All change at the top: Corsair's founder and long-running CEO steps down after 31 years as former company president Thi La takes over the reins

Working for three decades at the same company is perhaps a rare thing these days, but if you're the one who started it all, you'd want to look after your baby for as long as possible. All things must come to an end, though, and Corsair's co-founder and CEO, Andrew Paul, is officially retiring, with its chief operating officer Thi La stepping into the top slot.

Mind you, you'd think Corsair would keep something of Mr Paul around on its site, but alas, his profile has already been hoofed off into the void of dead webpages. The senior management structure of the PC peripherals and systems company is now led by Thi La, who has worked at Corsair for 14 years and held the position of president and chief operating officer for the past four and two years, respectively.

That's good news for Corsair fans who might be concerned that a completely new person might drastically change what the company does. On the other hand, Corsair critics might have been hoping for an injection of fresh blood, to perhaps bring its PC line more within the reach of people without capacious wallets.

Paul's retirement was long planned, so nothing about this is Intel-like, where former CEO Pat Gelsinger unexpectedly 'retired' last December, but in reality was given the boot by the board of directors due to Intel's financial woes.

Corsair was formed in 1994, co-founded by Andrew Paul, Don Lieberman, and John Beekley. Of the trio, the latter was the first to move on, stepping down from his vice president role in 2014, but Beekley is still there, as the company's chief technology officer. It initially just produced cache modules in the days when L2 cache was mounted in the motherboard rather than being embedded in the CPU die.

However, it rapidly switched to making DRAM modules, and for many years, that was pretty much Corsair's entire portfolio. Eventually, it expanded into the cooling market, and these days, the company makes pretty much everything that's anything PC-related. The only components that Corsair doesn't make are graphics cards and motherboards.

As to what it will do next, La has the following to say on the matter: "My passion is to make great products for our enthusiast consumers, and my goal is to put customers first while accelerating Corsair’s growth. With our recent acquisition of Fanatec and the NVIDIA 5000 series launch, we are in a strong position to jump start the next phase of Corsair’s growth."

Does that mean we will see Corsair graphics cards at some point? The profit margins are pretty slim, so probably not, but you never know. Either way, it'll be interesting to see if Corsair is still around in another 31 years, though by that time I'll be so old and doddery, I'll have forgotten all about them. And pretty much everything else, I reckon.

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