Hitting the books
By Dawn Yoshitake
Staff Writer, CNET NEWS.COM
Joe Costello is a live wire.
He talks at break-neck speed, his hands mere props by which to make his
point. His laugh comes quick, like machine-gun fire, from his tall, lanky
frame.
Joe Costello is a live wire.
He talks at break-neck speed, his hands mere props by which to make his
point. His laugh comes quick, like machine-gun fire, from his tall, lanky
frame.
With all that energy, it's hard to imagine this guy can sit still, let
alone serve as president and chief executive for nearly 11 years at Cadence Design Systems, a software tools
designer and services company.
But he has. At least until now.
Costello, in an announcement that stunned Cadence employees and the
high-tech community, last month announced his decision to leave to join a
relatively young educational software company, Knowledge Universe. There he
will serve as vice chairman of the privately held company, which is funded
by investors such as notorious former junk bond king Michael Milken and Oracle chairman and chief executive Larry
Ellison.
Costello leaves behind a company where he grew revenues from $429.1 million
in 1994 to $741.5 million in revenues last year. Costello also served as
Cadence's driving force in what has become one of high tech's largest
trade-secret criminal cases, with six executives from competitor Avant being charged with
trade-secret theft by the Santa Clara County, California, district
attorney's office. A federal appeals court last month issued a
preliminary injunction against Avant, forbidding the company from selling
some of its older-version software that allegedly carries code stolen from
Cadence.
Costello leaves behind a company that garnered him a reputation for being a
hotshot CEO. Chief Executive magazine handed him the No. 1 spot on
its performance-based index measuring the effectiveness of CEOs, and
Costello also recently landed on the list of Heidrick & Struggles
headhunter John Thompson, who was hired by Apple Computer to find a new CEO for the
beleaguered company. When approached for the job, Costello opted to hold
tight at Cadence rather than take a slice at Apple.
When did you decide it
was time to leave Cadence, and what thoughts were going through your mind?
Costello: It's something that I have actually been thinking about for a few
years, and more seriously in the last couple of years. And the question was:
"Do I want to take Cadence onto the next leg?"
There are these stages that companies goes through, and we were coming
through the end of one stage and about ready to launch into another stage.
And [these stages] usually go in three- to five-year pieces at a
time. And so we were at this moment where I had to either sign-up for the
next three to five years and really go for this next piece, or not. It's
not fair to start it and then say: "OK, I'm out of here!" And so it was a
perfect time, from that point of view, to [leave] .
I had been thinking about doing other things and trying to compare staying
with Cadence over doing something else. And over time, it had been gnawing
away at me. There was something inside me that said, "I want to do something
different." There was a yearning for something different, a different
marketplace, a different impact level, a different space to play in.
NEXT: Working for the king
