Having worked in EDA in the past it's kind of interesting that inside of the big 3 EDA companies (Cadence, Synopsys and Mentor Graphics) the culture seems to be very averse to change. For example, where I was working we had a C++ codebase that was mostly from the 90s. C++ templates and STL were verboten, they had their own non-templated containers from the 90s (this was in the 2006-2012 timeframe). We were using a version of gcc that was always about 7 years old. Similar for the ancient versions of RedHat we were running. Given how important EDA is to chip design you'd think there'd be more openness to innovation. The other thing that was frustrating was how siloed things were. There were software components that I'm sure other groups within the company had developed, but we were never encouraged to reach out to find out what might already be available - in fact it seemed to be discouraged. There wasn't some kind of central code repo within the company where we might look for such things - each group had their own repos that weren't accessible from outside the group.
The culture had a sort of "old boys club" feel. A lot of the folks working there had been there for 15 to 20 years or more - maybe this was what contributed to that, I'm not sure.
At any rate, EDA is a very interesting area to work in if you're a software engineer because there's a lot of advanced algorithmic work to do that you don't get much of working in other industries. But the way they approached that work was just not very interesting (old tools, old methodologies, etc). I suspect things are different in EDA startups, but unfortunately, they tend to be perpetually starved for cash - it's not an area that most VCs are familiar with; the time to payoff is much longer than for web startups. What tends to happen is that a startup EDA company will develop a product that falls outside of (but complementing) what's currently offered by big EDA and then they will try to get the attention of Big EDA and get bought by one of the Big 3 - that's the measure of success, not going public as would be in other industries because it's been extremely rare for EDA startups to go public since the big 3 have become established.
The culture had a sort of "old boys club" feel. A lot of the folks working there had been there for 15 to 20 years or more - maybe this was what contributed to that, I'm not sure.
At any rate, EDA is a very interesting area to work in if you're a software engineer because there's a lot of advanced algorithmic work to do that you don't get much of working in other industries. But the way they approached that work was just not very interesting (old tools, old methodologies, etc). I suspect things are different in EDA startups, but unfortunately, they tend to be perpetually starved for cash - it's not an area that most VCs are familiar with; the time to payoff is much longer than for web startups. What tends to happen is that a startup EDA company will develop a product that falls outside of (but complementing) what's currently offered by big EDA and then they will try to get the attention of Big EDA and get bought by one of the Big 3 - that's the measure of success, not going public as would be in other industries because it's been extremely rare for EDA startups to go public since the big 3 have become established.