 We are here at the CEO Forum. The CEO Forum is a relatively new adventure at SID, second year. And it's really our goal to bring the sort of audience scope to a new level, because as you know, we have a great technical program at Display Week. We have great opportunities listening to scientists, to engineers, to product owners. But we also wanted to expand that envelope to the people that actually run those companies and give some perspective on the topics that burn in their hearts. I know in my case, I'm a serial entrepreneur. I've built a number of companies in the display sector. And so it's nice to come to a conference to teach you all about the how to do it in terms of technology. But we also provide money for it. We need to find financing. We need to find customers, strategic partners. And so the CEO Forum is a mechanism to talk about those kind of topics. So it's a delight to see a great roster of candidates that Shree will introduce in a second and then interview of people who have been there at the cold phase and had their success, had their failures, had their challenges. At least I had my failures, I'm not sure. Maybe these guys have been just successful all day long. And sharing that experience. So thank you very much all for attending. Thank you to our speakers in advance. And Shree, it's your show. Thank you so much. I think you can hand this over. I use this because I have fallen off podiums before. All right. So let's get started. Thank you for participating in that exercise. When we started this program, my fear was that in the past, we've had very large rooms. And people are spread out and things like that. This time, the best problem I can have is we are going to overflow. And somebody will complain to Helga or to myself saying, we didn't plan better. That would be a good problem to have. I think we still have a lot of seats here. Those of you standing in the back, there are seats up here in the product. With that, let me introduce our panel. David Dutton, a CEO of Silvaco. His company makes software products for engineers to design. And they are involved in many, many different aspects of the display industry. David himself has got a lot of background. And he will expand on his background when he comes up on the podium. David, welcome. Please. Robert McIntyre is with LG Ventures. He is here not only to represent the venture aspect of our industry in terms of how he looks at companies, how he looks at who to fund, and those kind of things. But also, he's been CEO of more than one startup in the past. And he can relate to many of the experiences some of you may go through. And that's why Rob is here. Welcome, Rob. Andrew Scully is probably known to many of you. He's CEO of Imagine, a publicly traded company. And he'll bring a slightly different perspective as compared to a private company. And Andrew's got many, many years of experience. Welcome, Andrew. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. So what we're going to do today is I have a set of questions. Some of them I've shared with the panel. And some of them they don't know about. And obviously, the questions that you're going to ask, they don't know about. And so we'll keep this fun and somewhat informal. I had to give out awards. That's why I'm dressed like this. Otherwise, for this particular session, my preference would be we would be in much more casual kind of clothes because I'm trying to make this slightly different from our typical SID sessions. With that, let me request Andrew to start by expanding on your background from your days at Kodak and up to today. It's a long time. I will shorten it because I had about 20 years in the OLED display industry. I joined the Kodak's OLED display. And shortly after that, we had a joint venture with Sanyo in Japan. Sanyo ran into some, oh, we put the first direct pattern active matrix display in a camera. I still have one. And those of you who know OLED, there are no black spots in that display at the moment. And that's been many years. And I was asked by the CEO after the Sanyo venture didn't work because their backplane plant had to be given to a joint venture with Seiko Epson. And I was asked by the CEO to give him some scenarios for new manufacturing. What could we do? And Kodak didn't have the money to do it. So when Imagine said, would you please come and join us? I said, yes. So Imagine's micro displays. We've been at this for very many years. Today, we have the brightest micro displays. And the AR, VR industry is interested in us. So we're very excited, very happy. Rob? Yeah, so I'll start with an apology. First, my career is not in display. So a lot of what I'll say today is more general to startups and venture investing. In about a 20-year career, so far about half that time was spent in venture capital from 01 to 08. And then started up again in 2012. And then I did three startups, as well. First, as a junior business development guy at a company called Airwave that sold to Rubin Networks. And then after my VC fund, where I was a partner, I hit some trouble times in 2008. I was a senior manager at a company called Next Bio, which sold to Illumina in 2012. So again, I bring some of that mix of experience from some battles on the startup side, as well as the VC. Just quickly, on LG technology ventures, we have a $425 million fund. We invest in Series A and B rounds, right checks of 1 to 10 million. We have a local investment committee. We're GPLP with the five LG companies that are LPs in our fund. We move very quickly on investments. We've made six in our short tenure. We just started this late, this past summer. And in four of those six deals, we've gone from first meeting with CEO to actually wiring the funds within two months. So if I leave you with anything, we're a CVC that acts very much like a financial VC and can move and be dynamic like that. There are certainly individuals here that have startup companies that you're going to get called from. Thank you so much. David? Great. Did you say $10 million? Yeah, exactly. I got my checkbook, right? Perfect, perfect. Thanks. So yeah, I'm Dave Dutton. I'm with Silvaco. I've been in the semiconductor industry since 1984. So I joined more on the integrated circuit side. I'm a process engineer for most of my life, mostly in etching a little bit in deposition. I started in Intel was there about 10 years and then went to maximum integrated products, helped them with moving to multi-level metals. I was back in the one and a half micron era down to about 180 nanometer era, so quite ancient in some ways. From there, I actually joined a startup that was doing semiconductor equipment. It helped interface with Intel. A lot of companies bringing equipment into Intel. Did that for almost 20 years and wound up being CEO of a