永远要相信自己能成功。这是斯坦•博兰(Stan Boland)历经商海沉浮后印在脑海中的一句格言。博兰过去八年的经历，证明了这是一个有用的信条。在此期间，他创建了一家科技公司，希望公司能随着智能手机的流行而发展壮大。
博兰今年50岁，是英国公司Icera的首席执行官和共同创始人。该公司得到2.5亿美元风险资本的支持，正在努力实现一个看起来遥不可及的梦想：颠覆加州微芯片企业高通(Qualcomm)在一个半导体技术专门领域的主导地位。
博兰谈到这个强大的美国竞争对手时表示：“他们厉害得吓人，但（对于芯片设计）却采用了常规途径，而我们的做法完全不同。”
在他的职业生涯中，博兰在金融业和技术行业都曾担任过要职，这让他掌握了从金融贷款到高速电信协议等多个不同领域的丰厚知识。
他还曾浸淫于各种各样的企业文化当中，既有在飞机引擎制造商罗尔斯-罗伊斯(Rolls-Royce)供职六年对蓝筹英式企业文化的了解，又有上世纪80年代末在著名的“企业狙击手”罗伯特•霍姆斯•阿•考特(Robert Holmes à Court)手下从事金融工作一年对高调澳大利亚企业文化的了解。博兰形容，在Bell Resources工作的那段时间“充满乐趣”。
但投身创建Icera的八年，却是将自己形容为“乐观主义者”的博兰在一家公司供职最长的时间。
他说他的成功哲学源自Arm Holdings前首席执行官罗宾•萨克斯比爵士(Sir Robin Saxby)。微芯片集团Arm Holdings是上世纪90年代从英国个人电脑先驱企业Acorn Computers剥离出来的——博兰当时是Acorn的掌门人。
他继续说道：“罗宾教给我的另一件事情是，要抓住一切机会把自己推向顾客。”
虽然Acorn最终消失了，但在共办企业的校友身上仍能找到它的痕迹，其中包括赫尔曼•豪泽(Herman Hauser)。豪泽是英国知名的科技企业家之一，Acorn Computers的共同创始人，如今在Icera的投资方Amadeus Capital Partners担任董事。
豪泽说，能够领会复杂的想法，并向非专家解释清楚，是博兰最大的长处。他说：“斯坦非常了解一些极其复杂的技术，而且他还能从概念上解释清楚，并将公司的业务推销给客户和投资者。”
在博兰的职业生涯中，他还曾在硅谷的博通(Broadcom)供职一年。博兰1999年与他人共同创立了Element 14，一年后以6.4亿美元出售给博通。
Icera的总部位于布里斯托郊外的科技园区，这里是英国最大的半导体设计集群基地。博兰在外表毫不张扬的公司总部发表讲话时说，他认为，如果你将创业精神定义为以冒险但最终能获得回报的方式为新市场创造新产品，那么硅谷文化“最容易催生创业精神”。
但他补充道，欧洲科技企业的确有一些优势。“美国的商业惯例存在阴暗的一面，即公司经常否认自己的发展道路是错误的，高管会在自己的产品、时间安排、竞争对手和资金等问题上公然撒谎。我认为这在欧洲并不常见——欧洲人往往相对诚实，这是一个优势，得到了最终顾客的好评。”
在Icera的300名员工中，仅有略多于三分之一在英国，其他员工主要分布在法国、美国、中国大陆和台湾。
该公司的突破在于创造出了一整套半导体产品，能够以新颖的方式将iPhone等智能手机与数十亿种其他手机和终端相连。像欧美大多数半导体企业一样，Icera本身并不生产半导体，而是将业务外包给其他公司，主要是台湾的台积电(TSMC)。
这些芯片的逻辑电路采用了非常规设计，通过将信号在电路中重复传递，而非采用新处理器完成工作的工艺，使用数量相对较少的电路就能完成常规芯片中需要更多电路才能完成的任务。
博兰说：“如果从智力层面看，除了核物理或太空旅行，我想不出还有什么比我目前从事的工作更复杂的事情。”
然而，Icera还需接受真正的考验：该公司尚未从博兰所说的“每年几千万美元”的销售额中实现盈利。
Icera面临的一个关键挑战是，它是否能够将芯片销售给苹果(Apple)、诺基亚(Nokia)、三星(Samsung)等3G智能手机制造商。该公司目前的收入来源主要局限于向中国大陆和台湾公司销售芯片，包括中兴通讯(ZTE)和富士康(Foxconn)。这些公司将芯片用在调制解调器中，然后插入小型电脑，使其能够接入手机网络。
假如在未来12到18个月内，Icera能在目前正努力发展的手机制造商用户中为其产品找到买家，那么该公司就有望在股票市场上市，不过博兰不愿意透露具体时间。
博兰谦虚的风格，掩饰了一个艰难的处境。Icera已向欧盟委员会(European Commission)发起申诉，指控高通在欧洲的“反竞争”营销行为。这等于是在向高通宣战。Icera与其他几家生产3G手机芯片的竞争对手是在进行一场豪赌：这些设备今年的销售额有望达到45亿美元，随着功能更加复杂的移动电话占据手机行业的主流，未来几年的销量还有望出现显著增长。据信，高通目前占有此类芯片大约40%的市场份额。
博兰表示，阅读个人电脑杂志促使他做出了在英国首批电脑初创企业之一——Acorn工作的决定。但当时，Acorn已经遇到了一系列财务问题。
这位剑桥大学物理系毕业生相信，在Acorn供职期间，他从豪泽和其他剑桥高材生（例如现任剑桥大学计算机系主任安迪•霍珀(Andy Hopper)）那里学到了很多关于如何发展科技企业的内容。剑桥的人脉关系至今仍很重要，Icera在半导体设计方面的一些最佳创意就可以追溯到在Acorn开发的技术。
博兰说：“加入Acorn时，确实让我首次看到了工程师的工作与产品和业务开发之间的直接关系。”
