https://www.listennotes.com/e/db0264178b0d4638bb18f27f490a17c0

Hi, everyone. I am really, really excited to have my mentor and someone I really look up to, Scott McNelly, founder and CEO of Sun Microsystems.

How can I be your mentor when you're so much older than I am?

Oh, that's right. Sometimes you can learn from young people. and somebody who is a legend in technology industry. So I'm really, really honored to have Scott McNelly. Scott, thanks for joining.

Always happy to be with the infamous Imran.

That is, I appreciate that. So, you know, where I thought we should start is going back the beginning of Sun Microsystems. So I think if I'm correct, you started Sun Microsystems with Vinod and Andy and Bill Joy at age 28.

27.

27. Okay. Even younger. So what did you guys see that made you guys start Sun Microsystems? What was the vision and what made you start? Did you always wanted to be an entrepreneur? Walk me through that time and what get you guys started?

To be fair, I have to give Andy credit for creating the Stanford University Network, hence Sun. workstation while being a PhD student at Stanford. And I have to give Vinod credit for getting fired at Daisy Systems and looking for, which was a CAD startup, CAD workstation startup back in 1982. And he ran into an article about Andy's workstation and he said, this is the general purpose workstation, not just the CAD workstation. That market was just starting with Apollo and he called me up and he said, I'm gonna go meet Andy, let's go meet him. And we went and met Andy and Andy said, I need somebody to build this machine. I'm here and I'm making them by hand here at Stanford. And Vinod said, we'll go raise money to go get it done. And I introduced him to a venture capitalist for the company I'd been working for. And he knew a venture capitalist and they committed Right away, they each put a million dollars into, that was a lot of money back then.

That was a lot of money in 1982. Who were those venture capital?

It was US Venture Partners and Kleiner Perkins. And it was John Doerr's, maybe John Doerr's first project ever. And we told Kleiner, can't you give us a, you know, like one of the good guys at Kleiner Perkins? But anyhow, Vinod took me out to McDonald's after the meeting with Andy and with Bob Sakam from USVP, who had said he was in. And Doug Broyles, who said he was in from US or, yeah, US Venture Partners. No, well, I can't even remember, I can't even remember his venture firm at the time. But at McDonald's, he says, when you're quitting your job, Scott, and I go, I'm making 40 grand a year in Onyx Systems and, you know, why would I go do a startup? And he said, you can't bag out on me now. And so I went in the next day and quit. and so it was us with Andy, and then eventually we tracked down Bill Joy. But, I mean, the real impetus here was that Andy started this company because he said I would go into the DEC VAX shared server room at Stanford at four in the morning, and it was still busy. He said, I want my own computer. I want my own microprocessor. I want my own memory. I want my own. display, I want my own system. So, you know, the PC was starting to take off at that time, and we just made the PC for, you know, technical people, for engineers and eventually Wall Street, that sort of thing. And it just, it took off. But the other piece of it that Bill Joy brought was distributed computing, and he invented NFS, and we adopted tcpip. We were the first company to put tcpip on every computer we shipped. that's a fairly interesting advantage we had. Plus, we adopted sharing. I know Al Gore invented the internet, but we sort of invented the concept of open source and driving that. We were the largest open source driver in the marketplace. And, you know, we open sourced probably well over half of our technology at Sun. And we pioneered the sharing concept out in the marketplace. It didn't make us the most successful. We were probably the, we were good entrepreneurs. We weren't great. We were good in the sense that we made the world a better place. I wouldn't necessarily say that, say Facebook has made the world a better place. But I think everybody would argue that Sun Microsystems made the world a better place.

So first of all, this is in so many things areas to double play, but I still want to finish the round of the start of Sun Microsystems. So how did you guys know each other? Did you all go to school?

Vinod and I went to business school together and somehow he kept ending up at the parties dead last. He was still there, the last person at the party. Now don't ask me how was I to know that, but we became good buddies. We were actually living together after business school. I lived upstairs, he and his wife lived downstairs. And he was at Daisy Systems and I was at Onyx. And, you know, we were just best friends. We had started a company together also about the same time we started Sun called the Data Dump. Worst idea ever. We thought we would provide mini computer word processors to campuses around the country so that they could share resources. But the PC went out over that one. So we learned our lesson there.

So you started the company, four founders, right? And how is it like, you know, it's been a lot of conversations.

