College of Engineering Magazine- Spring 2001

Startup City

From Ground Zero to Product Launch, Bettina Briz (’86) Helps Semiconductor Startups Beat the Competitive Odds

By Taylor McNeil

From the College of Engineering in the early days of the LEAP program to newly founded semiconductor firms in Silicon Valley, Bettina Briz (’86) has made a habit of being near ground zero as new ventures begin. It’s only appropriate that she lives in Silicon Valley, “the center of the universe, it seems, for startups,” she notes.

Briz claims she’s semi-retired now, playing golf and spending extra time with her husband, Peter, and daughter, Jen, as much as giving management advice to startups. Retirement may be relative: when she describes what she’s up to professionally, it seems like full-time responsibility. This spring, for example, she has been plying her trade with GCT, a Korean-based firm focused on building semiconductors for the Bluetooth market. (Never heard of Bluetooth? You will — probably. It’s a standard established a year or two ago for wireless networking.) As GCT’s interim chief operating officer, initially focusing on the company’s marketing efforts, she is busy getting the firm ready for its product launch.

She’s doing with GCT what she does with any startup she advises. “The first thing I do is assess their competency. What is the product? What is the market niche they are focusing on? Do they have a strategy to go out and get the right customers and beat the competition?” And then there’s the market launch. “They have to appear larger than life,” she says, and to that end she helps define corporate image and branding, using her contacts with advertising agencies and PR firms that specialize in semiconductors. “I can come in and help, because I know what to do and who to do it with.” She laughs. “At least they think I do.”

While the semiconductor market is as cyclical as any old-economy one, Briz’s career has gone steadily upward. With an undergraduate degree in biophysics from UC-Berkeley, she wanted to do more than the research she was busy with in the early 1980s. So she enrolled in LEAP — the Late Entry Accelerated Program — at the College of Engineering. It was a startup of sorts, too, a new program for smart students wanting graduate degrees in engineering who had majored in other subjects as undergraduates. Briz took to it quite naturally, says Professor and Associate Dean Mark Horenstein, who taught her electrical engineering. “She was a very bright student,” he recalls.

Briz clearly appreciated the experience. “They taught me a lot and I took advantage of it,” she says of her time at LEAP. While still at BU, she set her sights on working in the semiconductor field, and after graduation landed at Analog Devices in Massachusetts, working as a reliability engineer. But that was just the start. “I knew right away I wanted to get into the business aspect of it,” she says. “So I finagled my way into a marketing engineering job, and that was kind of the start of my career.”

In a few years she moved back to her native California and got her first job with a startup, a semiconductor firm called Elantec, doing marketing. From there she went to one of the most established semiconductor firms, National Semiconductor. “National gave me a lot of responsibility and career movement. It was a terrific opportunity,” Briz says. After heading up a product line at National, she went back to the startup world and hasn’t looked back. She became general manager of semiconductor maker TriTech and chief operating officer of its San Jose facility. “It was a big career move. It gave me a lot more responsibility than just marketing,” she says. “I headed up the whole operation, so that was kind of neat.”

The experience was more than just a resume builder. It gave her lots of real life experience with the ups and downs of the business. “TriTech was a high-growth company, very aggressive, going to own the world in 3-D graphics.” But competition in the graphics chips business is brutal — too many

ENG Professor Ken Lutchen, who is also chairman of the Biomedical Engineering Department, remembers. “Bettina had an unusually deep thirst for understanding the material presented in lecture, as opposed to settling for just knowing it. She asked very probing questions during lectures, which usually resulted in my reexplaining concepts much more clearly. Her attitude and interaction raised the level of understanding for the whole class.”

Now she raises the bar for clients. They had better have a good idea and a good business plan. “It’s very competitive, especially if you’re a semiconductor startup or a software startup. You have to have a good idea and a well-thought- out strategy before you should make a go of it,” she says. “A lot of firms are started by people who haven’t had many years of business experience. It’s not that they won’t learn it, but they don’t know how to do it yet. Here’s an example: if it’s your first startup, how do you raise money? How do you get VCs [venture capitalists] to listen? I know a lot of them and can help with introductions, networking, and how to pitch a business plan. How do you hire your key people? How do you attract the best people? That’s hard. And worse, how do you get rid of people? I give a lot of advice on how to do that.”

Being an engineer helps too. “I can’t market or sell a product without understanding what it is and what it’s trying to solve. My engineering degree really helped me.”

Living in Palo Alto, Briz doesn’t need to go far to find more work. Word of mouth referrals keep her plenty busy. Would she ever want to head up another company? “No,” she says. “I like my time. I like being semi-retired.” But business runs in the family. Her husband, Peter Himes, is an entrepreneur at a wireless Internet startup, “and I try to help his company as well, so we’re in it together.” Now they are thinking of moving by year’s end to another hotbed of startups: the Boston area. Semi-retired or not, one suspects that Bettina Briz will never be too far from the action.


