Independent consultant Oliver Gunasekara and Shweta Shrivastava, chief product officer at Nauto, present the “Lessons From the Start-up Trenches” tutorial at the September 2020 Embedded Vision Summit.
This interview with Oliver Gunasekara, founder and CEO of NGCodec, explores lessons learned during the journey of NGCodec—a video codec developer—from its founding in 2012 to its successful acquisition in 2019 by Xilinx. Gunasekara begins with a brief presentation summarizing NGCodec’s path. Then he delves deeper into key lessons learned in an interview conducted by Shweta Srivastava.
NGcodec was founded on the heels of the H.265/HEVC video codec standard and initially focused on a semiconductor IP licensing model. Unfortunately, this business failed to get traction with investors. Subsequently, the company pivoted to the cloud, and succeeded in winning Amazon/Twitch with a SaaS business model. Gunasekara shares some of the key lessons learned during this journey. These include the reality that ideas are easy but execution is hard, which means that sharing your idea is important.
Gunasekara also explains why he believes that perseverance and grit are critical leadership skills. He shares why he has come to believe that ultimately, it’s all about the team—and that, given the competitive market in Silicon Valley, leveraging a remote team can really pay off. Finally, he touches on structuring the company foundation and stock options for optimum tax efficiency.
See here for a PDF of the slides.
