On the Record with Tomide Adesanmi, CoFounder & CEO of Circuit Mind
Hometown: I was born in Lagos, Nigeria, and spent my teenage years in Abuja. I’ve been in the UK for the past 15 years.
Hobbies: music (hip hop, R&B, jazz), sports, reading, and dancing.
3 words to describe you: ambitious, versatile, friendly
What were you like as a child and how do you think that shaped who you are today?
My parents were the first to instill the entrepreneurial mindset in me, because they were both entrepreneurial. They had their day jobs but they were always starting side businesses. My mom was a marketing manager at a bank, but she was also a seamstress, and I helped her sell popcorn from the trunk at church. My dad was a banker but started several import/export businesses; he was always starting new initiatives. I felt from a very young age that trying new things was the way to live your life.
I was also very competitive as a child; I always needed to be the best at whatever I did. This competitive edge gave me the ability to narrowly focus on what I really cared about, because I didn’t want to be competitive about everything. I learned how to channel that competitiveness into the areas where I really want to prove something.
You grew up in Nigeria and spent some time there as a young adult before moving to the UK. Can you talk at all about the tech scene in Nigeria versus the UK?
It’s a very interesting scene there. My brother is a solo founder in Nigeria, and I can say that there are a lot of differences. The primary difference is the access to capital. It’s not easy here (or anywhere) but it’s definitely easier than in Nigeria. Secondly, in Nigeria, the startup scene is mostly FinTech. About 70% of the founders I know are building fintech companies, which makes sense, because they are building the base infrastructure for the economy to really work. But overall it's a very vibrant and energetic scene with a lot of enthusiasm to achieve.
Now moving into the nitty gritty of your work, why has ECE design remained the same for 50+ years?
It’s such a multifactorial problem. The first thing is that there haven't been that many triggers for change in the industry. In the 1970s and 80s, the engineers at the time started working with ECAD tools that helped engineers document designs rather than engineer them. A significant proportion of design engineers are now retiring and fewer engineers are taking their place, so there's a growing skill-shortage even as the demand for electronics skyrockets. Existing tools for drafting designs are inadequate to enable electronic engineers to meet this rising demand, triggering an evolution in the board-level electronic design software industry.
The second factor is that the design of the 1970s/80s was very analogue where you had a few discrete parts that you built into a grander design. Over time, though, electronics have become more digital, and now we’re packaging discrete parts into integrated modules that perform more complex functions. That has lent itself to automation which is becoming the right time to explore.
Lastly, low cost, ubiquitous access to cloud computing has made it possible for our technology to perform the onerous computations required for optimized automatic electronic design exploration in seconds.
How will the Chips Act impact hardware design?
Overall, it’s incredible for the integrated circuit industry in the United States. For hardware at the board level where Circuit Mind operates, it’s not as influential, although we think there'll be funding for pertinent programs. Hopefully it becomes a driver for more innovation in technology skills.
Is now the inflection point for hardware products?
As I mentioned earlier, the supply of appropriately skilled electronic engineers is decreasing while demand for electronic products is increasing. Demand is increasing because:
Connected devices are becoming more ubiquitous. Consumers now expect most of their appliances to be smart, even lights, fridges and toasters. Industrial companies also expect machines to collect information about themselves in real time and communicate with both humans and other machines. The rise of the internet of things is driving a critical mass of hardware product development
The electrification of everything [Cars, aircraft etc]. For example: Cars are being converted into computers on wheels. We need a plethora of complex electronic hardware to drive electric and autonomous vehicles.
Why are there so many errors in hardware?
Right now, if you are doing electronics design, you are going through five different stages that are exceedingly manual. There’s a lot of data coming in from a lot of different sources (manufacturer websites, distributor websites, data aggregators, data vendors, excel spreadsheets, simulation tools), and you have to compile, parse, and combine it all into a functional design that also meets multifactorial customer requirements using rules learned over decades.. . The process takes 1 - 6 weeks per iteration and 3 - 10 iterations to get to a final design because of errors and changing requirements. It’s really easy to miss something from a data source or neglect a rule in one of the 5 design stages. Ultimately, the component data needs to be digitized so that machines can help us do some of the heavy lifting and prevent us from making errors in the process.
