Podcast appearances and mentions of andy bechtolsheim

Get our Business Monetization Playbook: https://clickhubspot.com/monetization Episode 669: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) do a deep dive on the 7 strangers that made the greatest investment of all time.  — Show Notes:  (0:00) Andy Bechtolsheim (7:10) David Cheriton (10:10) Ron Conway (29:20) Alfred Lin (35:00) Shaquille O'Neill (37:20) Susan Wojcicki (38:50) Pejman Nozad (46:20) Jeff Bezos — Links: • SV Angel - https://svangel.com/  — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it's called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam's List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

Original text from SunWorld, February 1996 by Michael McCarthy and Mark Cappel. This was such a bad idea that in the very same issue it was announced a potential Sun/Apple deal had fallen through. CHM Sun Microsystems Founders Panel in which they discuss close encounters with acquiring Apple. I'm glad Sun didn't buy Apple because by the turn of the century Sun was in serious trouble. UltraSPARC III was delayed by two years, x86 caught up, the dotcom bust happened, everyone was broke, and Linux had matured to a point where it began creeping into the enterprise. Andy Bechtolsheim quote to that effect. This was the second significant time Sun's CPU group had difficultly keeping up with the Groveses: Microprocessor Report outlines the troubled design and production behind the “constipated” performance of SuperSPARC (1992).

How can the lessons learned from a childhood of tinkering and a career influenced by tech visionaries like Bill Joy and Andy Bechtolsheim guide us toward a more sustainable future for technology? We're joined today by Adrian Cockcroft, a trailblazer in cloud architecture at Netflix and a proponent of open source at Amazon Web Services, who is now channeling his expertise into the vital cause of sustainability in cloud computing. Adrian shares his journey from the early days of building computers to his influential roles in shaping the tech industry and how these experiences have informed his current focus on sustainability. Together, we can build a future that is not only technologically advanced but also environmentally responsible.Early Career Experiences and InfluenceAdrian shares the experiences that shaped his professional life, especially his time at Sun Microsystems, and the influence of visionaries like Bill Joy and Andy Bechtolsheim. He discusses the power of thinking into the future and anticipating trends. "It was clear [Bill] lived five years in the future... that was one of those inspiring moments." This experience alone highlighted the significance of forward-thinking and the impact it can have on shaping one's career trajectory. It serves as a reminder to embrace curiosity and explore emerging technologies and trends, as they can lead to groundbreaking opportunities and shape the future of industries.The Power of Putting Ideas Out ThereSharing ideas can be transformational. Adrian and Barry, both authors, discuss the importance of writing and publishing, which goes beyond the unique experience of writing a book or the influence it has on the readers. It also shapes and influences their own organizations. Being open and vulnerable might be difficult, but the rewards are priceless. “Everyone should write a book. It's 10 times harder than you think." Putting your ideas out there helps you overcome self-doubt and fear of judgment and embrace the opportunity to contribute your unique perspectives and insights to the broader discourse.Transitioning to a Focus on SustainabilityAdrian doesn't just preach sustainability; he lives it. In addition to his current work, Adrian was also an early adopter of solar panels and electric cars. Professionally, Adrian shares his experience championing these values within AWS and helping his peers understand the importance of transparency and accountability in addressing environmental impact. Companies need to do more than give lip service to a better future. They must also align their actions to those values and actively seek ways to reduce their environmental footprint. Sustainability is not just a buzzword but a fundamental responsibility that requires commitment and action.Challenges in Achieving Sustainability in the CloudBarry and Adrian delve into the challenges faced by companies in achieving sustainability in their technology infrastructure. It's not enough to have accurate measurements and proper reporting of carbon emissions. Organizations must also ensure their supply chain adheres to the same standards and values. Allocation and attribution of carbon emissions on a global scale can be incredibly complex, so if we hope to address emerging climate risks and create a sustainable future, complying with regulations and being transparent is key.The Need for Measurement, Reporting, and ActionOrganizations need to go beyond measurement and reporting. Instead, the actions a company takes to ensure sustainability should be used as a measure of a company's quality and care. Consumers can take an active role in encouraging companies to be sustainable and holding them accountable when they aren't. The mix of regulations, reporting, market demands, and social pressure will cause companies to think about the future of the environment and take action, not just internally but also in their supply chains.ResourcesAdrian Cockcroft on LinkedIn | X(Twitter)

L'histoire de Google, c'est avant tout la rencontre de 2 amis qui deviendront inséparables: Sergey Brin et Larry Page. Et ils se rencontrent sur le campus de Stanford en 1995. L'un est extraverti et volubile, Sergey, l'autre est introverti et réfléchi, Larry. Mais les 2 jeunes hommes ont beaucoup de choses en commun. Ils adorent débattre en permanence et viennent de familles scientifiques portées sur les mathématiques. Surtout les 2 hommes sont brillants. Dès 1997, Larry travaille sur le sujet de l'organisation des données sur le web et finit par trouver un système de classification des données avec les liens hypertextes et le nombre de citations. Il l'appellera Pagerank. Sergey le rejoint pour travailler sur ce projet dans le laboratoire de recherche de Stanford. Ils testent leur outil de recherche en interne et les retours sont excellents. Leur moteur appelé Blakrub est bien meilleur que les moteurs de recherche actuels. Pourtant, ils n'arrivent pas à monétiser leur technologie qu'ils proposent à tous les acteurs de l'époque. Yahoo notamment. Ils fabriquent des serveurs avec les ordinateurs de l'université mais ils ont besoin d'argent s'ils veulent se développer. C'est un investisseur reconnu de la Silicon Valley, Andy Bechtolsheim, fondateur de Sun, qui parie sur les 2 hommes. Le nom ? C'est sur une faute d'orthographe qu'il est créé. Au départ, ils voulaient s'appeler Gogoplex. La société est alors créée et ils s'installent dans un garage avant de déménager dans des bureaux à Palo Alto. Puis en 1999, ils sollicitent 2 investisseurs de renom pour trouver de l'argent: Kleiner Perkins et Sequoia Capital. Tout s'accélère. Mais les fonds imposent une seule condition: recruter un PDG d'expérience pour les aider à monétiser. Ça sera chose faite avec Eric Schmidt. Puis ils lanceront dans la foulée en 2001, leur solution de publicité. La suite appartient à l'histoire. Notes The Google Story (2018 Updated Edition): Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time Histoire de Google : toute la chronologie - Optimiz.me L'histoire de Google - Semji. Google — Wikipédia

We are in strange and uncertain times. The technology industry has always managed to respond to strange and uncertain times with incredible innovations that lead to the next round of growth. Growth that often comes with much higher rewards and leaves the world in a state almost unimaginable in previous iterations. The last major inflection point for the Internet, and computing in general, was when the dot come bubble burst.  The companies that survived that time in the history of computing and stayed true to their course sparked the Web 2.0 revolution. And their shareholders were rewarded by going from exits and valuations in the millions in the dot com era, they went into the billions in the Web 2.0 era. None as iconic as Google. They finally solved how to make money at scale on the Internet and in the process validated that search was a place to do so. Today we can think of Google, or the resulting parent Alphabet, as a multi-headed hydra. The biggest of those heads includes Search, which includes AdWords and AdSense. But Google has long since stopped being a one-trick pony. They also include Google Apps, Google Cloud, Gmail, YouTube, Google Nest, Verily, self-driving cars, mobile operating systems, and one of the more ambitious, Google Fiber. But how did two kids going to Stanford manage to become the third US company to be valued at a trillion dollars? Let's go back to 1998. The Big Lebowski, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, There's Something About Mary, The Truman Show, and Saving Private Ryan were in the theaters. Puff Daddy hadn't transmogrified into P Diddy. And Usher had three songs in the Top 40. Boyz II Men, Backstreet Boys, Shania Twain, and Third Eye Blind couldn't be avoided on the airwaves. They're now pretty much relegated to 90s disco nights. But technology offered a bright spot. We got the first MP3 player, the Apple Newton, the Intel Celeron and Xeon, the Apple iMac, MySQL, v.90 Modems, StarCraft, and two Stanford students named Larry Page and Sergey Brin took a research project they started in 1996 with Scott Hassan, and started a company called Google (although Hassan would leave Google before it became a company).  There were search engines before Page and Brin. But most produced search results that just weren't that great. In fact, most were focused on becoming portals. They took their queue from AOL and other ISPs who had springboarded people onto the web from services that had been walled gardens. As they became interconnected into a truly open Internet, the amount of diverse content began to explode and people just getting online found it hard to actually find things they were interested in. Going from ISPs who had portals to getting on the Internet, many began using a starting page like Archie, LYCOS, Jughead, Veronica, Infoseek, and of course Yahoo! Yahoo! Had grown fast out of Stanford, having been founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo. By 1998, the Yahoo! Page was full of text. Stock tickers, links to shopping, and even horoscopes. It took a lot of the features from the community builders at AOL. The model to take money was banner ads and that meant keeping people on their pages. Because it wasn't yet monetized and in fact acted against the banner loading business model, searching for what you really wanted to find on the Internet didn't get a lot of love. The search engines or portals of the day had pretty crappy search engines compared to what Page and Brin were building.  