Startup City From Ground Zero to Product Launch, Bettina Briz (’86) Helps Semiconductor Startups Beat the Competitive Odds By Taylor McNeil From the College of Engineering in the early days of the LEAP program to newly founded semiconductor firms in Silicon Valley, Bettina Briz (’86) has made a habit of being near ground zero as new ventures begin. It’s only appropriate that she lives in Silicon Valley, “the center of the universe, it seems, for startups,” she notes. Briz claims she’s semi-retired now, playing golf and spending extra time with her husband, Peter, and daughter, Jen, as much as giving management advice to startups. Retirement may be relative: when she describes what she’s up to professionally, it seems like full-time responsibility. This spring, for example, she has been plying her trade with GCT, a Korean-based firm focused on building semiconductors for the Bluetooth market. (Never heard of Bluetooth? You will — probably. It’s a standard established a year or two ago for wireless networking.) As GCT’s interim chief operating officer, initially focusing on the company’s marketing efforts, she is busy getting the firm ready for its product launch. She’s doing with GCT what she does with any startup she advises. “The first thing I do is assess their competency. What is the product? What is the market niche they are focusing on? Do they have a strategy to go out and get the right customers and beat the competition?” And then there’s the market launch. “They have to appear larger than life,” she says, and to that end she helps define corporate image and branding, using her contacts with advertising agencies and PR firms that specialize in semiconductors. “I can come in and help, because I know what to do and who to do it with.” She laughs. “At least they think I do.” While the semiconductor market is as cyclical as any old-economy one, Briz’s career has gone steadily upward. With an undergraduate degree in biophysics from UC-Berkeley, she wanted to do more than the research she was busy with in the early 1980s. So she enrolled in LEAP — the Late Entry Accelerated Program — at the College of Engineering. It was a startup of sorts, too, a new program for smart students wanting graduate degrees in engineering who had majored in other subjects as undergraduates. Briz took to it quite naturally, says Professor and Associate Dean Mark Horenstein, who taught her electrical engineering. “She was a very bright student,” he recalls. Briz clearly appreciated the experience. “They taught me a lot and I took advantage of it,” she says of her time at LEAP. While still at BU, she set her sights on working in the semiconductor field, and after graduation landed at Analog Devices in Massachusetts, working as a reliability engineer. But that was just the start. “I knew right away I wanted to get into the business aspect of it,” she says. “So I finagled my way into a marketing engineering job, and that was kind of the start of my career.” In a few years she moved back to her native California and got her first job with a startup, a semiconductor firm called Elantec, doing marketing. From there she went to one of the most established semiconductor firms, National Semiconductor. “National gave me a lot of responsibility and career movement. It was a terrific opportunity,” Briz says. After heading up a product line at National, she went back to the startup world and hasn’t looked back. She became general manager of semiconductor maker TriTech and chief operating officer of its San Jose facility. “It was a big career move. It gave me a lot more responsibility than just marketing,” she says. “I headed up the whole operation, so that was kind of neat.” The experience was more than just a resume builder. It gave her lots of real life experience with the ups and downs of the business. “TriTech was a high-growth company, very aggressive, going to own the world in 3-D graphics.” But competition in the graphics chips business is brutal — too many ENG Professor Ken Lutchen, who is also chairman of the Biomedical Engineering Department, remembers. “Bettina had an unusually deep thirst for understanding the material presented in lecture, as opposed to settling for just knowing it. She asked very probing questions during lectures, which usually resulted in my reexplaining concepts much more clearly. Her attitude and interaction raised the level of understanding for the whole class.” Now she raises the bar for clients. They had better have a good idea and a good business plan. “It’s very competitive, especially if you’re a semiconductor startup or a software startup. You have to have a good idea and a well-thought- out strategy before you should make a go of it,” she says. “A lot of firms are started by people who haven’t had many years of business experience. It’s not that they won’t learn it, but they don’t know how to do it yet. Here’s an example: if it’s your first startup, how do you raise money? How do you get VCs [venture capitalists] to listen? I know a lot of them and can help with introductions, networking, and how to pitch a business plan. How do you hire your key people? How do you attract the best people? That’s hard. And worse, how do you get rid of people? I give a lot of advice on how to do that.” Being an engineer helps too. “I can’t market or sell a product without understanding what it is and what it’s trying to solve. My engineering degree really helped me.” Living in Palo Alto, Briz doesn’t need to go far to find more work. Word of mouth referrals keep her plenty busy. Would she ever want to head up another company? “No,” she says. “I like my time. I like being semi-retired.” But business runs in the family. Her husband, Peter Himes, is an entrepreneur at a wireless Internet startup, “and I try to help his company as well, so we’re in it together.” Now they are thinking of moving by year’s end to another hotbed of startups: the Boston area. Semi-retired or not, one suspects that Bettina Briz will never be too far from the action.
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