This content was created by GHION.AI . This content was uploaded by GHION.AI . This is a YouTube video titled "Rick Wallace: Focus Focus Focus" created on April 26, 2011, featuring Rick Wallace discussing the importance of focus in business, illustrated by the story of Ken Levy's decision to concentrate on mask inspection over blood analyzers when founding KLA.
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When Ken Levy, the KL of KLA founded the company, he had a business plan and it had two businesses on it. He was going to do mask inspection. And masks are the things that go into lithography tools that image the devices in semiconductors. And they were done manually. And he thought, you know, I can automate that, but I also have a plan to do blood analyzers, similar kind of technology, both image processing. And the great thing about this, thought Ken, was I can diversify my risk and I can be in two markets and they're kind of off cycle each other and it'll be great. Because he'd been in the semiconductor industry, equipment industry, and he knew that was cyclical. So he wanted to have a balanced approach. Sounds like it makes sense, right? So he goes to 146 investors before the first one says yes. There's another lesson in that 146 times people said no to the business plan before the first person said yes. And when the first person said yes, what do you think they told him? Pick. You can only do one. And the reason you can only do one is because you need to focus. You need to focus on what you're going to do. He picked mast inspection. He thought he had a great plan for blood analyzers, but the VCs were smart enough to say, you need to focus. It's going to be hard enough to do a startup. And so the lesson there, at least for me, and I'll come back to this idea, is you do need to focus on where your energies are.