They initially called the search engine BackRub back in 1996. As academics (and the children of academics) they knew that the more papers that sited another paper, the more valuable the paper was. Applying that same logic allowed them to rank websites based on how many other sites linked into it. This became the foundation of the original PageRank algorithm, which continues to evolve today. The name BackRub came from the concept of weighting based on back links. That concept had come from a tool called RankDex, which was developed by Robin Li who went on to found Baidu.  Keep in mind, it started as a research project. The transition from research project meant finding a good name. Being math nerds they landed on "Google" a play on "googol", or a 1 followed by a hundred zeros. And within a year they were still running off University of Stanford computers. As their crawlers searched the web they needed more and more computing time. So they went out looking for funding and in 1998 got $100,000 from Sun Microsystems cofounder Andy Bechtolsheim. Jeff Bezos from Amazon, David Cheriton, Ram Shriram and others kicked in some money as well and they got a million dollar round of angel investment. And their algorithm kept getting more and more mature as they were able to catalog more and more sites. By 1999 they went out and raised $25 million from Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, insisting the two invest equally, which hadn't been done.  They were frugal with their money, which allowed them to weather the coming storm when the dot com bubble burst. They build computers to process data using off the shelf hardware they got at Fry's and other computer stores, they brought in some of the best talent in the area as other companies were going bankrupt.  They also used that money to move into offices in Palo Alto and in 2000 started selling ads through a service they called AdWords. It was a simple site and ads were text instead of the banners popular at the time. It was an instant success and I remember being drawn to it after years of looking at that increasingly complicated Yahoo! Landing page. And they successfully inked a deal with Yahoo! to provide organic and paid search, betting the company that they could make lots of money. And they were right. The world was ready for simple interfaces that provided relevant results. And the results were relevant for advertisers who could move to a pay-per-click model and bid on how much they wanted to pay for each click. They could serve ads for nearly any company and with little human interaction because they spent the time and money to build great AI to power the system. You put in a credit card number and they got accurate projections on how successful an ad would be. In fact, ads that were relevant often charged less for clicks than those that weren't. And it quickly became apparent that they were just printing money on the back of the new ad system. They brought in Eric Schmidt to run the company, per the agreement they made when they raised the $25 million and by 2002 they were booking $400M in revenue. And they operated at a 60% margin. These are crazy numbers and enabled them to continue aggressively making investments. The dot com bubble may have burst, but Google was a clear beacon of light that the Internet wasn't done for. In 2003 Google moved into a space now referred to as the Googleplex, in Mountain View California. In a sign of the times, that was land formerly owned by Silicon Graphics. They saw how the ad model could improved beyond paid placement and banners and acquired  is when they launched AdSense. They could afford to with $1.5 billion in revenue.  Google went public in 2004, with revenues of $3.2 billion. Underwritten by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, who took half the standard fees for leading the IPO, Google sold nearly 20 million shares. By then they were basically printing money. By then the company had a market cap of $23 billion, just below that of Yahoo. That's the year they acquired Where 2 Technologies to convert their mapping technology into Google Maps, which was launched in 2005. They also bought Keyhole in 2004, which the CIA had invested in, and that was released as Google Earth in 2005. That technology then became critical for turn by turn directions and the directions were enriched using another 2004 acquisition, ZipDash, to get real-time traffic information. At this point, Google wasn't just responding to queries about content on the web, but were able to respond to queries about the world at large. They also released Gmail and Google Books in 2004. By the end of 2005 they were up to $6.1 billion in revenue and they continued to invest money back into the company aggressively, looking not only to point users to pages but get into content. That's when they bought Android in 2005, allowing them to answer queries using their own mobile operating system rather than just on the web. On the back of $10.6 billion in revenue they bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion in Google stock. This is also when they brought Gmail into Google Apps for Your Domain, now simply known as G Suite - and when they acquired Upstartle to get what we now call Google Docs.  At $16.6 billion in revenues, they bought DoubleClick in 2007 for $3.1 billion to get the relationships DoubleClick had with the ad agencies.  They also acquired Tonic Systems in 2007, which would become Google Slides. Thus completing a suite of apps that could compete with Microsoft Office. By then they were at $16.6 billion in revenues. The first Android release came in 2008 on the back of $21.8 billion revenue. They also released Chrome that year, a project that came out of hiring a number of Mozilla Firefox developers, even after Eric Schmidt had stonewalled doing so for six years. The project had been managed by up and coming Sundar Pichai. That year they also released Google App Engine, to compete with Amazon's EC2.  They bought On2, reCAPTCHA, AdMob, VOIP company Gizmo5, Teracent, and AppJet in 2009 on $23.7 Billion in revenue and Aardvark, reMail, Picnic, DocVerse, Episodic, Plink, Agnilux, LabPixies, BumpTop, Global IP Solutions, Simplify Media, Ruba.com, Invite Media, Metaweb, Zetawire, Instantiations, Slide.com, Jambool, Like.com, Angstro, SocialDeck, QuickSee, Plannr, BlindType, Phonetic Arts, and Widevine Technologies in 2010 on 29.3 billion in revenue. In 2011, Google bought Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion to get access to patents for mobile phones, along with another almost two dozen companies. This was on the back of nearly $38 billion in revenue.  The battle with Apple intensified when Apple removed Google Maps from iOS 6 in 2012. But on $50 billion in revenue, Google wasn't worried. They released the Chromebook in 2012 as well as announcing Google Fiber to be rolled out in Kansas City.  They launched Google Drive They bought Waze for just shy of a billion dollars in 2013 to get crowdsourced data that could help bolster what Google Maps was doing. That was on 55 and a half billion in revenue.  In 2014, at $65 billion in revenue, they bought Nest, getting thermostats and cameras in the portfolio.  Pichai, who had worked in product on Drive, Gmail, Maps, and Chromebook took over Android and by 2015 was named the next CEO of Google when Google restructured with Alphabet being created as the parent of the various companies that made up the portfolio. By then they were up to 74 and a half billion in revenue. And they needed a new structure, given the size and scale of what they were doing.  In 2016 they launched Google Home, which has now brought AI into 52 million homes. They also bought nearly 20 other companies that year, including Apigee, to get an API management platform. By then they were up to nearly $90 billion in revenue. 2017 saw revenues rise to $110 billion and 2018 saw them reach $136 billion.  In 2019, Pichai became the CEO of Alphabet, now presiding over a company with over $160 billion in revenues. One that has bought over 200 companies and employs over 123,000 humans. Google's mission is “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful” and it's easy to connect most of the acquisitions with that goal. I have a lot of friends in and out of IT that think Google is evil. Despite their desire not to do evil, any organization that grows at such a mind-boggling pace is bound to rub people wrong here and there. I've always gladly using their free services even knowing that when you aren't paying for a product, you are the product. We have a lot to be thankful of Google for on this birthday. As Netscape was the symbol of the dot com era, they were the symbol of Web 2.0. They took the mantle for free mail from Hotmail after Microsoft screwed the pooch with that.  They applied math to everything, revolutionizing marketing and helping people connect with information they were most interested in. They cobbled together a mapping solution and changed the way we navigate through cities. They made Google Apps and evolved the way we use documents, making us more collaborative and forcing the competition, namely Microsoft Office to adapt as well. They dominated the mobility market, capturing over 90% of devices. They innovated cloud stacks. And here's the crazy thing, from the beginning, they didn't make up a lot. They borrowed the foundational principals of that original algorithm from RankDex, Gmail was a new and innovative approach to Hotmail, Google Maps was a better Encarta, their cloud offerings were structured similar to those of Amazon. And the list of acquisitions that helped them get patents or talent or ideas to launch innovative services is just astounding.  Chances are that today you do something that touches on Google. Whether it's the original search, controlling the lights in your house with Nest, using a web service hosted in their cloud, sending or receiving email through Gmail or one of the other hundreds of services. The team at Google has left an impact on each of the types of services they enable. They have innovated business and reaped the rewards. And on their 22nd birthday, we all owe them a certain level of thanks for everything they've given us. So until next time, think about all the services you interact with. And think about how you can improve on them. And thank you, for tuning in to this episode of the history of computing podcast. 