Can you walk me through the process of how a hardware product gets to market?
The entire process is 4 steps: 1) concept, 2) detailed design, 3) testing, 4) production.
The first three steps are done in loops (iterations). As I just mentioned, you typically do 3-10 iterations before you go to market. Within each of these phases you are going through even more detailed steps like conceptualization, gathering requirements, selecting components, component connection, and analysis. After all of that you move into prototype manufacturing at which point you test the prototypes. You do that repeatedly until you have a product ready for production. The entire process can take anywhere from 3 to 24 months.
You’re saying even the big hyperscalers like Apple, Google, Samsung have this problem?
100%. Every single company that develops electronics products has this problem. Apple, Google and Samsung have large teams of electronics engineers. This is the work they do day in, day out.
So, how do we bring down the costs to manufacture?
This is a great question because if you look at software, the reason it's so proliferated is exactly because we've trimmed down the barrier to entry to create new software. In software, we have software compilers, libraries and other frameworks that enable us to go from an idea to customer deployment within 2 weeks. We then iterate on the customer feedback to develop the right product for their needs .
Hardware can take years to get into the hands of the customer. We need to reduce the cost by reducing the iteration cycles. We need to go from hardware idea to customers’ hands within weeks, not months or years. That’s going to reduce the cost of innovation of hardware.
As a quick sidenote, did you work on any cool projects at BAE? Or were they classified?
I worked on the high integrity military and aerospace systems; more specifically, I worked on helmet mounted display systems for jet fighter pilots. When a pilot flies a plane, he/she has a clear display attached to the helmet that projects information like altitude, attitude, direction, weapon systems info, etc.. The display projects this information onto the pilot’s field of view without obstructing the view of control panels, the cockpit and the outside world—it’s like a hololens but more complicated and more expensive. I worked on those sort of displays for 4.5 years as an electronics systems engineer
Moving on to a more personal note, what has been your biggest or most unexpected challenge in founding Circuit Mind?
I think my biggest challenge has been the amount of learning and growth that is needed as a startup founder and CEO. I’m doing a lot of things that I've never done before. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see that I’m interested in doing a lot more things than I realized because I have such a strong belief in our mission.
What motivates you each day?
Solving problems that I care about. I really care about Circuit Mind because I love gadgets. In general, I love building and creating things, which I did myself for a long time, and that’s how I saw that there were a lot of obstacles with creating physical things. Everyone is in love with software these days, but I really wanted to create physical objects like robots and computers, and seeing that it wasn’t easy to do this quickly or to a high level of optimization was a big motivator to start Circuit Mind.
Are there any life lessons you live by?
I have three very important lessons by which I live: 1) don’t be afraid to grow and to develop yourself, 2) your relationships with people matter—the most important thing you can do is connect with people, and 3) live with purpose.
Who has been your biggest inspiration/mentor/motivator as an entrepreneur?
I would have to say my cofounders first and foremost. They are a great influence on me, and having people to do this with and who support me matters a lot.
And, of course, my parents; they’ve always encouraged me. They don’t totally get what I’m doing because they think I could have a more secure, higher paying job, but they also understand the mentality of needing to try new things. They think a startup could be a side hustle, but ultimately they support me!
Tomide Adesanmi is the Co-founder/CEO of Circuit Mind, a venture-backed startup that is developing intelligent software for electronic engineers. Circuit Mind's software enables electronics teams to design faster and better by specifying their input requirements and exploring automatically generated design options in seconds/minutes. Before Circuit Mind, Tomide was an electronic systems engineer at BAE Systems, where he developed Heads Up Display Systems and Helmet Mounted Display Systems for jet fighter pilots.
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