pub. We went public and was part of the CEO of the public company. I ran it for 11 years that way. I retired and was doing a number of consulting things kind of in clean tech. And every time I came back and worked in semiconductor, I really realized that's where my blood was. And I joined Silvaco about four and a half years ago. And we do essentially simulation and design software for semiconductors and display. We're really the leader in display. And we do help simulate new materials as well as structures that you may build for display on into the design of the circuits, the display layout, and then verifying that that work. So we're really passionate about this industry and I'm looking forward to the panel as well. Thank you so much. For those of you who are standing in the back, there are plenty of seats right here in the front. And besides, you can heckle as much better if you're here. OK, we'll start with the theme for today's panel session, which is succeeding in the display industry. So my first question that any of you could take is what does it take to succeed in the display industry? Andrew? I think for the teams I was a part of that to invent new technology and keep it going, I've always been very proud of both the Kodak team to be a member of that and the Imagine team. We have team members who will go out of their way to do what it takes to get to the next step. And if one of us is having trouble, the other guy comes in to do it. So it is very important in this industry you have to invent new technology. And we've managed to do that terrifically. Hire new people who will keep that technology going. So I'm very much a team person, and that has been very successful in both my Kodak's day and the Imagine. I'll speak from the perspective of us and LG display. If you want to be successful in our sphere, one is you need to have a technology that is not only unique, disruptive, but something that it'd be very hard for someone at LG display to say, we can do that here. So you've got to have something that gets past the NIH, which can be a very high bar. The second thing is you have to be patient. Because a big company like LG, if you haven't already dealt with them, can be extremely slow. And the time frames in which they operate are not the same as the time frames in which startups typically operate. So you have to be good at multitasking, realizing that when you send an email to somebody at LGD, it may take two weeks for a very simple answer to come back. So just parallel process that with engagements you have with other big display manufacturers or other partners that you have. Thank you. Dave, your company doubled in size for the last 12 months with you in the CEO role. Your chairman was very proud to talk about this not so long ago. And you kept your resources somewhat similar to what you had before. So what did you do to succeed? Yeah, I think a couple of things, and I'll try and tie back into display, too. But I think for us, part of being successful, I think, is one, focusing on leadership. So when you focus on leadership, market leadership, whether it be niche or a bigger market, you're really thinking, OK, what can I provide value that people want? What are people going and how can I help them get there? So I think that helps, or in a company, to focus on products that are valuable. And also, we're very proud of being a very open, transparent, no holds barred, being really open to understand the truth and solve the problems. And I think that's what's critical. It creates a team that is focused to win. And if I carry a little further, because we work in a lot of different areas. We work, like I said, with semiconductor. I integrated circuit manufacturers and designers, display designers, solar, and so on. I think display also has its own characteristics. It's a very fast moving, as Andrew mentioned. So part of what we have to do is provide value. In other words, a learning curve has to increase through simulation. So at the technical level, a display company can learn, like, in 10 days. And so we have to have very fast, but working on very new materials, you're kind of breaking the very leading edge. And at the same time, be somewhat, I wouldn't say secretive, but everybody has their own secret sauce. And so working as a team, as you say, but across the industry is always a challenge to keep that trust. But I think the display industry is really dynamic and really fun and challenging. And that's why you see, as here, this is a very technical show. We see a lot of that in display, because it is still a very fast-evolving technology. Sure, certainly. So when we created this theme, I deliberately did not say that this is how a company succeeds in the industry, but I also wanted to make sure there is enough discussion on how you, as an individual, can also succeed in the industry, right? So we have an audience comprised of, I see more than one CEO here in the audience, and I also see individuals that are a little bit earlier in their career. From that perspective, so I'll switch the questions back and forth between the company and the individual, right? So I'll still stick with the company theme. What are some traits that you would see for a successful company, Rob? You're probably most apt to answer, because you see a lot of companies come at you and ask for funding. And what are some early indications that you say? You know what? I think this company is gonna be successful. What are some things? Yeah, so the first thing, when you think about venture capital, what we're trying to do, coming in as early stage investors, is we're trying to make a 10x return on the capital it put in. So that's not an easy thing to do. And so that means we have to build big companies. With every shot on goal, we're very much, again, like a financial or institutional VC, we're looking to make a billion-dollar company, a multi-billion-dollar company, a 10-billion-dollar market value company, and that requires a number of things. So when we meet them in the early stage, again, one is the disruptive nature of the underlying technology. We can't, what we're looking at can't be an incremental step. It can't be two times, three times better than existing technology. It's really gotta be order of magnitude in at least one dimension, and maybe multiple dimensions. The next thing is a lot of people, a lot of people have failed to look at this. They see kind of the initial disruptive nature of the technology. The second part is the sustained nature of that disruption or the moat that you build. Now, the moat that you build may not necessarily be technological. It could be sales and marketing. It could be execution on your software. It could be great design. But you have to have a plan to go from where you are. Hey, I believe that