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72 The PCB Design Magazine • April 2017 we first started bringing supply chain informa- tion into the design environment, just like you, I would go to trade shows and talk to engineers. Of course, I'm a marketing and salesperson at heart so I would give them an example of some of the things we could do for them. Warner: Well, I can see why you would get fans from doing that. You're taking them out of the mud so to speak. Now I think the number that Chris Do- nato had told me is you sold around 5,000 seats in 2016? Romine: Correct, in the last fiscal year. It's about one an hour. Warner: It's hard to get my head around that, but what I also know is that that your package is a lot less expensive than some of your competitors, correct? Romine: Well, I'm not going to use the term "value" because I have a certain definition of value but other people think it's one of those cheap words. But I will say bang for your buck. The proposition is unbelievably valuable. When we look at it for what you get for what you pay and considering what we're really eliminating. For example, Draftsman is our new fabrication drawing tool. It's a drawing tool that runs in- side of Altium Designer. That's a great example of us eliminating an entire post process. This is really at the heart of everything we've really brought to the market space, eliminating that in between stuff. When you look at engineers' frustrations in releasing products on time, they're never going to tell you it's because they couldn't actually de- sign the PCB. They're never going to tell you it's not because they couldn't draw the schematic. It's always something in between. We look at Draftsman as a great example of that. What I say is that the essence of design is re- design. That's really what we enable our users to do, to not be penalized for being creative, and being explorative when we talk about creating something really cool. Warner: Which is where all good technology that gets to market comes from. Romine: Of course. Well, look at it this way, Judy. Again, I'm a gear head. Given my choice, I would have a motorcycle shop or a hot rod shop, or something along those lines. You take, for example, a disc brake system on a car. It looks overwhelmingly simple. It's a rotor, two pads with a caliper on it. You look at that and you say well, shouldn't it have always been done that way? But I think the essence of sophistica- tion in design is simplicity. That's what we've been able to do because this is the industry we work in and where 90+% of our revenue comes from. Therefore, we're able to invest in specifi- cally this business. We acquired about eight companies after our public offering. Because of our singular fo- cus on this business, we were able to look at the technologies that we acquired and ask, "How do we make this simple? How do we make this non-punitive to our customer base?" Warner: So simplicity, again, along with focus, re- ally is what got you where you are and sort of de- fining your customer as the average Joe layout guy. Obviously, judging by the number of seats you've sold, you've hit a chord with the market. Romine: There are a number of things going on. We have a huge segmentation of our users that are what I call "Joe from Joetronics." And the appeal that brought us into Joetronics is the same appeal that's brought us into some of the well-known OEMs. Early days in my career here at Altium, I was a salesperson. I'd call all these people up and talk to them about the de- sign process and what they're doing. You'd find in our database some of these marquee names who had a couple licenses of Altium Designer. You'd call them up and they'd say that they're standardized on brand X or standardized on Y. That's interesting, then why is it that you have Altium Designer there as well? Well, they use Altium Designer when they want to do some- thing fast. Of course my feeling was, "Don't you want to do everything fast?" But that's what we've seen is, again, us always focused on the user, and that there was a natural adaptation. Warner: Why would they use something else? Were there features? Now here I will pause to say I have ALTIUM FOCUSES ON THE DESIGNER FIRST