The History Of Cisco Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us to innovate (and sometimes cope with) the future! Today we're going to talk about the history of Cisco. They have defined the routing and switching world for decades. Practically since the beginning of the modern era. They've bought companies, they've grown and shrunk and grown again. And their story feels similar in many ways to the organizations that came out of the tail end of the grants tossed around by DARPA. These companies harnessed the incredibly innovative ideas and technology to found the companies who commercialized all of that amazing research and changed the world. These companies ushered in a globally connected network, almost instantaneously transmitting thoughts and hopes and dreams and failures and atrocities. They made money. Massive, massive truckloads of money. But they changed the world for the better. Hopefully in an irrevocable kind of way. The Cisco story is interesting because it symbolizes a time when we were moving from the beginnings of the Internet. Stanford had been involved in ARPAnet since the late 60s but Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn had been advancing TCP and IP in the 70s, establishing IPv4 in 1983. And inspired by ALOHAnet, Bob Metcaffe and the team at Xerox PARC had developed Ethernet in 74. And the computer science research community had embraced these, with the use of Email and time sharing spurring more and more computers to be connected to the Internet. Raw research being done out of curiosity and to make the world a better place. The number of devices connected to the growing network was increasing. And Stanford was right in the center of it. Silicon Valley founders just keep coming out of Stanford but this one, they were professors, and early on. They invented the multi-protocol router and finance the startup with their own personal credit cards. Leonard Bosack and Sandy K. Lerner are credited for starting Cisco, but the company rose out of projects to network computers on the Stanford campus. The project got started after Xerox PARC donated some Alto workstations and Ethernet boards they didn't need anymore in 1980, shortly after Metcaffe left Xerox to start 3COM. And by then Cerf was off to MCI to help spur development of the backbones faster. And NSFnet came along in 1981, bringing even more teams from universities and private companies into the fold. The Director of Computer Facilities, Ralph Gorin, needed to be able to get longer network cables to get even more devices connected. He got what would amount to a switch today. The team was informal. They used a mother board from Andy Bechtolsheim, later the founder of Sun Microsystems. They borrow boards from other people. Bosack himself, who had been an ARPAnet contributor, donated a board. And amongst the most important was the software, which William Yeager wrote, which had a little routing program that connected medical center computers to the computer science department computers and could use the Parc Universal Packet (PUP), XNS, IP and CHAOSNet.. The network linked any types of computers, from Xerox Altos to mainframes using a number of protocols, including the most important for the future, IP, or the Internet Protocol. They called it the Blue Box. And given the number of computers that were at Stanford, various departments around campus started asking for them, as did other universities. There were 5,000 computers connected at Stanford by the time they were done. Seeing a potential business here, Bosack, then running the computers for the Computer Science department, and Lerner, then the Director of Computer Facilities for the Graduate School of Business, founded Cisco Systems in 1984, short for San Francisco, and used an image of the Golden Gate Bridge a their logo. You can see the same pattern unfold all over. When people from MIT built something cool, it was all good. Until someone decided to monetize it. Same with chip makers and others. By 1985, Stanford formally started a new project to link all the computers they could on the campus. Yeager gave the source to Bosack and Kirk Lougheed so they could strip out everything but the Internet Protocol and beef that up. I guess Yeager saw routers as commercially viable and he asked the university if he could sell the Blue Box. They said no. But Bosack and Lougheed were plowing ahead, using Stanford time and resources. But Bosack and Lerner hadn't asked and they were building these routers in their home and it was basically the same thing as the Blue Box, including the software. Most of the people at Stanford thought they were crazy. They kept adding more code and logic and the devices kept getting better. By 1986, Bosack's supervisor Les Earnest caught wind and started to investigate. He went to the dean and Bosack was given an ultimatum, it was go the wacky Cisco thing or stay at Stanford. Bosack quit to try to build Cisco into a company. Lougheed ran into something similar and quit as well. Lerner had already left but Greg Satz and Richard Troiano left as well, bringing them up to 5 people. Yeager was not one of them, even though he'd worked a lot on the software, including on nights and weekends. But everyone was learning and when it was to benefit the university, it was fine. But then when things went commercial, Stanford got the lawyers involved. Yeager looked at the code and still saw some of his in there. I'm sure the Cisco team considered that technical debt. Cisco launched the Advanced Gateway Server (AGS) router in 1986, two years after the Mac was released. The software was initially written by Yeager but improved by Bosack and Lougheed, as the operating system, later called Cisco IOS. Stanford thought about filing a criminal complaint of theft but realized it would be hard to prosecute, and ugly especially given that Stanford itself is a non-profit. They had $200,000 in contracts and couldn't really be paying all this attention to lawsuits and not building the foundations of the emerging Internet. So instead they all agreed to license the software and the imprint of the physical boards being used (known as photomasks), to the fledgling Cisco Systems in 1987. This was crucial as now Cisco could go to market with products without the fear of law suits. Stanford got discounts on future products, $19,300 up front, and $150,000 in royalties. No one knew what Cisco would become so it was considered a fair settlement at the time. Yeager, being a mensch and all, split his 80% of the royalties between the team. He would go on to give us IMAP and Kermit, before moving to Sun Microsystems. Speaking of Sun, there was bad blood between Cisco and Stanford, which I always considered ironic given that a similar thing happened when Sun was founded in some part, using Stanford intellectual property and unused hardware back in 1982. I think the difference is trying to hide things and being effusive with the credit for code and inventions. But as sales increased, Lougheed continued to improve the code and the company hired Bill Graves to be CEO in 1987 who was replaced with John Mordridge in 1988. And the sales continued to skyrocket. Cisco went public in 1990 when they were valued at $224 million. Lerner was fired later that year and Bosack decided to join her. And as is so often the case after a company goes public, the founders who had a vision of monetizing great research, were no longer at the startup. Seeing a need for more switching, Cisco acquired a number of companies including Grand Junction and Crescendo Communications which formed like Voltron to become the Cisco Catalyst, arguably the most prolific switching line in computing. Seeing the success of Cisco and the needs of the market, a number of others started building routers and firewalls. The ocean was getting redder. John Mays had the idea to build a device that would be called the PIX in 1994 and Branley Coile in Athens, Georgia programmed it to become a PBX running on IP. We were running out of IP addresses because at the time, organizations used public IPs. But NAT was about to become a thing and RFC 1918 was being reviewed by the IETF. They brought in Johnson Wu and shipped a device that could run NAT that year, ushering in the era of the Local Area Network. John T. Chambers replaced Mordridge in 1995 and led Cisco as its CEO until 2015. Cisco quickly acquired the company and the Cisco PIX would become the standard firewall used in organizations looking to get their computers on the Internets. The PIX would sell and make Cisco all the monies until it was replaced by the Cisco ASA in 2008. In 1996, Cisco's revenues hit $5.4 billion, making it one of Silicon Valley's biggest success stories. By 1998 they were up to $6B. Their stock peaked in 2000. By the end of the dot-com bubble in the year 2000, Cisco had a more than $500 billion market capitalization. They were building an industry. The CCNA, or Cisco Certified Network Associate, and CCNE, Cisco Certified Network Engineer were the hottest certifications on the market. When I got mine it was much easier than it is today. The market started to fragment after that. Juniper came out strong in 1999 and led a host of competitors that landed in niche markets and expanded into core markets. But the ASA combined Cisco's IPS, VPN concentration, and NAT functionality into one simpler box that actually came with a decent GUI. The GUI seemed like sacrilege at the time. And instead of sitting on top of a network operating system, it ran on Linux. At the top end they could handle 10 million connections, important once devices established and maintained so many connections to various services. And you could bolt on antivirus and other features that