Darian Domocos told me the hardest part of starting a CPU company wasn’t the engineering; it was getting anyone to believe that two young guys from Romania could do it.
He’s the CEO and co-founder of Fiora5, a startup that develops and licenses RISC-V processor IP out of Europe. That’s where the conversation started before it charged through supply chain politics, why he’s ignoring the datacenter on his path to market, and what he’s reading to keep growing.
Our discussion hit a pretty wide range of topics, from career advice to nation state security.
My three favorite themes from the discussion were:
We discussed open source instruction sets and how you build a business model around one. Closed systems still have the edge, but given how rapidly the EDA world is changing, and how rapidly the architecture of chips is changing, open source is having a moment. As we discussed with Daniel Schulz in Episode 8 of The Siliconimist, many parts of the silicon model are moving rapidly toward open: as more of the industry builds on it and embraces it, a self-reinforcing cycle starts.
Arm’s advantage is ecosystem maturity, not the instruction set. Toolchain, debugging, integration, forty years of programmer habit. As Darian put it:
“you might have a really amazing RISC-V core, but because you don’t have the auxiliary software it is harder to integrate.”
The unlock is standardization, specifically RVA23, which he called out as the single biggest step RISC-V International has taken.
Driving RISC-V further and faster are the shifts in the global supply chain and the changing geopolitical winds. Open source can mean sovereignty. With no single controlling company, nations have fewer effective pressure points to control or compromise the instruction set.
With America and China locked in on each other, the EU has decided that they too need more sovereignty over their chips. Rather than cast their lot with one or the other, they’re trying to build a local ecosystem. Europe won’t replace the entire supply chain, or control it, and unlike China they’re being realistic about that. Rather, if they control critical pieces of the chain, they buy optionality for the future. The strategy’s not MAD, it’s not self reliance, and it’s not Lenin’s “commanding heights of the economy” worldview. Both the US and China are closer to those approaches of strategic supply chain security. It’s more like Global Value Chain integration: specialize and participate in order to gain security and be irreplaceable (also, good career advice!).
Fiora5 is capitalizing on this as the EU invests in startups to support various parts of the semiconductor industry.
Given the hot market for talent, how does an upstart like Fiora5 attract the people they need to win? With pay packages climbing, it’s more expensive than ever to get high-end talent.
You can’t compete on salary alone, so Fiora5 gives founding engineers stock options, giving agency plus equity.
Giving people more responsibility and more control attracts and motivates them. If you’re a young, talented engineer, you too might prefer a role at a startup that doesn’t have the resources to micromanage you. And early career growth can have big payoffs in the long run . . . the long game wins.
I end every episode the same way: “what are you reading, and what’s your favorite resource for learning?”
Darian is working through The Confidence Game by Maria Konnikova, a book about con artists and why people believe them. He got there through an early interest in social engineering, and he thinks it’s useful for a founder: understand what actually motivates the people across the table.
Coming full circle, that brings it back around to the start of the conversation. He started by telling me his biggest problem was credibility, that nobody wanted to bet on two unknown engineers from Romania. Founding a company is a confidence game in the honest sense of the phrase: you have to get people to believe in something before it’s true, and then go make it true.
For the technical side, he pointed at Onur Mutlu’s computer architecture lectures from ETH Zürich, free on YouTube, which he called his holy grail of learning.
He also reads Dylan Patel , SEMIVISION , Mario Gabriele, EE Times, and Tom’s Hardware.
Darian will be in the US in late September for the RISC-V Summit, and Fiora5 is raising a larger round in Q1. We’ll check back in!