Taste, Talent and Drive – Marc Fleishmann Outlines The Entrepreneurial Spirit

Marc Flesichmann is a serial entrepreneur with several companies under his built. Currently, he is a co-founder at Datera, but in today’s interview, we talk mostly about his experience at Transmeta, which gave Intel a run for its money. For Marc there are two key qualities that have kept him going in new startups: first, the willingness to do it, through dedication to the task at hand. Also, he cites a certain insecurity that keeps him on his toes and wanted to continue to grow and expand and try new things. A native of Germany, Marc began programming by the time he was 11 when PC’s were still a new thing. At 13, he read an article about Steve Jobs. He was the article was written in Palo Alto and knew that’s where he want to end up. Within about 10 years, he’d made it there. While Germany is prosperous and industrialized, it’s also conservative. Marc didn’t feel much support for his drive to develop new ideas, and that fueled his dream of coming to the United States. He did start his first business while still in Germany - making clone computers (basically, any PC that was not made by IBM). He ran this throughout university and was able to sell it shortly before graduation. At the time he began to see the potential of TCP/IP and the early days of internet, and wanted to move in that direction.   Looking at the playing field, Marc though Hewlett Packard, with its new RISC processor, had the best system to get into internet, and he landed a job with HP Labs in the early 1990s. After about a year working in Germany, he was transferred to the US on an L1 visa. While he says HP was great and in the forefront in many areas, they actually lagged behind in internet, which is where he still wanted to be. So shortly after getting his green card, he decided to leave. His big opportunity came with Transmeta. He secured an interview while they were in stealth mode, and was actually worried and unsure when, during the interview, he found out their project was microprocessors, not internet. Transmeta originally wanted to develop high-end processors to outdo Intel. However, one of the big problems that Marc and his team recognized was the low battery life of portables. They were able to develop chips that had much lower power consumption but then had to persuade management. Intel had a strong hold on the US market, though, although Transmeta was able to make inroads with Japanese companies. They were so successful that from 2000 to 2001 the company more than doubled its revenue. Marc tells the story of how Intel was apparently stealing their trash to find out their secrets, although Transmeta was careful to make sure anything sensitive was shredded or otherwise protected. And in the end, a suit was brought against Intel for patent violations, which led to a $250 million out-of-court settlement. In 2006 Marc went back to Germany, as he saw Berlin becoming a startup center in Europe. He’d long admired Zynga, and worked to developed a game platform with a high level of consumer analytics. He saw important differences between the US and European markets for entrepreneurs:

In Germany, there is more focus on precision and execution. There is a smaller “out” for startups, with less potential to sell. So investors tend to focus more on risk
In the US, focus tends to be on the endgame, when the company can be sold and the investor will make their money back

Marc sees that each can learn from the other - the exuberance of America balance with more focus and precision is still a tough balance for him to achieve, but one he thinks will be beneficial. Marc’s latest project, Datera, is born to satisfy the data infrastructure for the data era. The data storage solutions they offer can be compared to self-driving cars. Your destination, or intent, is what matters, and you’ll no longer have to focus on all the other factors around it. Datera came out of stealth mode last April. Marc’s personal satisfaction has always come from building...