Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/811341
68 The PCB Design Magazine • April 2017 Warner: Yes, I was in the EMS industry selling to the military. Longest lead times on the planet. You can work a very long time for something only for it to go "poof." But when it is payday, payday's really good, but it takes a long time to get there. Romine: Absolutely, and it was a 10% hit rate. I'd say you need to call on 100 people to get 10. But supporting all 100 as diligently as you do the 10, and really the idea was to assist them in meeting and realizing the project coming to fruition. It just rarely happened. That encour- aged me to look for a software opportunity and I ended up here and it's been now 11 years at Altium. Warner: That's quite a path. In our industry, we all seem to take a long and winding path to get where we end up, but almost everyone has an interesting story. Romine: Even when I went into engineering, the goal was always to be in the business end of it because that was what I saw my father doing. It just appealed to me. He was very tied to the things that I was interested in, which was the technology, the tinkering, the exploration, and the creative portion of it, but at a much more of an abstract and practical application level. But if I talked to our salespeople, a lot of them are marketing people; absolutely I don't think any of them really saw a career in the technol- ogy business, certainly not in the EDA or CAD space. However, I would argue that none of the users got into this business by accident. Warner: Give me the typical bio of an Altium cus- tomer. Romine: If you ask engineers if they've ever met a release date and they say yes, they're either lying or they moved the goal post. But when we talk about our customers, as I've said, I don't believe any of them got into this business by accident. It's almost like you're born into this business an engineer or a designer. Warner: I think that's right. Romine: When they first come into the busi- ness, "civilians" as I call them, I'll just ask them what their perception of an engineer or a de- signer is, and overwhelmingly you get respons- es that they're reserved, they're quiet, they're antisocial. You know, you get "geek," "nerd," and all these other names. I don't think those are derogatory terms. Honestly, I've always em- braced that term. They have that perception because they re- alized at a pretty early age that, when they talk- ed about what motivated them, the things they were interested in, and the questions they asked about the world around them, the average civil- ian didn't know what the hell they were talking about. That ties back into my original story about growing up questioning everything. It was "How does that work?" Take it apart and find out. I don't think that is an uncommon trait amongst this community of users. These are people that grew up saying, "I bet I can make that go faster. I can make it go higher. We can make it go far- ther. What if we tried this approach versus this approach?" It's really much more of an innate lifestyle choice. Overwhelmingly, they realize that the aver- age person walking around doesn't really know what it is they're talking about. As a natural defense mechanism, they purposefully sort of leave details out. That is heavily contrasted when you see a group of engineers together. What you see as the common trait amongst these people is really a curiosity, a cynicism, and a passion for what it is they do. I would dare say it's even much more of an art that's wrapped in science. ALTIUM FOCUSES ON THE DESIGNER FIRST