I really liked the structure of the interview and the type of questions.
All questions were really relevant and the order they were built up, worked very well!
Cool to hear that he started the company with fellow students.
Some questions unanswered
1. How did they come up with the name, and how long did it actually take them to come up with this name
My guess is that Siglent comes from Signal and Intelligent.
But still would be nice to hear other alternatives that made the first rounds before they decided on the final name. Apparently the name took really off, as the sales increased after they moved from an OEM business model to a branded business model.
2. Easter eggs in Siglent products. Maybe the CEO put in some easter eggs himself in the first model.
Well, at least they had 2,5 years to add one in
And maybe even today there are some easter eggs left in the newer products.
3. Financing. How they pulled this together in the very early days of the factory.
Did they go to several banks for getting a business loan. Insight on the process back then, and maybe also some insights on the business climate in China today. Do they have incubators in China today? Is it as easy as in the US today or at least similar? Silicon valley spirit, Stealth phase approach, etc.
4. Siglent's take on High-Level-Synthesis and an "All-in-C" based design flow, where the hardware logic is not written in VHDL by hardware engineers, but developed by software engineers, who synthesize the high-level source code into RTL.
5. Siglent's take on Xilinx Zynq 7000 series (inspired by GW-Instek in Taiwan).
6. Engineering education in China. If the amount of engineering students is increasing. Popular engineering schools. Competition between universities in research papers. In Europe some countries are facing challenges as number of engineering students is declining: "Everybody likes an iPhone, but nobody likes to make one".
7. Factory tour in Siglent. Would be cool if this can be organized. To get a glimpse of how scopes are put together. There is a guy on Internet who does lots of these factory tours for Android tablet devices (armdevices.net). Still AFAIK I have not seen a factory tour of a Chinese scope factory.
8. Where does Siglent buy their relative silent fans? Apparently they know, and maybe if they reveal, someone can pass the address on to Rigol
And Where does Siglent buy the factory-remove screen protectors? Rigol should have them on their screens as well
9. Siglent's view on having a video output connector on test equipment. Why not have an HDMI connector on the oscilloscope and the spectrum analyzer. Or both VGA and HDMI to support older video projectors in the class room.
10. Licensing. Whether Siglent licenses some SW libraries and IP from other companies (algorithms, RTL IP blocks, patents on signal processing, interleaving methods, etc.) in their products?
11. Spectrum analyzer. Do they sell them in Europe? I could not find on their website.
Maybe these questions can be answered in a follow-up interview, or can be addressed by email exchange between the Australian interviewer (aka Dave) and the Chinese CEO (aka Yolo)