my technology is better than anybody else's, to a place where in five, 10 years, if you've been successful, you've basically given a blueprint to competitors to figure, you know, to follow, and you've created a market that is now of interest to a lot of people. You might be the first, you know, starting today, you might be the only one to realize that this market is worth going after, but that's not gonna be true in three, five years. So you have to initially think about how am I gonna build that moat over time? And it could be IP. I mean, that happens a lot in hardware space, but it's gotta be something. A thing that a lot of startups, frankly, most of the startups that we talk to are lacking, even though they have great technologies, is product market fit. And I'm not saying anything that's groundbreaking here, but I really wanna emphasize this, because there's just so many, again, with the business plans that we see, there's so many companies that have a solution to a problem that doesn't exist and will never exist, right? And you're just constantly looking for how do I take this thing that I have and solve a problem? Well, if you don't understand the end market, or if you don't have advisors that understand the end market, who can explain, okay, here's what's going on, here are the bottlenecks, here are the challenges, then you have no context. You're just someone out there with a widget, pitching a widget. So that one thing, if you're thinking about starting a new company, pay more attention, frankly, to that than anything else I'm about to say. And the last thing, again, is as these guys mentioned, people. You know, I think to start a company requires a certain amount of bravado, some ball holes, you know, frankly. And you have to be, or let me put it this way, when I pattern match against all the successful CEOs that I've backed or that I've talked to, seen, been exposed to, they've all been a little bit, or maybe a lot, unrealistic or unreasonable. You know, they don't take no for an answer, they don't think about what's, what most people think is being achievable or fitting within a box. They have very unrealistic and outsized goals and expectations, so you need that. And that may be you, that may be someone you bring into the company, but you need that driving force, that person that's constantly cheerleading, saying, you know, we can do this, we can change the world. Simultaneously, you know, you need to start building your team, again, with people who have experience in the industry and who know what they're doing. They know what they're doing in sales, they've sold a product like this before, they know how to price it, they know what the, how the competition's gonna respond to the pricing, they understand segmentation of customers, kind of all the nitty gritty of the sales. And you have to know how, you have to have people who know how to make the product, actually make it a really, not just bright eyed PhDs out of their, out of their, those are great. You know, people with new ideas, fresh blood is great, but you have to have people who know how to deliver product into this market credibly. So that's, I'll start, there's a lot more I can say, I'll stop there, I don't want to eat up the whole time. Yeah, thank you. Dave, you told me that you had a hiring budget for this year, and you literally filled that quota in your first quarter. So how, what were the trades you were looking for among candidates that you hired? Yeah, that's a good, we were talking earlier, and I think for us, we had a, you know, last year was a very strong year and Selvako's been driving very aggressive growth and especially we've done a mix of both organic growth and so we've been investing in some key technologies. And this year we wanted to staff those as well as, we've over the last four years, we've also completed six acquisitions. So we've been kind of using both those as growth methods. And this year we felt okay, we had some plans in place and we put forth to the, we put a plan in place to hire and gave the managers the go ahead to start. And we really did within the first quarter as our recruiting work better than we thought. And also I think we found, you know, we kind of found some talent. And for us, we're looking for physicists, mathematicians, very strong coding people. So they're very technical, very hard people to find. I think part of it is we have, not just in near, our headquarters is Silicon Valley, but we look for talent around the world. So we have a number of what we call R&D technical centers such as Grenoble France, near Cambridge in the UK, near Vienna, Austria in Denmark and such. So we're able to search all those areas. And we were in some ways lucky to find quite a bit of good talent and bring them on. At the same time, it, you know, all of a sudden our expenses jumped up at in the first quarter, what really should have been across the year. So we've had to then react and slam down because at the same time a business has to make money, right? So I think that being able to, part of it is, write good job descriptions and also be open to adjust as you're, as you're talking to candidates and you start to really get a feel for what you're looking for, be able to adjust those and then hone in on the talent. Andrew, I were to apply for a job in your company. You're fired. That was the answer, wasn't it? What are some qualifications beyond your technical skill or what discipline I'm applying for that you would look for? Well, we've got two sides to that. One is, and we are looking for people. The difficulty is on the technical side, I'll just mention that this is an Asia industry. So the people have to be willing to be where we manufacture. That's in New York state or where we design the silicon, which is right here in Santa Clara or near here. On the other hand, we need talent that knows the market. And here the market I'm talking about is augmented reality, virtual reality, and that knows how to work with people who are interested in that, hear what they say, tell them why we have a value proposition with these micro-displays, OLED on silicon, why that fits, and then come back to the company and say you're doing something wrong when you are, you need to invent it a little differently. So that's a type of thing. And the other question that I would ask you, because I think this fits with you, is how big is this market? It's been delayed, hasn't it? So are we realistic to think this is a big deal or it isn't? And that's very important for us. How much time and effort do we put into this? And I'm not talking necessarily consumer, but there's the enterprise market and we hear a lot of different companies are interested. So to be able to put a market together, how big is it? A plan on how you're gonna go