The duo won a small initial order. Samueli's papers also lured Intel. 3Com, Intel's top rival in adapter cards, had been using only Lucent chips in its product for transmitting data at 100 megabits a second. Enter Broadcom and Nicholas in early 1996. Carson Chen, who heads Cisco's cable and wireless businesses, recalls that meeting with Nicholas reinforced his bet on cable during a time when the technology was out of favor with investors.
Cisco is now the top maker of equipment that handles connections from cable modems.
Nicholas is banking on such early ties to anchor Broadcom's expansion. The business has grown so rapidly that he and Samueli don't tag team as much on customer meetings or projects. Samueli draws up the technical vision and serves as the evangelist, spending less time than in the past in his professorial role of mentoring his engineers, who now number about 1,500. I kind of step back and just take a higher-level view of the world. Nicholas and Samueli know they need to preserve the formula that has made things work so well so far.