were becoming increasingly necessary at various layers of connectivity at the time. They went down-market for routing devices with an acquisition of Linksys in 2003. They acquired Webex in 2007 for over $3 billion dollars and that became the standard in video conferencing until a solid competitor called Zoom emerged recently. They acquired SourceFire in 2013 for $2.7B and have taken the various services offered there to develop Cisco products, such as the anti-virus to be a client-side malware scanning tool called Cisco AMP. Juniper gave away free training unlike the Cisco training that cost thousands of dollars and Alcatel-Lucent, Linksys, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, SonicWall, Barracuda, CheckPoint, and rising giant Huawei led to a death by a thousand competitors and Cisco's first true layoffs by 2011. Cisco acquired OpenDNS in 2015 to establish a core part of what's now known as Cisco Umbrella. This gives organizations insight into what's happening on increasingly geographically distributed devices; especially mobile devices due to a close partnership with Apple. And they acquired Broadsoft in 2017 to get access to even more sellers and technology in the cloud communication space. Why? Because while they continue to pump out appliances for IP connectivity, they just probably can't command a higher market share due to the market dynamics. Every vendor they acquire in that space will spawn two or more new serious competitors. Reaching into other spaces provides a more diverse product portfolio and gives their sellers more SKUs in the quiver to make quotas. And pushes the world forward with newer concepts, like fog computing. Today, Cisco is still based in San Jose and makes around $50 billion a year in revenue and boasts close to 75,000 employees. A lot has happened since those early days. Cisco is one of the most innovative and operationally masterful companies on the planet. Mature companies can have the occasional bumps in the road and will go through peaks and valleys. But their revenues are a reflection of their market leadership, sitting around 50 billion dollars. Yes, most of their true innovation comes from acquisitions today. However, the insights on whom to buy and how to combine technologies, and how to get teams to work well with one another. That's a crazy level of operational efficiency. There's a chance that the Internet explosion could have happened without Cisco effectively taking the mantle in a weird kind of way from BBN for selling and supporting routing during the storm when it came. There's also a chance that without a supply chain of routing appliances to help connect the world that the whole thing might have tumbled down. So consider this: technological determinism. If it hadn't of been Cisco, would someone else have stepped up to get us to the period of the dot com bubble? Maybe. And since they made so much money off the whole thing I've heard that Cisco doesn't deserve our thanks for the part they played. But they do. Without their training and appliances and then intrusion prevention, we might not be where we are today. So thank you Cisco for teaching me everything I know about OSI models and layers and all that. And you know… helping the Internet become ubiquitous and all. And thank you, listener, for tuning in to yet another episode of the history of computing podcast. We are so very lucky to have you. Have a great day!

An airhacks.fm conversation with James Gosling (@errcraft) about: "Hello World" with PDP assembly in 1969, exciting places like universities, the University of Calgary (alumni award), dumpster diving to find usable electronics, software does not consume any resources, James loves building things, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Gort is cool, building Gort from tin foil and cans, there were no answers how to build a brain, working for physics department in the age of 14, measuring the interactions between solar winds and the upper atmosphere, ISIS-2 satellite, PDP-8 assembler, CDC 6400, Fortran, PL-1, spending all the free time with computers, teachers were worried, James enjoyed downhill (skiing), Pascal, Multics, Simula, there was no C before 1976, James wrote emacs at graduate school in C, James's emacs became standard on Unix, Bill Joy kept asking James repeatedly to join Sun, James met Andy Bechtolsheim before joining Sun, James joined Sun in 1984, James was involved with User Interfaces at Sun, Sun was missing out on stuff like telephone headsets, VCRs and IoT was already happening, IoT literally launched Java, re-inventing the wheel and repeating the errors in networking, ideas for the JVM, Three Rivers Computer like Xerox Alto was only interested in hardware and wanted to reuse software, writing software for PERQ with UCSD Pascal, porting from PERQ to VAX, James was too lazy to port and started with transcoding, translation worked surprisingly well and outperformed C, Project Green started in early 1991 and ended in Sep 1992, Java was running at the end of 1991, the implementation of the first Java compiler took a couple of months, the first compiler version was written in Python, the intermediate format was the instruction set itself, Java bytecode follows the polish notation, or execution on a stack machine, OAK was growing outside James's window, OAK was renamed to Java because of legal reasons, James likes coffee ...and tea, Sun was a wonderful place to be, John Gage was cheerleader in chief, Scott (checkout episode #19) didn't like to spend money on marketing, problem with JINIs marketing was lack of marketing, RMI fighted with CORBA (end of first part - to be continued...).

Schon als Schüler gründet Marco Börries sein erstes Unternehmen und ärgert damit direkt Microsoft. Nach langen Jahren im Silicon Valley – unter anderem als strategischer Kopf bei Yahoo – will er jetzt kleineren Firmen das Überleben sichern. Wieso Börries gerade auf diesem Markt riesiges Potenzial sieht, welches Problem er vor allem als Gefahr für Kleinunternehmen ausgemacht hat und wie Verhandlungen mit Steve Jobs so gelaufen sind, erzählt er im OMR Podcast. Alle Themen des Podcasts mit Enfore-CEO Marco Börries im Überblick: Wie Marco Börries schon als 16-Jähriger mit seiner Firma Microsoft geärgert – und das vor 33 Jahren (ab 1:36) Börries‘ Firma war „Konformationsgeld-finanziert“ (ab 3:59) Der Dotcom-Crash als Motivation für die nächste Firma (ab 4:49) Die Vision der verbundenen Geräte über die Cloud hatte Börries schon 2001 (ab 8:20) Wie Börries Yahoo in die mobile Zukunft geführt hat (ab 12:56) Marco Börries hat 2006 Yahoo-Funktionen für das erste iPhone mit Steve Jobs verhandelt. Und so lief das: (ab 17:34) Woran ist Yahoo am Ende eigentlich gescheitert? (ab 24:30) Marco Börries hat schon mit vielen großen CEOs an einem Tisch gesessen. Warum ihn Steve Jobs am tiefsten beeindruckt hat: (ab 27:18) Wie hat Börries Andy Bechtolsheim kennengelernt – einen der ersten Google-Investoren und Co-Gründer von Sun Microsystems? (ab 32:21) Was steckt hinter seinem aktuellen Projekt Enfore? Und warum ist er zurück nach Hamburg gezogen? (ab 33:24) Wie löst Börries das Problem, dass Kleinunternehmen in der Akquisition eigentlich zu teuer sind – im Vergleich zu ihrer Lifetime Value? (ab 39:05) Wie sieht der typische Enfore-Kunde aus? (ab 41:17) Wie funktioniert die Vermarktung der Enfore-Produkte über Partner wie die Telekom? (ab 44:26) Warum hat die Entwicklung des Enfore-Produkts acht Jahre gedauert? (ab 47:45) Wie groß ist Enfore nach einem Jahr am Markt? (ab 50:15) Seine ersten drei Firmen hat Börries ohne VC-Geld aufgebaut. Warum ist das bei der vierten anders? (ab 50:47) Was war der größte Deal unter vielen großen Deals, die Marco Börries in seinem Leben abgeschlossen hat? (ab 54:44) Zusammenfassend: Welche große Vision steht hinter seinem Unternehmen Enfore? (ab 55:57)

An airhacks.fm conversation with Scott McNealy (@scottmcnealy), co-founder of Sun Microsystems, about: how Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy, Andy Bechtolsheim and Scott started Stanford University Network (SUN), Onyx Systems and Pizza Boxes for 40k USD, Sun opensourced 80% of its R & D budget, Sun was top 40 R & D spenders, opensource lowers the barrier to exit, IBM buying RedHat, Sun was the first company in 1982 shipping with TCP/IP, Scott was smart and the other founders were brilliant, Bill Joy wanted to open NFS or "what is a phone worth which doesn't connect with other phones", Java Ring was on the cover of Fortune Magazine, Network is the Computer, Java was the greatest marketing efforts ever, missing the router hype was the earliest mistake at Sun, the beginnings of JavaSoft, Bill Joy wanted to work with James Gosling, Java was invented to build a "clicker", Netscape, Java, JavaScript, LiveScript, JavaSoft was loosely coupled and highly aligned business unit, Java went with Netscape viral, being nervous and unprepared as speaker - people would like to hear what do you think as a speaker, "you don't have privacy, get over it", Steve Jobs at JavaOne, Andy Bechtolsheim was the "industrial" Steve Jobs, Sun was having fun without offending somebody, John Gage - the Chief Science "Fiction" officer and the perfect MC for Java, 130 dollars for 3rd grade text book -- the beginnings of curriki, global community of opensourcing education, curriki is a wildly successful startup, Scott is chairman of wayin.com and still spends a lot of time with curriki, corporate capitalism - private charity or Seperation of Concerns, the job of a chairman, Larry Ellison and Scott, Scott met Larry on the airplane in early eighties -- and Larry gave Scott a shaver, behind the scenes of Sun's acquisition, Wayin -- the new project, Scott at twitter: @scottmcnealy.