after it and not just consumer, a plan on how you're gonna go after it. And what do we need to do differently within Imagine to make the display that works? And I'll give you just one example of that. You go out to a VR company and they say what? Well, I want a wide field of view. I want to match the human eye. Okay, 40 pixels per degree, 60 pixels per degree. And I want a hundred degree field of view. I need 4,000 or 6,000. Oh, you want us to make a very small display? No, no, no, no, the optics are too tough. Now we have to stitch the silicon. So it's not easy. So now we have to find a place to do that. That's the kind of help we need. I have a feeling I'm not qualified. What? He told me to tell him he was hired. Switching to a more personal experiences and so on. Each of you have reached a pretty significant level in your career in the industry. I'm sure in your career there was a fork in the road where you had to make some decisions. And whatever fork that you chose, obviously got you to a level of success that you currently enjoy. Please share some of those experiences, what were other choices in career and life that you could have chosen and you chose this and got you to here. Looking to meet? Okay, well, I guess I would say I have probably two or three forks I've had through the road. Actually, I started life as a geologist and loved doing field geology and would go out for six months at a time. And of course, when you're young, you don't quite think everything through. And then when I realized I wanted a family, I thought about, wow, can I really do justice to my children if I'm really out doing what I love? So at the same time, back in those days, the semiconductor industry was really growing and looking for people and I wound up applying and kind of viewed I had a lot of physics and a lot of chemistry, so maybe this would be an industry that worked. I knew some people that were in the industry, so I hired on at Intel. So I made the choice to move from what I essentially really loved to a new industry. And I was so afraid of why the heck would they want somebody like me that I just for six months studied my brains out and learned the industry. And back then I could name every process, what the impurities were, what levels of dopants, the energy used to etch everything just to really understand it. So that was one fork in the road I think and was a good choice for me. A little further on when I left Intel, I had really helped a lot of equipment companies come into Intel, so I had a number of them were surprised I left and then were asking, can I join them? So I wound up, one of them was a startup and the others were more mature, well-known companies today. So I told my wife that it would be fun to try a startup. So that startup experiencing making that choice was also kind of another fork in the road and really brought the opportunity where I learned a broader set of upper management skills and went and did some MBA courses and stuff and then wound up being the CEO of a public company and then continuing to grow that way. So I think those have been a few forks in the road that turned out fine for me, but I think they're all, you have to self kind of look inward and decide what feels best for you. Depends on the individual. It sure does, yeah. So I won't name the company, but I was head of business development at a startup company and came into the job, was given a set of let's say goals that I didn't exactly agree with. I had a kind of a different view for the partnerships that we're gonna take our company to the next level. And I think frequently, and I think this experience is generalizable to the situations that happened to a lot of people where you end up in a role. You're told, do X, but you have a passion for Y. And I have the benefit of a friend, this guy Jesse Robbins. He's known as the father of DevOps. So he was at Amazon Web Services. He basically created the framework in which they manage their data centers. And when he speaks, so I'm plagiarizing when he says, when he speaks, he has a motto. And I have this, excuse me, this is gonna become a mantra for me. He says, don't fight, suck, create awesome. So no matter what, in any situation that you're in, there's always gonna be stuff that you don't agree with or just sucks for whatever reason, right? Like bureaucracy, you name it. And you can drive yourself crazy, but more importantly, you can become incredibly ineffective with your time by spending your effort and your mental cycles trying to fight the suck. Instead, acquiesce to some of the suck, realize that some of the things that suck, you can't change. So if there are things that you're empowered to change, definitely do that. If you're the CEO of a company, your employees are coming and saying, hey, this sucks, and you can make the change, make the change. But in a lot of times, you're in situations where you really can't, there's powers at play, investors, formers, whoever, you can't change their minds, go with the suck. Instead, spend your time creating awesome in the area that you're passionate about, excuse me, got a little bug, you're passionate about and where you know you can create huge value for your organization, whether that be your startup company, your big company, investment fund like I'm at. And over time, the awesome that you create, takes over and creates so much value that people just start jumping on your bandwagon. So if I can leave you with one thing, that's the mantra. It comes from Jesse Robbins, the father of DevOps, but it's something that I think about, frankly, every day when I encounter suck. Thank you. So I started my career in elementary particle physics. I was a theoretical physicist slamming protons together and trying to predict what came out. And I decided that wasn't for me, huge calculations, Monte Carlo simulations. So I took a step and went to business. So that was a fork in the road. But you know that physics was not wasted at all because it allowed me every job I was in, I would expand what I'm doing. If I had a manufacturing process, I wanted to learn about it. So when you expand what you're doing, you get more opportunities. And that's what happened to me. I did finance, I did strategic planning, I did managing operations and now a CEO of a company that's very technically oriented. And the second fork in the road was deciding to leave the OLED group in Kodak. I feel badly about leaving them and coming to Imagine. But because the CEO asked me, how did I get back into manufacturing? And he gave me $10 million in the display industry. So I left for Imagine. That was the other fork in the road. But I've always paid attention to expanding what I'm doing and that gave me more opportunities. Every three years, they would give me another thing that