如果Icera能在未来几年成为一家有盈利能力的大公司（由于任务艰巨，谁都不能保证），那么这不仅是一家极为特殊的英国科技公司的喜讯，更能证明像博兰这样广泛的商业背景，加上他职业生涯中涉及的各种各样的金融和技术人脉，的确能成为成功的平台。
译者/王柯伦
http://www.ftchinese.com/story/001035208
Always assume you will be successful. This is one of the maxims Stan Boland carries in his head as a result of his broad span of business experience. It is a tenet that has proved useful over the past eight years while establishing a technology company that he hopes will make it big on the back of the new wave of smartphones. Mr Boland, 50, is chief executive and co-founder of Icera, a UK company backed by $250m in venture capital that is trying to achieve what might seem an impossible dream: to mount a coup against the dominance in a specialised field of semiconductor technology of Qualcomm, the Californian microchip company. “It’s scary how good they are,” Mr Boland says of his big US rival. “But they take a conventional approach [to chip design], while we are doing something completely different.” Mr Boland’s career has included top jobs in both finance and technology, enabling him to build deep knowledge in a range of diverse topics from loan finance to high-speed telecommunications protocols. He has also had exposure to a wide range of company cultures, from blue-chip British, based on the six years he spent at Rolls-Royce, the aircraft engine maker, to swashbuckling Australian, when he worked for a year in the late 1980s in a finance job for famed corporate raider Robert Holmes à Court. Mr Boland describes this spell working for Bell Resources as a “lot of fun”. But the eight years he has spent establishing Icera is the longest time Mr Boland, who describes himself as an optimist, has ever spent at one company. He says that his philosophy on success stems from Sir Robin Saxby, former chief executive of microchip group Arm Holdings, which in the 1990s was spun out of Acorn Computers, the pioneer of British personal computers. Mr Boland was running Acorn when Arm was created. “Another thing Robin told me was to take every opportunity to put yourself in front of the customer,” he continues. While Acorn ultimately disappeared, its legacy remains through its network of entrepreneurial alumni, which includes Herman Hauser, one of the UK’s leading technology entrepreneurs, a co-founder of Acorn Computers, and now a director of Amadeus Capital Partners, which has become one of Icera’s financial backers.