Panel Brendan Eich Joe Eames Aaron Frost AJ ONeal Jamison Dance Tim Caswell Charles Max Wood Discussion 01:57 – Brendan Eich Introduction JavaScript [Wiki] Brendan Eich [Wiki] 02:14 – Origin of JavaScript Java Netscape Jim Clark Marc Andreesen NCSA Mosaic NCSA HTTPd Lynx (Web Browser) Lou Montulli Silicon Graphics Kernel Tom Paquin Kipp Hickman MicroUnity Sun Microsystems Andreas Bechtolsheim Bill Joy Sun-1 Scheme Programming Language Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs – 2nd Edition (MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) by Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman & Julie Sussman Guy Steele Gerald Sussman SPDY Rob McCool Mike McCool Apache Mocha Peninsula Creamery, Palo Alto, CA Main () and Other Methods (C# vs Java) Static in Java, Static Variables, Static Methods, Static Classes 10:38 – Other Languages for Programmers Visual Basic Chrome Blacklist Firefox 12:38 – Naming JavaScript and Writing VMs Canvas Andrew Myers 16:14 – Envisioning JavaScript’s Platform Web 2.0 AJAX Hidaho Design Opera Mozilla Logo Smalltalk Self HyperTalk Bill Atkinson HyperCard Star Wars Trench Run 2.0 David Ungar Craig Chambers Lars Bak Strongtalk TypeScript HotSpot V8 Dart Jamie Zawinski 24:42 – Working with ECMA Bill Gates Blackbird Spyglass Carl Cargill Jan van den Beld Philips Mike Cowlishaw Borland David M. Gay ECMAScript Lisp Richard Gabriel 31:26 – Naming Mozilla Jamie Zawinski Godzilla 31:57 – Time-Outs 32:53 – Functions Clojure John Rose Oracle Scala Async.io 38:37 – XHR and Microsoft Flash Hadoop Ricardo Jenez Ken Smith Brent Noorda Ray Noorda .NET Shon Katzenberger Anders Hejlsberg NCSA File Formats 45:54 – SpiderMonkey Chris Houck Brendan Eich and Douglas Crockford – TXJS 2010 Douglas Crockford JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford TXJS.com ActionScript Flex Adobe E4X BEA Systems John Schneider Rhino JScript roku Waldemar Horwat Harvard Putnam Math Competition Chris Wilson Silverlight Allen Wirfs-Brock NDC Oslo 2014 JSConf Brendan JSConf Talks 59:58 – JavaScript and Mozilla GIP SSLeay Eric A. Young Tim Hudson Digital Styles Raptor Gecko ICQ and AIM PowerPlant CodeWarrior Camino David Hyatt Lotus Mitch Kapor Ted Leonsis Mitchell Baker David Baren Phoenix Tinderbox Harmony 1:14:37 – Surprises with Evolution of JavaScript Ryan Dahl node.js Haskell Elm Swift Unity Games Angular Ember.js Dojo jQuery react ClojureScript JavaScript Jabber Episode #107: ClojureScript & Om with David Nolen MVC 01:19:43 – Angular’s HTML Customization Sweet.js JavaScript Jabber Episode #039: Sweet.js with Tim Disney TC39 Rick Waldron 01:22:27 – Applications with JavaScript SPA’s Shumway Project IronRuby 01:25:45 – Future of Web and Frameworks LLVM Chris Lattner Blog Epic Games Emscripten Autodesk PortableApps WebGL 01:29:39 – ASM.js Dart.js John McCutchen Monster Madness Anders Hejlsberg, Steve Lucco, Luke Hoban: TypeScript 0.9 – Generics and More (Channel 9, 2013) Legacy 01:32:58 – Brendan’s Future with JavaScript Picks hapi.js (Aaron) JavaScript Disabled: Should I Care? (Aaron) Aaron’s Frontend Masters Course on ES6 (Aaron) Brendan’s “Cool Story Bro” (AJ) [YouTube] Queen – Don't Stop Me Now (AJ) Trending.fm (AJ) WE ARE DOOMED soundtrack EP by Robby Duguay (Jamison) Hohokum Soundtrack (Jamison) Nashville Outlaws: A Tribute to Mötley Crüe (Joe) Audible (Joe) Stripe (Chuck) Guardians of the Galaxy (Brendan)

Panel Brendan Eich Joe Eames Aaron Frost AJ ONeal Jamison Dance Tim Caswell Charles Max Wood Discussion 01:57 – Brendan Eich Introduction JavaScript [Wiki] Brendan Eich [Wiki] 02:14 – Origin of JavaScript Java Netscape Jim Clark Marc Andreesen NCSA Mosaic NCSA HTTPd Lynx (Web Browser) Lou Montulli Silicon Graphics Kernel Tom Paquin Kipp Hickman MicroUnity Sun Microsystems Andreas Bechtolsheim Bill Joy Sun-1 Scheme Programming Language Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs – 2nd Edition (MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) by Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman & Julie Sussman Guy Steele Gerald Sussman SPDY Rob McCool Mike McCool Apache Mocha Peninsula Creamery, Palo Alto, CA Main () and Other Methods (C# vs Java) Static in Java, Static Variables, Static Methods, Static Classes 10:38 – Other Languages for Programmers Visual Basic Chrome Blacklist Firefox 12:38 – Naming JavaScript and Writing VMs Canvas Andrew Myers 16:14 – Envisioning JavaScript’s Platform Web 2.0 AJAX Hidaho Design Opera Mozilla Logo Smalltalk Self HyperTalk Bill Atkinson HyperCard Star Wars Trench Run 2.0 David Ungar Craig Chambers Lars Bak Strongtalk TypeScript HotSpot V8 Dart Jamie Zawinski 24:42 – Working with ECMA Bill Gates Blackbird Spyglass Carl Cargill Jan van den Beld Philips Mike Cowlishaw Borland David M. Gay ECMAScript Lisp Richard Gabriel 31:26 – Naming Mozilla Jamie Zawinski Godzilla 31:57 – Time-Outs 32:53 – Functions Clojure John Rose Oracle Scala Async.io 38:37 – XHR and Microsoft Flash Hadoop Ricardo Jenez Ken Smith Brent Noorda Ray Noorda .NET Shon Katzenberger Anders Hejlsberg NCSA File Formats 45:54 – SpiderMonkey Chris Houck Brendan Eich and Douglas Crockford – TXJS 2010 Douglas Crockford JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford TXJS.com ActionScript Flex Adobe E4X BEA Systems John Schneider Rhino JScript roku Waldemar Horwat Harvard Putnam Math Competition Chris Wilson Silverlight Allen Wirfs-Brock NDC Oslo 2014 JSConf Brendan