The prof. who almost could not give away the idea that eventually made it into Apple's supply chain :)) Suhas Patil grew up in Jamshedpur, where his father worked at Tata Steel. He studied at IIT KGP, then went to MIT for his master's and PhD, becoming a prof. there in 1970. In 1971, he formally described something computer science students worldwide still study today as a foundational puzzle in concurrent computing: the "cigarette smokers problem." Most people assume that kind of textbook canon concept came out of an anonymous Western lab. It came from a young Indian prof's paper. Then, working across MIT and the University of Utah, he built something genuinely clever: SLA, Storage/Logic Array, not a single chip, but a structured IC design method, a silicon compiler approach that let complex chips for storage, video, and other applications be designed faster and more consistently than the ad hoc methods common at the time. In 1981, believing the industry needed this, he founded Patil Systems in Salt Lake City to sell it. And for 3 years, almost nobody wanted it..... Patil himself put it as bluntly as you can: "I made the rounds and could not give it away." The company stayed stuck at ~11 employees, technically sound and commercially going nowhere, the exact kind of quiet, unglamorous failure that never makes it into "visionary founder" narratives, because most companies in that position simply die there. What saved it was Patil recognizing what he was not good at, and going and finding someone who was. He recruited Michael Hackworth, a semiconductor marketing and management veteran from Signetics, who saw a path Patil's own pitch had not been landing: generalize the SLA method into a platform for building specialized chips fast, for a PC industry about to explode. The company moved to Silicon Valley, was renamed Cirrus Logic, and Hackworth was named president and CEO in Jan 1985. This is also where the real technological leap happened. Rather than build their own chip fabrication plants, the standard, capital crushing approach most semiconductor companies used, Cirrus Logic paid existing foundries to manufacture their designs under contract. This is the fabless semiconductor model, and Patil's company was genuinely 1 of the early successful firms to run it, alongside a handful of others in that same early-1980s wave, like LSI Logic. Today it is how a huge share of the global chip industry works, Nvidia and Qualcomm included. Patil's near-failed company was one of the 1st to help write that playbook. From there, the wins compounded. When IBM unveiled the VGA graphics standard in 1987, Cirrus Logic shipped some of the earliest VGA-compatible chipsets on the market, and the company would go on to become a major, low-cost VGA/SVGA vendor. It went public on NASDAQ in 1989, acquired Crystal Semiconductor in 1991, the deal that actually built the company's real strength in audio and Wolfson Microelectronics in 2014. Today, Cirrus Logic carries a market capitalization in the billions, on annual revenue of ~$2B, and as of its last fiscal year, 89% of that revenue came from a single customer: Apple (a figure that climbed to around 91% the following year). Cirrus Logic genuinely is a major audio and mixed-signal chip supplier to Apple today. The same company that nearly died trying to sell an unwanted idea in Salt Lake City now earns the overwhelming majority of its revenue from Apple. Also, in 1992, a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs founded TiE, The Indus Entrepreneurs, and Patil, as one of that founding group, became its 1st official president in late 1993, the organization went on to become one of the most influential mentorship networks for Indian-origin founders anywhere in the world, years before "Indian-American tech founder" was a familiar cultural archetype. And his son, DJ Patil, became the 1st Chief Data Scientist of the United States, serving in the White House under President Obama from 2015-17, meaning a father who spent 3 years failing to give away a chip-design idea in Salt Lake City raised a son who held the very 1st version of that job title inside the U.S. federal government.