, Logistics,
and Purchasing, Shipping and Receiving. Amazingly, the company never made a product that worked as intended and never sold anything except itself. We had developed a strategic alliance with a Japanese company who was interested in the design intellectual
property (IP), and they ended up buying Tropian for the IP.
While we were trying to develop a revolutionary cell phone transceiver, we got into the business of designing cell phones for companies who wanted to be in the cell phone business but
didn’t know how to design them. One of our customers had a very interesting business plan. This was a Taiwanese contract electronics assembler who wanted to step up the food chain and actually make and sell their own phone. I visited
them several times, and after one rather late night / dinner / drinks it came out that their plan was to make the phones for the Chinese market and smuggle them into Mainland China for sales. Apparently this was a well-accepted business model.
Anyway, there wasn’t much money in the cell phone design business, and some of the flakey customers didn’t pay their bills. Our money was running out. When the end was in sight, I left Tropian for the next startup company in my career.