JSConf Talks 59:58 – JavaScript and Mozilla GIP SSLeay Eric A. Young Tim Hudson Digital Styles Raptor Gecko ICQ and AIM PowerPlant CodeWarrior Camino David Hyatt Lotus Mitch Kapor Ted Leonsis Mitchell Baker David Baren Phoenix Tinderbox Harmony 1:14:37 – Surprises with Evolution of JavaScript Ryan Dahl node.js Haskell Elm Swift Unity Games Angular Ember.js Dojo jQuery react ClojureScript JavaScript Jabber Episode #107: ClojureScript & Om with David Nolen MVC 01:19:43 – Angular’s HTML Customization Sweet.js JavaScript Jabber Episode #039: Sweet.js with Tim Disney TC39 Rick Waldron 01:22:27 – Applications with JavaScript SPA’s Shumway Project IronRuby 01:25:45 – Future of Web and Frameworks LLVM Chris Lattner Blog Epic Games Emscripten Autodesk PortableApps WebGL 01:29:39 – ASM.js Dart.js John McCutchen Monster Madness Anders Hejlsberg, Steve Lucco, Luke Hoban: TypeScript 0.9 – Generics and More (Channel 9, 2013) Legacy 01:32:58 – Brendan’s Future with JavaScript Picks hapi.js (Aaron) JavaScript Disabled: Should I Care? (Aaron) Aaron’s Frontend Masters Course on ES6 (Aaron) Brendan’s “Cool Story Bro” (AJ) [YouTube] Queen – Don't Stop Me Now (AJ) Trending.fm (AJ) WE ARE DOOMED soundtrack EP by Robby Duguay (Jamison) Hohokum Soundtrack (Jamison) Nashville Outlaws: A Tribute to Mötley Crüe (Joe) Audible (Joe) Stripe (Chuck) Guardians of the Galaxy (Brendan)

Panel Brendan Eich Joe Eames Aaron Frost AJ ONeal Jamison Dance Tim Caswell Charles Max Wood Discussion 01:57 – Brendan Eich Introduction JavaScript [Wiki] Brendan Eich [Wiki] 02:14 – Origin of JavaScript Java Netscape Jim Clark Marc Andreesen NCSA Mosaic NCSA HTTPd Lynx (Web Browser) Lou Montulli Silicon Graphics Kernel Tom Paquin Kipp Hickman MicroUnity Sun Microsystems Andreas Bechtolsheim Bill Joy Sun-1 Scheme Programming Language Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs – 2nd Edition (MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) by Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman & Julie Sussman Guy Steele Gerald Sussman SPDY Rob McCool Mike McCool Apache Mocha Peninsula Creamery, Palo Alto, CA Main () and Other Methods (C# vs Java) Static in Java, Static Variables, Static Methods, Static Classes 10:38 – Other Languages for Programmers Visual Basic Chrome Blacklist Firefox 12:38 – Naming JavaScript and Writing VMs Canvas Andrew Myers 16:14 – Envisioning JavaScript’s Platform Web 2.0 AJAX Hidaho Design Opera Mozilla Logo Smalltalk Self HyperTalk Bill Atkinson HyperCard Star Wars Trench Run 2.0 David Ungar Craig Chambers Lars Bak Strongtalk TypeScript HotSpot V8 Dart Jamie Zawinski 24:42 – Working with ECMA Bill Gates Blackbird Spyglass Carl Cargill Jan van den Beld Philips Mike Cowlishaw Borland David M. Gay ECMAScript Lisp Richard Gabriel 31:26 – Naming Mozilla Jamie Zawinski Godzilla 31:57 – Time-Outs 32:53 – Functions Clojure John Rose Oracle Scala Async.io 38:37 – XHR and Microsoft Flash Hadoop Ricardo Jenez Ken Smith Brent Noorda Ray Noorda .NET Shon Katzenberger Anders Hejlsberg NCSA File Formats 45:54 – SpiderMonkey Chris Houck Brendan Eich and Douglas Crockford – TXJS 2010 Douglas Crockford JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford TXJS.com ActionScript Flex Adobe E4X BEA Systems John Schneider Rhino JScript roku Waldemar Horwat Harvard Putnam Math Competition Chris Wilson Silverlight Allen Wirfs-Brock NDC Oslo 2014 JSConf Brendan JSConf Talks 59:58 – JavaScript and Mozilla GIP SSLeay Eric A. Young Tim Hudson Digital Styles Raptor Gecko ICQ and AIM PowerPlant CodeWarrior Camino David Hyatt Lotus Mitch Kapor Ted Leonsis Mitchell Baker David Baren Phoenix Tinderbox Harmony 1:14:37 – Surprises with Evolution of JavaScript Ryan Dahl node.js Haskell Elm Swift Unity Games Angular Ember.js Dojo jQuery react ClojureScript JavaScript Jabber Episode #107: ClojureScript & Om with David Nolen MVC 01:19:43 – Angular’s HTML Customization Sweet.js JavaScript Jabber Episode #039: Sweet.js with Tim Disney TC39 Rick Waldron 01:22:27 – Applications with JavaScript SPA’s Shumway Project IronRuby 01:25:45 – Future of Web and Frameworks LLVM Chris Lattner Blog Epic Games Emscripten Autodesk PortableApps WebGL 01:29:39 – ASM.js Dart.js John McCutchen Monster Madness Anders Hejlsberg, Steve Lucco, Luke Hoban: TypeScript 0.9 – Generics and More (Channel 9, 2013) Legacy 01:32:58 – Brendan’s Future with JavaScript Picks hapi.js (Aaron) JavaScript Disabled: Should I Care? (Aaron) Aaron’s Frontend Masters Course on ES6 (Aaron) Brendan’s “Cool Story Bro” (AJ) [YouTube] Queen – Don't Stop Me Now (AJ) Trending.fm (AJ) WE ARE DOOMED soundtrack EP by Robby Duguay (Jamison) Hohokum Soundtrack (Jamison) Nashville Outlaws: A Tribute to Mötley Crüe (Joe) Audible (Joe) Stripe (Chuck) Guardians of the Galaxy (Brendan)

In this archive of a livecast from the Intel Developer Forum, Mario Paniccia, an Intel Fellow and GM of Silicon Photonics at Intel and celebrity guest Andy Bechtolsheim, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems and current Founder, Chief Development Officer and Chairman of Arista Networks, stop by to talk about the need for 100 Gbps for large networks with massive aggregate throughputs. The biggest challenge to mainstream deployment is the cost of optics, which has been addressed with Intel Silicon Photonics by marrying optics with the silicon manufacturing process. For more information, visit http://intel.ly/SiliconPhotonics.