they wanted me to do. Success, expanding, learn everything you can about not only what you're doing, but what everybody else is doing around you. And if they need help, you go there and help them. And that's the type of thing that has helped me. But it's also impassionate about that and impassionate about making sure the team wins. Thank you. For me personally, when I had a fork in the road many years ago, it was in the year 2006 I was working for Sharp. We were the most profitable display company in the world at the time, fairly large. And then I get a call from a recruiter from this relatively unknown company named Eink based in Boston area. So we started, you know, I'm also an engineer as a geek, I wrote down all the things, you know, on a spreadsheet and everything. Finally, it came down to it's nose in Boston should we really go there. Best mistake I ever made. Going working and got to work with Jen and the company went from nothing to about a billion dollars in two and a half years. One of the joys that I have when I work with panels like this where we have panelists and speakers that are very distinguished. They are a tremendous background. You learn a lot and you get to appreciate and I am constantly inspired by different people. As I was looking around the room, my friend, Dr. Fred Kahn is here and he wants, I had the opportunity one time to introduce him in the audience and he had a fork in the road which is, you know, when he was very young, it was absolutely inspiring to me. He could have turned out to be one of the, he's a child prodigy in terms of being a musician instead he chose to work in the display industry and he invented some fundamental LCD technologies that went into the original HP calculator when he worked for, I believe, David Packard of HP. And I've been very inspired since the day I introduced him. So I just want you to please get up for a second, Fred, and be recognized in our industry. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. With that, what I'm gonna do is we are roughly halfway through the session. So I'm gonna pause and take two questions from the audience to go out in the corridor into that microphone and then towards the end I'll leave time for more questions. I see John getting up, John probably, oh, you're not looking for coffee, you're looking, you're gonna ask a question. Very good. I drank online, but I don't know. So I'm John Brewer with Amorphix, what's anybody doing? Hi, John. I run a startup company that will probably never be able to raise a Series A in the United States yet start revenue this year. I come from the semiconductor industry. I've raised like 150 million for some RF semiconductor startups over the years. I know everybody who's ever been in venture capital in the semiconductor industry. I've talked to all of them about my company which replaces semiconductors with quantum tunneling in the backplane. Eventually, when you get deep enough in with the VCs in the U.S., you get to this sentence and I'm gonna quote one guy from Manhattan. The display industry is not, the display industry is non-deterministic. So under the title of succeeding in the display industry, what the hell do you do with the display industry is non-deterministic? Well, thank you, that's what I told the VC when he said that. I only have a bachelor's degree, I don't know what that means, but I think what he was trying to go for is that, and this was 18 months ago when he said, what he was trying to go for is that when you look at the industry, there is a fanning out of technologies, not a conversion. There's no coalescence of a path. And every one of those paths is now fragmenting into more and more paths. I think I saw nine papers today on nine different versions of CAAC, IGSO, TFTs. How does that converge back? And I'm gonna also jump, and Dave's gonna wanna talk about this part because he and I come from semiconductors where you do 80% of your design and simulation and when you go to the fab, the second pass is done. Not in this industry, that's not possible to simulate. So try to pull those things together. Good question, John. I think I, maybe I could just start, but you guys. And I think the display industry in semiconductor to a degree, it is tough to get funding. And I think there's a couple things. One, it is difficult to understand the technology. I think if you're trying to get funding, one of the things I was thinking about is, there's always trends in the industry, right? And so trying to latch into automotive or smart cities or AI or something around that, and then being able to take your technology into how you're gonna solve a piece of that, maybe one way to at least keep investors in the room, because usually when you say display, you gotta grab them by the collar just to say the second word. So I think that's part of it. And I think besides the technology, trying to have what you mentioned earlier, a realistic, it always has to be a growth plan and has to be where you can see the doubling and tripling, but it has to be realistic too. You see so many times founders will come in and they have just such a hockey stick growth that investors know they're not in touch with reality. Not saying that about you, John, but that's it. So I think those are, to me, those are some of the things about how to do it. I think later on we talk a little bit about where display's going. I could get into I think how you can tile a bit more. Because I think display is going to have a lot of different technologies that are gonna have to answer the holistic demand for display, because I think it's huge. But those would be some of the things I think that you can try and at least get the wrapper ahead around this non-deterministic is heading for a larger benefit to society per se. So I don't know if that helps. I mean, I can't speak for the venture industry writ large about display investing. I know it's sparse compared to, you know, say SaaS software, which is, you know, enormous and certainly consumer, you know, Uber's and things like that. You know, I'll just speak to what, you know, how we look at things. So we're committing 150 million out of this fund to just display. That could be, you know, fundamental, you know, new physics or new materials all the way over to, you know, software that, you know, helps create new markets for the displays that LGD already makes and sells in the marketplace. But I think we've got probably one of the bigger pools of money going after it. And we, you know, again, maybe it's both a benefit and a curse, but we rely pretty heavily. I'm not a display expert. I've done most of my investing in software. But when, you know, deals come in, the first thing I do is take it to our team. We have, on our staff, we have someone who spent 15 years at LG display. He's