Mr Hauser says Mr Boland’s ability to grasp complex ideas and explain it to non-experts is his greatest strength. “Stan has a great understanding of some extremely complicated technology but he has also got the ability to explain it in conceptual terms and sell the story of what the company is doing to customers and investors,” he says.
Mr Boland’s career has also included a year in Silicon Valley at Broadcom, the microchip company that acquired Element 14, a business that Mr Boland cofounded in 1999 and sold a year later for $640m.
Speaking at Icera’s unassuming headquarters in a technology park on the outskirts of Bristol, home of Britain’s biggest semiconductor design cluster, Mr Boland identifies the Silicon Valley culture as the one he has found “most conducive to entrepreneurialism, if you define that as the creating of new products for new markets in a risk-taking but ultimately rewarding way”.
But he adds that European technology companies do have some advantages. “There is a darker side to American business practice, which is that companies often deny they are on the wrong track and executives blatantly lie about their product, schedules, competitors, funding and so on. I don’t think you see this much in Europe – the European tendency to be relatively honest is a strength, and one that is valued by the ultimate customer.”
Out of Icera’s 300 employees, just over a third are in the UK, the rest mainly in France, the US, China and Taiwan.
The company’s breakthrough has been to create a family of semiconductors that offers a novel way of connecting smartphones such as the iPhone with billions of other phones and terminals. Icera, like most semiconductor companies in Europe and the US, does not manufacture the semiconductors itself but outsources this to other companies, primarily TSMC in Taiwan.
The chips work by an unusual design of their logic circuitry. A relatively small number of circuits can be made to do the job of the much bigger number than would be needed in conventional chips, through the technique of passing signals through them repeatedly rather than requiring new processors to do the work.
“If you consider the intellectual aspects to what we’re doing, I can’t think of anything that’s more complex, apart from nuclear physics or space travel,” says Mr Boland.
However, the real test for Icera is still to come: the company has yet to make a profit from sales described by Mr Boland as being “a few tens of million dollars a year”.
A key challenge for Icera will be whether it can sell its chips to makers of 3G smartphones such as Apple, Nokia and Samsung; revenues so far have been limited mainly to selling the chips to Chinese or Taiwanese companies, including ZTE or Foxconn, that use them inside the modem devices, also called dongles, that plug into small computers to enable them to connect to cellular networks.
Assuming Icera can find buyers for its products among the phone makers it is wooing in the next 12-18 months, then it could be in line for a stock market flotation, although Mr Boland is reticent about timing.
Mr Boland’s self-deprecating manner conceals a tough streak. Icera has initiated a complaint to the European Commission about allegedly “anticompetitive” marketing practices by Qualcomm in Europe, in what amounts to a declaration of war. Along with a handful of competitors making 3G cellular chips, the company is playing for high stakes: sales of these devices are likely to be about $4.5bn this year but are likely to expand substantially in the next few years as more complicated mobile phones start to take over mainstream parts of the cellular industry. Of the current market for these chips, Qualcomm is thought to account for about 40 per cent.
Mr Boland says reading magazines about personal computers triggered his decision to work at Acorn, one of the UK’s first computer start-ups but which had already suffered a series of financial problems.
The Cambridge physics graduate believes he learnt a huge amount while at Acorn from Mr Hauser and other Cambridge luminaries – such as Andy Hopper, now head of Cambridge university’s computer department – about how to develop technology businesses. The Cambridge connection is still important; some of Icera’s best ideas on semiconductor design can be traced back to techniques that were under development at Acorn.
“When I arrived at Acorn, it was really the first time I could see the direct connection between the work of engineers and the creation of products and business,” Mr Boland says.
If Icera can turn into a big and profitable business over the next few years, which is by no means guaranteed given the scale of the task, it will be a celebration not just for an extremely special UK technology venture but also testimony to how such a broad business background as Mr Boland’s, together with the varied span of financial and technological connections that his career has involved, can provide the platform for success.
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