Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1093246
46 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I MARCH 2019 ther was always involved in global marketing, which is what initially piqued my interest in it. Freshman year, I took a couple of introductory classes and stuck with it. I studied marketing the whole way through and got my first job out of college at a very small company—a hole-in- the-wall marketing agency in San Diego. You could fit maybe four or five people in the of- fice, and there was no A/C, so it was burning hot, but it allowed me to move from Wisconsin to California, so I wasn't complaining. That was really my first experience with marketing, and I loved it. After that, I transi- tioned into a bigger company still in the start- up world. I always stayed in the smaller start- up world at first and found that I could move around and get a lot of different experience within one organization very quickly. That helped me tremendously when I was build - ing my career early on and led me to oppor- tunities like Altium where it's a much bigger, global organization, and I get to apply a lot of the things I learned in that startup space on a larger level. Shaughnessy: When you were in college, was there any type of program to bring in people from industry to let students get exposed to them? Johnson: Yes, in my marketing classes. It was more class-specific. It depends on the profes- sors. But with two of my marketing professors, their curriculum heavily involved working out- side of the classroom, finding businesses, con- necting with them, and interviewing people who worked there. In certain situations, it in- volved bringing those individuals in to talk to the class on relevant topics, or to host a mock negotiation with students in front of the lec- ture hall. This wasn't a course that was just paperwork; it was more about the mental side of it, going out and actually learning about and participating in the industry early on. Shaughnessy: What college was this? Johnson: University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. I'm from Wisconsin and moved to San Diego about four years ago. Shaughnessy: You don't talk funny at all. Johnson: A couple of my words have the Wis- consin accent, but I hide it pretty well. When I talk about the Packers or cheese, it comes out. Shaughnessy: Among the people that are your age, are they aware of the EDA industry or PCBs? Johnson: I'm sure they are, but it's minimal, and I think that that's my answer to the ques- tion of bringing youth into the industry—a lot of people just don't know enough about this indus- try. Unless an outside fac- tor has influenced them like a relative or a friend that works in the industry, they're not going to know much if anything about it. Going into college, I never had any experience in the hardware industry—EDA or PCB design. I didn't know about any of it. When I started at Al- tium, I was exposed to a whole new world, but I think it goes back to not