part of our team, so he's not part of LGD, but he spent 15 years there. He helps do a first pass initial vet. He takes every startup that we meet, we take and plug into multiple places at LG display and LG electronics, if that's appropriate as well, because they are on the sales side of a lot of display products. And we also have, on top of the gentleman we have on our team, there's three gentlemen who sit in our office as well, who are from LG Corp, the open innovation team, whose job it is to, again, find inroads for startups. So we're not, again, we have 150 million. We're looking to, you know, invest early stage, write checks one to 10, all that kind of stuff, make money. But the other thing that we're trying to do as citizens in kind of the display industry in Silicon Valley, writ large, is we're trying to help companies figure out the right way to interact with a big company like LGD or LG electronics. And part of that, and I've seen this play out a number of times, is again, for young entrepreneurs or maybe inexperienced entrepreneurs in this market to understand, okay, what, you know, I've got this neat thing, idea, whatever it is, what do I need to show somebody like LGD to be taken seriously, right? And that's a lot of the feedback we give. We love what we see, because we see so many startups, we love what we see, you know, you're doing great on this aspect. Here's the three variables you're not thinking about because you're not close to a fab, right? We have guys who all they care about, and most of our guys all they care about is, can I take this thing and make it manufacturable in our fab today, given that we've sunk billions and billions of dollars into the LCD fab, into the OLED fab, right? So it's, again, I don't know if I can answer your question, but that hopefully gives you some insight into how we operate and how we think about investing. Well, you also said that don't ever give up, so I'm gonna encourage John to keep coming after you until you fund it. Exactly. And Matez Alarov, who's in the audience, is also gonna be raising funds. Matez, you heard what Rob said. Don't accept no for an answer. Exactly. So instead of two questions, we'll just do that one, and I wanna come back and ask the audience another question, which is, we are here hosted by SID. This is an organization that is constantly undergone change. We are, I would say, at the peak, right, as Helga put it, in terms of pretty much most aspects of it. This is when companies, if you're a company, you should start worrying about what happens. From the peak, there is usually one possible direction to go there, unless you see other peaks in front of you. So, Andrew, you've been going to Display Week for quite a while, you know this industry well. What are some things SID could be doing that it's not doing? Well, to me, I mentioned the item that I'm interested in is what are the markets look like? And I think that discussions about that as well would be of great interest. So more discussions like that, meetings like this, where you get to ask questions and get some answers. So, science is great and the R&D is great, very important to me and my company, but we also have to look at the outside world. Where do I see AR and VR going? So I think that's something that would be very helpful to me. And I would imagine a lot of people would like to see that too. Absolutely. In terms of the industry, you know, we are all doing different things in our careers in this industry. Where do you guys see the market going in the next three years? What are some trends that you're seeing that we can take advantage of? If I'm a company or I'm an individual and I want to pursue something that I don't quite see today that you think will happen three years from now? I guess what I see and maybe this ties together, I think displays are reaching a point where I think earlier at one of the keynotes they talked about you're going to see a display on every surface basically. And we're going to be, we're going to see multiple different technologies, right? So I don't think I'm an expert to talk about the different technologies, but what I think is the challenge of the industry and if you kind of go back and look at the semiconductor industry as a model, part of what, you know, if you look at today where we have IoT and we just have AI exploding you have so many different people designing chips. At the core of that, what started that to me to a degree is the Fabbless or the Foundry system and creating a Foundry environment and IP blocks and design enablement areas so that really you could take the creative of a much broader community to design products and have somebody that's focused on the technology to put those products on and move them forward. And if you think about semiconductor we didn't have the Foundry's today, you'd have three or four probably companies that would be dominating almost all integrated circuit design and then can you imagine trying to do low power IoT or large SOCs, it'd just be a different environment. And I think the display industry for us we think it's at that crossroad. I mean like, you know, Sri's holding his phone over there and if you kind of take the, well there's a display everywhere and you start to connect with the IoT. Well the arm of this chair would probably have a display. He wouldn't even have his phone and it read his fingerprint or something and the questions he's looking at would come up right here, right? So, but to get to that means that displays are gonna change from a rectangular format to almost any kind of free flowing format and we'll have specific designs. And I think we need a design enablement community to be able to do that. And then, again, at the same time, what's then if you look at today, you never would have guessed that the foundries are leading technology for semiconductors over what we used to call the IEDMs because they're not vested in the design which the IEDMs are, they're vested fully in creating the best and most competitive technology to attract people with their designs to make it. So we would have display, people focused on creating the best display technology that would fit for these designs. And I think that's part of where I think the industry, we think it's, people are starting to talk about it but I think that's a good shift we'd see over the next three years that would really help this industry expand to the next level. Robert, are you putting your money on bets three years? Yeah, I don't wanna talk about specific technologies because it might tip the hand a little bit of where LGD is going. I will say trend-wise, I think there's something very clear going on which is the commodity market like for display as we have seen for the commodity market for mobile phones and other things