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Kim Polese CEO, SpikeSource, Inc. Date: July 17, 2007 NCWIT Interview with Kim Polese BIO: Kim Polese is the Chairman at CrowdSmart and former CEO of SpikeSource, Inc., a software company based in Silicon Valley. The company is backed by venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and has developed an advanced automated testing technology for certifying interoperability of open source software, creating a continual "UL"-style certification for Global 2000 companies that depend on open source software applications to run their core business operations. The automation enables the delivery of low-cost, high-quality software to a mass market, resulting in more affordable and dependable software applications for business of all sizes worldwide. Prior to joining SpikeSource in August 2004, Kim co-founded Marimba, Inc., a leading provider of systems management solutions, in 1996. Marimba was acquired by BMC Software in June 2004. Kim served as President, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairman of Marimba, leading the company through a successful public offering and to profitability in 2000. Before co-founding Marimba, Kim worked in software management at Sun Microsystems and was the original product manager for Java, leading its launch in 1995. Prior to joining Sun, Kim was with IntelliCorp Inc., consulting for Fortune 500 companies in the development of expert systems. Kim earned a Bachelor’s degree in Biophysics from the University of California, Berkeley and studied Computer Science at the University of Washington in Seattle. Kim serves on several boards, including the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, the University of California President's Board on Science and Innovation, UC Berkeley's College of Engineering, the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, and the Global Security Institute. Lucy Sanders: Hi, this is Lucy Sanders. I'm the CEO of the National Center for Women in Information Technology. This interview is one in a series of interviews that we're doing with fabulous IT entrepreneurs. With me today are Larry Nelson and Lee Kennedy. Larry is CEO of w3w3.com, and Lee is an insulate director. Welcome, Larry and Lee. Larry Nelson: Well, thank you. That's so great being able to get together and help support this type of thing. The Heroes program is sponsored by NCWIT, wonderful. At w3w3.com we archive everything and we push it out. We have a large audience, and we're happy to be part of this. Lee Kennedy: Thanks, Lucy. I'm excited to be here and be part of the interview series. Lucy: Today we're interviewing Kim Polese. We're so excited, Kim, to have you on the call. Kim Polese: Thank you, delighted to be here. Lucy: I have to say that your career has been one that I think is just awesome. When I look back at some of the things you've been involved with for example Java. I remember when Sun released Java. Us techies at Bell Labs were pretty excited about that, because it really enabled the Internet to come alive. You could bring applications along with the static web pages. That was just tremendously thrilling. Then, when you moved over into Marimba, worked on push technology, again, we were all rather thrilled that we could have stuff come to our desktop without even asking for it. That's pretty amazing. And now you have a new company Spikesource is a couple of years old, is that right? Kim: Yes. Actually, it was founded in 2003 and I joined. It was an incubation project at Kline & Perkins, a venture firm here in Silicon Valley. I joined in the fall of 2004. Lucy: I just think you've been on the leading edge of all of these different trends in software and software development. Why don't you give the listeners a little bit of information about Spikesource? Kim: Sure. I'd be happy to. So, Spikesource, basically its mission is in a nutshell to democratize software, and do that by bringing open source software to a mass market. When I say "democratize software", I mean make software as low‑cost and as easy to maintain, to use as possible. Software's a wonderful thing; it powers all sorts of service and appliances, the world around use every day. But it's also really complicated both to develop, package, maintain and support. Open source has provided a wonderful new abundance, a new ecosystem of software applications, components and infrastructure. It is really totally changing the software industry in a variety of ways, and really accelerating innovation. Software is getting better faster. There are many more people who are banging on it and making it better every day. That's a wonderful thing. It's an exciting time to be in the software world. But there's also a challenge with abundance. Businesses that have been using open source find very quickly that they get into a lot of overhead time and cost in maintaining open source application. The applications typically consist of dozens or hundreds of different open source components, all of which need to be updated, maintained and made to work together, continually integrated and tested. That's a huge problem. So, what Spikesource is doing is really helping that problem through automation. We're automating specifically the process of maintaining that software and ensuring that the software applications continue to work, stay up and running and are free of viruses, and so forth. It's really making the process of maintaining open source software invisible to the user. We're using very interesting approaches in computer science and automating the build test patch process, and creating an automatic test framework for basically packaging up, distributing, supporting and maintaining these open source applications. We're bringing to market a variety of open source applications. Basically taking many of the best applications out there on the Internet, email, content management, business intelligence, CRM and so forth, and offering those as packaged applications to business of all sizes. There's a low‑cost subscription maintenance stream along with it. So, in this way when I said "democratizing software", again, it's really about making software much easier to buy, to use, and to have supported at a much lower cost. That's now all possible because of open source and because of the new technologies that we're working on and others are participating in as well in innovating, automating and maintaining the software. Lucy: I think that the technologies involved with software engineering are some of the most complex. No question. And so, I can only imagine that the technologies that you're using at Spikesource are pretty advanced. Kim: Yes. Lucy: For sure. And that gets me to the first question that we wanted to ask you. In addition to some of the technologies that you're using today at Spikesource, what other technologies do you see on the horizon that you find particularly cool? Kim: Well, the open source world is really where most of the most interesting innovation is happening, in my view, in software today. That's because of the power of collaboration. You take, for example, virtualization. Virtualization, or virtualization software, there's a huge amount of innovation happening there. You see a lot of not only developers all over the world who are contributing to open source virtualization technologies, but also big companies that are standardizing on open source and using it to drive greater value in their hardware platforms. So, to me in general the most exciting place to be in software today is in the open source world. In virtually every category there's tremendous innovation happening and really a new generation of software is being developed. And there are a lot of very important supporting technologies and underlying infrastructure that's also helping make this happen. A lot of the service‑oriented architecture, the web services, the easy to use now APIs that make it possible to put pieces of software together more easily, and new techniques like Agile programming and so forth to make it easier to build software faster... But so much of that, again, really does come out of the open source world. We're finding that the open source model of building software is becoming more prevalent even within companies and across companies in vertical industries such as financial services and retail. Companies are now beginning to collaborate on creating applications that they can share to make their respective businesses more efficient. Lucy: In fact, I'm on a commission looking at the R&D ecosystem for IT. We were at Harvard and we listened to a researcher not too long ago who was studying open source and the movement of companies into open source. It was pretty interesting how that platform is really emerging. How did you first get into technology, Kim? Kim: I was actually a girl geek. I grew up in Berkeley, California and I was fortunate to really be exposed to science at a very early age. I started entering science fairs as a kid in elementary school and just found that I loved the idea of creating something new and exploring, and testing the limits of what was possible. Then, I found a place called the Lords Hall of Science, which is a public science museum here in the Bay Area. I went up there, again, as a kid in elementary school and started playing on the computers. There was a program called Eliza which was an early artificial intelligence software application that was running on the computers there. It was kind of like an online psychotherapist, and I really loved playing on the computer that ran Eliza and trying to get Eliza to go into a loop or act like a computer, again, see the limits of what was possible. So, all of that sparked my curiosity, my interest in not only science but specifically computers and software. I ultimately ended up getting a degree in biophysics, but at Berkeley I started to get more and more into computer programming and software development as an undergrad. That increasingly became where my interests were directed. Lucy: That's really cool. Kim, tell us why you're an entrepreneur and what it is about entrepreneurship that really makes you tick. Kim: Well, I've always loved creating new things. I love inventing and coming up with a new idea, running with it and seeing what's possible. There's nothing more exciting than setting out with a whole team of people on a mission, climb a mountain and actually doing it together, making it happen. So, I think it's the creativity. It's the element of being able to chart your own course, come up with your own idea. It's the challenge of making that idea actually into a successful business, which is two very distinct elements to building a successful company in the technology area. One is coming up with a great technology, but the other is actually making it work in the economic sense and the sense of the market acceptance. That turned out to be a whole separate creative process. All of that is very challenging. I love a challenge. I love climbing mountains and scaling new heights, because it's just fun when you get there and it's fun along the way. So, I found that that was just something I gravitated towards. I think it's just something that's been inside me forever. Lucy: And it's a pretty good view when you