Daniel Nenni

The fourth of July is one of my favorite holidays:  Sunny skies, food, family, and a parade, a great way to spend the day. This year my son, the fire fighter, was in the Danville parade for first aid and lost parent search and rescue, I couldn’t be prouder!

Being from a very military family, the Fourth of July takes on even more significance. My ancestral roots can be traced back to the Mayflower, with military service in the American Revolutionary War,  the Civil War, and beyond.  My other Grandfather and his older brother, off the boat Italians, were proud to serve their new country in the First World War. John Nenni Sr was a medic in WWI and lived to tell about it, lived to the age of 102 actually so he told quite a bit. My Mother’s Father graduated West Point and defended Pearl Harbor during the attack. My Father was Air Force during the Korean War, his work was classified so we didn’t hear much about it. After the war my father was a Commander in the Civil Air Patrol and was killed in a plane crash. My Uncle was a Marine during Vietnam and my brother was in the Army during the first Gulf War, so yes the 4^th of July was a big deal in my upbringing.

The Declaration of Independence is the basis for my favorite holiday of course, and it contains one of the most known sentences in the history of the United States, which fueled the American Revolutionary War:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The signers of this declaration risked life and limb for this document, for this emerging country. Silicon Valley has always been my revolutionary war, working with emerging companies, new technologies, fighting against the evil empires that suppress innovation, liberty, and the pursuit of exit strategy happiness.

Silicon Valley and EDA specifically have been living off the innovation of our fore fathers with the trend getting stronger every year. Venture Capitals, the founding partners of Silicon Valley, are no longer willing to risk life nor limb for our Valley. They continue to say that EDA start-ups are cost prohibitive due to point tool integration challenges, cut throat competition, and limited exit strategies. Semiconductor start-ups offer similar challenges as well with an estimated cost of $100M and 6+ years to get a major semiconductor start-up to break even. EDA and semiconductor acquisitions are a fraction of what they were two years ago, in both value and number of transactions.

The result being conditions revolutionary wars are made of. Silicon Valley innovation, the start-up companies that innovate, are being governed (by monopolies) without representation. No match for the lines of marching Red Coats, the American Militiamen changed the rules of engagement and brought independence to the thirteen colonies. The rest of course is history, and yes history often repeats itself. The Silicon Valley Revolutionary War is coming, believe it, and I am honored to be a part of it.