is gonna be dominated by the Chinese. So any of you in the room who are thinking about playing in that end of the market, be afraid. If you've got IP that you think helps that end of the market, focus like crazy on how do I take this to China and how do I protect my IP? Because if you don't protect your IP it's gonna get copied in some way and all the fabrication again of the commodity end of the market is gonna be in China. So as we think about deploying our, again 150 million that we've got earmarked for display investing, we're thinking about how do we make investments continue to take LG and LG Display, LG Electronics upmarket to kind of more premium services, premium offerings, better quality display, better quality services around the display because we know that we've got to go upmarket because staying or trying to compete in the commodity end at the best buys and $300 for 55 inch UHD TV, that kind of thing, that's a fool's errand. I'm gonna switch to from industry trends and company related to back to more personal kind of thing. Could each of you cite some of maybe two or three of habits that you found fairly early in your career that you continue to this day that you believe is a reason that you were successful and the reason that you were able to sustain your success? I've mentioned that before so I apologize that I've always liked to learn where I am, what, all the things around me. So maybe I'm blessed with a physics background, I learned about the manufacturing, I remember sitting with somebody who was telling me I was doing finance then and he was talking about I need to put in a new piece of equipment, he was talking about the pressure volume, I said oh the ideal gas law and he looked at me like how did you know that? That for me was very helpful. I learned finance not only for that type of thing but how do you estimate unit costs and all sorts of things. So I always, that was key to me, learn everything about what it is you're doing, not just your job and that allowed me to do many things and I'll just give you another example. So in this strategy I was, the company is in Kodak so I wasn't in OLED yet and the company said we need to do something different, really take a look at what it is we do and at that time Kodak had a pharmaceutical group and the pharmaceutical group, I don't know if you have ethical drugs and you have a over the counter group, the ethical drugs come off of prescription, go into the over the counter and I said okay what's in the ethical drug market? Oh it's stuff that goes into your blood so that the dye can show up on imaging so what was my comment? You don't need the over the counter, it doesn't do us any good. You gotta get rid of the whole thing, you might know that Kodak did sell the pharmaceutical business and I said the same thing about the Eastman Chemical Company, of course that's doing much better than Kodak now but I said we use some fine chemicals, that's it, why do you need this? So that's a type of thing, to branch out and be willing to take a risk, they could have shot me after saying those types of things. But it was probably the right thing to do and the only thing I argue about what we in Kodak did that was wrong should put more effort into OLED and gone forward with that instead of the printer business. Don't tell them I said that. Well we are recording this and I'm gonna put it on YouTube. Okay man, I'm dead. Rob what are some of your habits? Yeah, so I think like a lot of people in this room, I look at my to-do list and I've got more things on my to-do list than there are hours in the day. Even if I didn't, for some reason didn't have to sleep, I could always fill every hour of the day with something that would really be of value, right? So I think the ability to ruthlessly prioritize and not only focus on kind of okay what is the most important thing on my list thinking strategically but also kind of cross referencing that with what are the most important things on my list where I can add a lot of value individually, right? And that value could be making connections between people it could be spending time doing a certain piece of analysis whatever, right? And I think it ties into, this concept ties into a little bit of kind of professional development of people that you manage. Frequently I see with bad managers people who are protective of their, kind of the gates that they keep and they open up and they're very bad, bad managers are bad delegators. And at every point in my career I've always been trying to offload, delegate as much, aggressively delegate as much of my job as possible. I mean even to the point where it's like okay am I really doing anything anymore if I've got people under me doing my job that serves multiple purposes. One, it frees up my time to again think about okay what are the high value things that I can be doing and then finding ways to kind of, because the things that I don't think are high value will be high value for somebody else. It'll bring their career long, they'll get exposure to something new. So turning that dynamic into a win-win rather than thinking of it as a burden has kind of yielded a lot of fruit for me. That's a very good point. A few years ago I went and I was talking to some customers and they had some issue and I said we will take care of it. And Jen who was part of my team said what he's talking about is the global we and she was referring to another colleague saying this is gonna get delegated to you as soon as we are done with this. I didn't realize I was doing that until she pointed this out. You remember this Jen? Dave same question. Yeah I think a couple of things I think but similarly but never stop learning and also be open to learn. I think so those are slightly subtle different things but I'll give you an example for me. There's four and a half years ago I came into this industry EDA. It would have been very easy to say I have no idea about EDA and I'm too old to learn and gone off and haven't done something else but instead to embrace, there's some things that are similar that I can build off of but to learn forward. So always focus on learning. I think I always call it you always hustle. You always hear people say well work smart work smart and not hard. There's a lot of people that work smart and hard and I think it's just you're in a competitive environment at all times and I think you have to do that and probably one of the other ones that I think is key is always do the right thing for your company and your customer. So you really have to put your agenda behind. The best teams you say are the ones that kind of their agenda goes off at the door like a backpack and everybody is there for the problem for the company and I think those along with everything else will pose those three