Intrinsic ID founder Pim Tuyls reveals the secrets of succeeding in The Valley as a European founder

(Editor’s note: This interview with Pim Tuyls is part of Dispatches’ Tech Tuesday series. We cover tech because so many of our highly skilled internationals are engineers and entrepreneurs.)

Why aren’t there more European entrepreneurs like Pim Tuyls? Pim, founder of Intrinsic AI, was the guest recently at a Lunch & Learn event at the AI Innovation Center on High Tech Campus Eindhoven. Founded in 2008 at HTCE, Intrinsic ID was acquired last March by Synopsys, based in Sunnyvale, Calif. The terms were not released. Synopsys has taken over Intrinsic ID operations on campus.

We asked Pim to present because he’s a doer, not a talker... and he’s the definitive expat who moved his family to the West Coast to expand Intrinsic ID into the American market, the largest in the world.

Pim is a Belgian who studied physics at KU Leuven. A PhD in mathematical physics, he came up with the concept of the ?physical unclonable functions, or PUFs at Philips NatLab. The technology is based on the biometrics of chips – the fact manufacturing irregularities make each computer chip slightly different. Essentially, each chip has a fingerprint, a fingerprint that can be used to verify data security.

Philips punted on the concept. in 2008, and Intrinsic ID was born. But that’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is that Pim, unlike so many Dutch entrepreneurs, adopted the American startup mindset of moving fast and braking things, as well as the approach to raising capital and hustling his product.

He didn’t stop there.

In 2015, he moved his family to Sunnyvale, Calif. in Silicon Valley and started running the company from the United States. It was, he told 60 Lunch & Learn attendees, “a huge step. It’s probably the most impactful and important decision. I’ve taken the whole life of the company that is going to us, because all of a sudden I was in the midst of where it happens.”

HERE ARE KEY EXCERPTS AND LESSONS FROM PIM’S ONE-HOUR TALK. SOME COMMENTS HAVE BEEN EDITED FOR LENGTH AND CLARITY:

Go. Just go.

“My advice to technology companies has always been, ‘Move to the US.’ The probability of success is much, much higher. Is it risky? Yes, of course, it is a risk. You’re an entrepreneur! So it is part of the entrepreneurial life that you take a risk.”

Big move

Though Intrinsic ID was based at High Tech Campus Eindhoven, Pim was flying at least one week each month to pitch executives at semiconductor companies in The Valley, Austin, and Arizona. In 2015, it became so bad that in Q1 he was “more at the West Coast than I was at home,” Pim said. “I saw, and my investors saw, that if you want to make this really, really, really successful, you have to be here. You have to be there all the time. Because with Americans, it is like they believe in you, but you also have to commit yourself.”

What it’s like to be a founder in the US

“If you want to be successful in the US, you need to make sure that you as a CEO know what you’re talking about, technically speaking. Not just about finance or whatever, but also technology-wise. They really test you, like, ‘Is the founder solid? Does he know his stuff? Will he be here when there’s trouble? Can he help us when there is trouble?’ and so on.”

Building a company in The Valley

“Silicon Valley is very strong, I think, in turning good technology into a good, good business—good applications, good business, building a company around it. And it’s also... it’s very intense. I mean, it goes on and on and on. It’s really a 24-hour society, almost where you constantly are involved in calls and emails and the whole thing. Don’t get me wrong. (Europeans) build fantastic technology. But there is more needed beyond the technology to build a successful company that gets that gets acquired. I’m not saying we cannot do it here, by the way. That’s a different issue.”

Spend the money

A trip to the US is expensive, Pim said. “I don’t know what it was (in 2015), but at least a few thousand dollars, a few thousand euros. Flying there, renting a car, hotel, dinners, lunches hopefully, with customers. Of course, it’s expensive, and you do that. And I’m saying this because we were talking the other day with another company and we told them, ‘You have to go to the US to this conference.’ And they said that’s expensive. It cost 3,000 euros or 4,000 euros, but that’s small money to the US to get access to that market.’ Companies need to be disciplined about spending money in the right places, to be able to show that progress. Because in the end, progress is measured on the business side.”

Should you go to the US?

It’s all about personality. First, you need to be aggressive about building a company, Pim said. “And then secondly, you need also be to be somebody who easily talks with people. Because if you go to networking events and to stand in the corner, or you go with two people from your company and you only talk with your colleagues, that doesn’t really help.”

Okay, you’ve started a company. Now what?

“First step – go out and find out what product companies would buy that they would pay money for. So we started engaging with companies. The only thing you can do is start writing emails, cold calling companies, going to conferences, speaking with people, and you start to raise interest and talk and see who, in what format, would you use your product.” A lot of entrepreneurs think mentors and others will tell them if their products are “crap. Why would they?” Pim said.

If no one wants to buy your product, then you know it’s crap, he said.

Get ready to be tested

“What I learned was, if you have a startup company, all of a sudden you are speaking with CTOs, maybe CEOs, at semiconductor companies who know their stuff. These are people who know all details of what they’re doing. You have to convince engineers you have something that is very interesting, that you can do what they didn’t think about. You have to convince them the thing works, because those guys come and say, ‘What if temperature goes up? What if in 25 years from now (the market) changes?’ They have hundreds of situations. They kill you with ‘what ifs?’ It’s not like you walk in and say, ‘Oh, we have a good price.’

“In the end, you need to find a customer with somebody who starts paying for this. That’s what I did. And that started to pay off, slowly but surely. We started adding more and more customers. At some point, we got NXP, and then we had Silicon Labs and Micro Chip and Intel, and started growing and growing and growing and growing and growing.”

Focus

Pim said don’t let applying for European subsidy programs distract you. Go for early-stage angel investors. “You need to run the company based on customers that buy a product. That’s what you need to have. You need to be 200-percent obsessed with building products that the customers want to buy. You should not be distracted by building things because you also have a European project and you have to make it literally according to a project plan that you defined two, three years ago, and that is not in line with your road map anymore. But you got some (subsidy) money, so you have to do that.

“You need to be 200-percent focused on customers, nothing else.”

The exit

It took years of getting to know one another before Synopsys acquired Intrinsic ID, Pim said. Aligning goals and strategies was crucial. “Alignment was certainly important for me, because I I wanted this thing to be successful after the acquisition too. I mean, I was not just looking to get an exit. What you want is that (your company) becomes bigger than you can do on your own. We discussed for quite some time, till the point in detail and say, ‘Hey, maybe it’s interesting to strategically work together.’ if that alignment is good, then you say, ‘Yeah, let’s do this.’

“You can’t imagine how complex this thing is and how complex the whole semiconductor industry is. So you have to make sure you’re well aligned to this.”

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Read more about Pim Tyuls and Intrinsic ID here in Dispatches’ archives.

Read more articles from Terry Boyd here