get to the top. Larry: I'll say. Kim, I can't help but reflect back. Quite some time ago, did I hear that you were one of those early radicals that were pushing free and open source software? Kim: Well, I did grow up in Berkeley, it's true. And I was hanging out at Cal when Bill Joy was a grad student. So, I do have it probably in my DNA by now. But I didn't actually get to immerse myself in open source until I joined Spikesource in 2004 and really started doing it as full‑time and really wrapping my head around the whole open source world and building a business. Larry: You've done a wonderful job. Now, you mentioned Bill Joy. We interview him probably five, six, seven years ago. Along the line, did you have any particular mentor, or support person or support group that really helped along the way? Kim: Well, I was very fortunate to work at a great company for seven years, Sun Microsystems. Sun was full of very bright I'd say demanding, people where there was a bar that was set high and you had to achieve more than you thought you were capable of. I look at the management team, the founders of Sun, Scott, Scott McNealy, Bill Joy, Vinod Khosla and Andy Bechtolsheim. They really were a great inspiration to me, each of them. Also, to me, at that time in the '80s as I was developing my career, Carol Vartz, who was a senior executive at Sun at the time, I really looked up to her. Sandy Kurtzig, Heidi Roizen, these were women who were really leading the way in building companies and proving that women could achieve great things in technology and software. So, I was surrounded I guess by many inspirational leaders, and I learned what I could from each of them and then really molded that into what I decided to do next, how I developed my career. Lucy: Kim, you've been in the thick of Silicon Valley and all the changes that have taken place over the last 10, 20 years, and you've had such an exciting career. When you look back, what's the toughest thing that you've had to do in your career? Kim: Well, there are many challenges in building a company. I'd say probably the toughest thing as a manager is letting someone go. It's actually making a decision that you know is right for the company and right for ultimately that individual, but always a tough thing to do. I'd say that's probably the top of the list, and that's just one of those management challenges that everyone has to deal with at a certain point. So, that's on the not so fun part. There are also challenges just inherently in building a business. I'd say the other thing that I have faced repeatedly, but actually is kind of a fun challenge, is the need to adapt to change. When you're starting a company and you're in a new market, you've got a new idea, it's unproven, there's precedent, you can't become attached to that one plan that you're going to execute on it. There's always going to be a reason why it doesn't exactly turn out that way, another twist in the path, another unexpected obstacle, but then unexpected opportunity at the same time. And so, adapting to change and being comfortable with change on a daily basis is something that can real tough at first, but once you get used to it, it's actually exhilarating. You love the challenge of being able to rise to the occasion and adjust course, change course as needed, and still keep your eye on the ultimate goal that you're headed towards. It's just that the path along the way is different from what you thought it would be. I'd say that's a more fun, tough thing that I've faced in business. Lucy: Well, and in face you ultimately get to the place where you really enjoy change. You wouldn't want to be working in something where that wasn't part of what you did every day. It really becomes part of the challenge. I think that's wonderful advice. You can share with us, a bit more advice that you might give to young people about entrepreneurship if they were sitting in the room with you right now. Kim: Sure. Well, there is a lot to say. If I were to boil it down to some of the things that come to mind first, it really has to do what I was just talking about. You might have a great idea, but you can't forget the market that you are launching it into, and all of the other constituents that need to contribute to the success of what you are setting out to do. For example, you may be launching a product in the market; the most brilliant product that anyone has developed or thought of but it turns out that it's just too early. A good example of this is I worked in artificial intelligence, AI, software back in the 80's. We built a fantastic software system that was an expert system, but the hardware requirements were prohibitive in terms of cost and just the overall expense of delivering an expert system. You had $50000.00+ computers required, and ultimately there wasn't a mass market for that back in the 80's. The software wasn't ready for the environment around it that it needed to rely on, so for entrepreneurs I'd say don't get too enamored of your idea. Make sure that you see the full picture and that you find a way to make it palatable in the market today and then chart a path to where you ultimately believe you can go and what the ultimate end goal is. But, don't be too wrapped up with getting to the end goal right off the bat. So, that's one thing. The other thing I'd say is get comfortable with saying "no" because as an entrepreneur you want to say "yes" to every possibility and every potential customer and partner that comes along. There is a temptation to do that, especially early on. You have to have the discipline to say, "You know what? We'd love to deliver this product into both the enterprise market and the consumer market, and we know the software is capable of working for both markets, but we're just going to focus on the enterprise market". That's the first step. From there we can build a bigger company and ultimately get to the broader market. Saying "no", we had to do this at Marimba, a decision we made very early on to focus on the enterprise and not the consumer market. It turned out to be the best decision we made, but it was a very tough one at the time because I knew we could do anything. We could absolutely serve a broader market, but you have to have the discipline to know what you are capable of and take one step at a time. Lucy: That's some very sage advice. What personal characteristics do you think have given you advantages as an entrepreneur? Kim: Probably the greatest one is persistence. It's never losing sight of that goal that you are charging toward and never losing faith that you will achieve that goal and being totally flexible and able to deal with any obstacle that comes along. Whether it's an obstacle in the market, a challenge with the team, whatever it happens to be, never giving up, never ever, ever, ever giving up. If you have that, you'll find a way to get to where you are going no matter what. I think that's probably for every successful entrepreneur you will find that that is the primary characteristic that made them. Lucy: In fact, we're finding that with this series of interviews. I believe that one of the people we interviewed a few weeks ago said there is this line between persistence and pesky. And it's OK to cross over it from time to time. Kim: Yeah, that's probably true. Lucy: I want to switch a minute into this issue of balance. I know there is a lot written about work and personal balance, and so we just wanted to ask, how do you bring balance into your life? Kim: Well, that's a great question. One thing I've always made sure to do is to continue to pursue the things I love to do in the rest of my life. One thing I love is dance. I've always done that, and I still do ballet and jazz. I've done it since I was a kid and will never stop. I find that it's tremendous; it's literally all balance. It's a great counterpoint, too, to do what I do all day long. It's also requires great focus and attention, and you just can't sort of space out while you're learning a piece of choreography. So, that's one thing I love. I love also mountain biking and getting out and just charging up a mountain. So, those are the things I have always done and will continue to do. I find also that the mind‑body balance is really important. If you are physically fit your mind is much sharper and you are able to run a marathon in business as well as physically. So, that's one way. The other is just time for family and friends. I always make time for family and friends. It's not enough ever, but you have to stand back every so often and think about what's really important in life. Those connections and relationships are really more important than anything, so I try and not always succeed as well as I'd like. But, I try as much as possible to keep that at the forefront, too. Larry Nelson: Kim, I want to thank you for what you've shared so far. It's easy to see by the discussion here why you were chosen as one of the heroes, that's for sure. Now, you have already achieved a great deal, and I know you are going to take Spike Source to another level. In addition to Spike Source, what is your next thing? What are you going to do next? Kim: Well, one thing I've always done is actually not plan too far in advance. Lucy: That's a good idea. Kim: The reason is sort of tongue‑in‑cheek, but I find that serendipity is a wonderful thing. I am in the most dynamic, exciting industry and, I think, place for the area and the world. I am surrounded by brilliant, creative people, and that network is ever expanding so I know that whatever I do next it will evolve from creating something new together with a team of people and doing our best to make an impact in some positive way in the world. I personally would like to find a way to make an impact in the world that goes beyond my industry. I haven't quite figured out when and how and what that will be, but that's something that I'd like to do in my life. I'm sure that the path will appear as it always has. As long as I follow my passion and surround myself with people that I love working with and respect and appreciate, I know that life will unfold in wonderful ways. I have faith. Lucy: I think that's just really well said. I'm just sitting here thinking you are just one of the top web entrepreneurs of our age. It's wonderful. We are so thrilled to have talked to you. Kim: Thank you. I am more than honored to be part of this series. Thank you. Larry: A couple of words that stick out in my mind, too, in addition to hear all this democratized, open source and serendipity. Lucy: That's great. And see I'm a techie so what stands out for me, open source, Java. So, Kim, thank you, thank you very much. Kim: Thank you. Lucy: We appreciate your joining us. I want to remind listeners where these podcasts can be found at www.ncwit.org and also at w3w3.com. Please do pass these along to friends who might want to listen. Kim, thanks again. Kim: Thank you, my pleasure. Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Kim PoleseInterview Summary: Kim Polese has technology -- and innovation -- in her blood. Ever wondered who coined the term "Java"? That was Kim. Release Date: July 17, 2007Interview Subject: Kim PoleseInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry Nelson, Lee KennedyDuration: 20:04