things kind of are things you can, if you deliver on those, your career I think moves forward very well. Thank you, that's very good advice. Thank you so much. We'll turn over once again audience questions. There are no pressing questions. I'm sure I'll point at one of you and ask you a question and some of you are used to my stuff. Please, glad that you. David LaBordon says it was very good that somebody does, I was going to point at him. My name is James Stewart. I'm from a small startup out of Toronto called Amber Molecular. You've clearly all had tremendous amount of success throughout the course of your career with large companies with startups. So I'd like to talk about failure. And I was wondering, it's something that I'm sure entrepreneurs in this room have to deal with daily. You're coming up across barriers, across obstacles, across various forms of failure. So I was wondering if you could maybe share with us what in the course of your either own entrepreneurial journeys or working with entrepreneurs, what your most important failure was. So what was the thing that went sideways that without that, you wouldn't have been able to move forward? It's a good question. In fact, that was on my list. So thank you for taking that. Any of you. Failures is one thing to talk about. That's why you see them silent. It's not easy to talk about failures. I can start, I guess, but I think one. And so if you look at today, I mentioned Slovakos doing a blend of acquisitions as well as organic growth. So in my last company, we had taken on a very big acquisition. It was actually larger than us. And we also did it right during the dot-com bus. So it almost killed the company. And we wound up diluting the shareholders pretty aggressively. And we survived that and made it through. But later on, then I took a strategy to drive more organic growth and I wasn't interested in diluting the shares or bringing in outside money. So we explained the plan and we got a lot of support for it. And we did a pretty bolting. We went into etching, it's a $4 billion etching market against applied and lamb. And there were some key things we had. But the time, the development and the cycle of pure organic growth, brought us, it was a big challenge and we were introducing just as the 09 crisis hit. And so I think, and one of the things I learned was looking back on it was kind of, they're really putting too many eggs in one basket or focusing like that versus having done a blend of some organic and inorganic growth, probably would have served the company better. So I think that's one area that, as we went into 09, it really kind of dampened our main strategic thrust at that time. And then we had to do some shifts. So I don't know if that helps, but that was a big learning for me. I'll, so I started Inventure Capital in 2001. I've made, so I've sold a lot of companies, if you look at my bio, you can see all. But I've made multiple, many more bad investments. I've made so many bad investments. And each one is a learning experience in so many ways. And so in some senses, I'm now in this role at my firm, I think I'm hired because of the successes that I have on my resume, but I think I'm effective at what I do because of the failures. Because people actually learn very little in success, right? Everything kind of goes the right way. Everybody says, oh, it's because of this, that, and the other, but a lot of times there's just a lot of luck involved, right? I mean, Microsoft versus the other people doing DOS-based OSs at the time, right? I mean, they just kind of happen to be in the right place at the right time, right? But it's in your failures that you pick up very specific lessons about, I mean, I've invested in a lot of companies that have failed because they couldn't sell product, right? And so there's just a lot of nitty gritty in there about, okay, how do you build a sales team? How do you go to market in certain areas that you just on the ground learn and again, it's so much more reinforced when you fail. That gets etched in your brain. The success is just kind of, you know, kind of all kind of wash over you, I guess. In the interest of time, I'm gonna go to Fred for his question and then you can come back and Andrew. I'm sure Andrew's got something to say. Andrew, this is directed at you. Uh-oh, there you go. This is my first failure now. He's answering his question, yes, sir. No, I really liked your description of the decisions you had to make at Kodak and Imagine. And how you wished Kodak had maybe pursued the OLED more intensively. Yes. But I want to flash back a little, maybe 20 years earlier. Uh-oh. When I entered the liquid crystal field, it was December 1968. I had suggested to NEC in Japan that we could smear these things on a semiconductor and make their domains visible. And they said, that's a very interesting idea, but we don't have any liquid crystals here, so learn something about them and bring some with you. And it turned out at that time, there were two places. Kodak was the world's leader in liquid crystals. Oh my. So they had more liquid crystals and more information about liquid crystals available than anyone else. And there was a pure and fine chemical company that also sold them. Now, you apparently had something to do with the selling of Eastman chemicals. So the question is, should Kodak have pursued that business more intensively? Did they make the right decision and why? Well, hindsight, I wasn't there in 1968. But in hindsight, I think Kodak had this great abilities in the materials business, and that's by the way why they got into the pharmaceutical, but that was very different. So I think in the liquid crystal side, they should have spent more time there too, absolutely. But, and on the OLED time side as well, that the OLED was a great technology, they invented it in some fashion, some people believe, Ching Tang does, he believes that. And they started doing things like, I had to license people because they wanted patents for the printer field. And hey, I'm a company guy, I do what it takes. So I would agree that they should have spent more time in OLED, but I'm a biased person probably, and they should have spent more time in liquid crystal. Big industry. So I think they missed that too. I don't know where though that was made in Eastman Chemical. I don't know for sure. I bought them from Kodak in Rochester. Well, that would be more likely, it would be my guess. Yeah, I think things like that would have been a great thing to go after. Thank you. With that, we are at the end of our appointed hour. I'd like to keep this on time. Let's thank our panelists for a wonderful job. Thank you so much. And I look forward to seeing each of you in next year's CEO forum. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.