We just, the way we found Andy was Vinod was reading and he saw a little two sentence word about the Stanford University Network Workstation. So we just drove over to Stanford and met him in his office. It was a five minute drive. We sat down in his office and he said, I can't make these boards. He was showing us these motherboards. and I need somebody to make them. And I said, oh, well, I'm making more Unix computers than anybody in the world right now over at Onyx. We were the first company to put Unix on a microprocessor over at Onyx. And Vinod says, I've been doing engineering workstations over at Daisy. And he said, all right, well, let's go start a company. And then we needed a software guy. So we started interviewing Unix guys, because Unix was the way to go at the time. and we kept meeting people and we go, who's the best Unix person you know? And so then we go meet that person. And then we got to this guy from Nat Semi, who was kind of a hard, hard guy to deal with, but he said, oh, the guru of Unix, after Richie and Thompson who invented it, but they were a little long in the tooth. He said, the god of Unix is Bill Joy over at Berkeley. And Andy says, oh, I know Bill Joy. We're like, strangling. Why didn't you tell us? We've been interviewing for four months. We're a Unix guy. He goes, well, you won't get Bill Joy. He's doing really well. You know, he's making 40 grand a year over at Berkeley doing Berkeley Unix. So I pick up the phone and I go, Bill, you know, we want to talk to you. He says, Come on up. Well, he didn't want to talk to us. We said, you know, Andy wants to meet you. Oh, Andy Bectel signed. Yeah, send him up. So Venote and I drove up separately. Andy came up. We walked into Bill's office. and he's at the keyboard and code is flying on his screen and his fingers aren't moving. I mean, the guy is just like telepathic with it. I've never seen code just go on the screen like this. And he says, have a seat, guys. And he just keeps coding. Finally, Andy comes in and he goes, hey, Andy. And they go off in the room. They do a Vulcan Mind Melt and we hire him. And he's. And then Bill says, the greatest programmer in the world is James Gosling. And this was about four months after we started the company. I said, Really? Call him. He won't come. He's at Carnegie. Call him. And we got James out and that's how Java happened. And so it's just that sort of thing. But I asked Bill, why did you not talk to me and Vinod? We were in blue jeans and t-shirts. He goes, I was waiting for top management to show up. It's just things happened like that back in the old. I'm sure it happens like that in the Valley still today around the world.

Building a business is one of the hardest things in the world to do. When did you know that Sun Microsystems is a success? What is the first big catalyst that you saw that, hey, we're into something big and we're going to make it happen?

Well, I knew we had a head start when we would get on the phone and we'd start, we did a little press, got a little notoriety about it, and we hired John Gage. who was a friend of Bill's. And Bill and Andy were legends in the academic community. And we just, we started off selling to universities. And I literally, I was running sales for us because we didn't have a lot of manufacturing to do early on. And literally people would call and say, is it true Bill Joy works at your company? And I said, yeah, what do you make? I would say workstations, how much did they cost? 10,000. Like I would say, I want two. That was literally sales calls that we had at the time. And so we got it into the university program and then all these kids would graduate out of school, take it to the market. But they really blew up and we knew we were rocking and rolling when we won the computer vision deal that got us into the CAD market. That's a longer story. But an interesting one because it went to Apollo and they told us to go away. And we just, we went, Vinod and I just looked at each other and went, now what do we do? The whole cat market's going to Apollo. We got to win this. And we sent Vinod on an airplane with an engineer and we sent proposals to FedEx overnight so that it was there the next morning when he got to Boston offering manufacturing rights, source code, We invented a spec of a computer that Andy had in his head. We wrote it all down and we said, we'll ship you this, you can have the manufacturing rights for it, all the rest of it. And Vinod was told, get out of the lobby. He showed up at the lobby in the morning, right? And they said, get out of here. We got your proposal. It's interesting, but get out of here. You can't be seen because we had been told two days before that we could not communicate anymore with Apollo, well, or with the computer vision, Apollo got a little arrogant. They called us up in the middle of the week and said, Meet Saturday in Chicago O'Hare with a printer and a lawyer, contracts lawyer. And if we hear one peep out of this, the deal's off. We negotiated over the weekend, announced the next morning. That really got us on the map. And because computer vision was 40 to 60% of the CAD market at the time, and they were going to be all on sun. But the thing that really rocketed us was when a sales guy from the East Coast says, let me take this to the trader. And this became the trader workstation. And once we hit, we were on every trading workstation practically, Bloomberg, all of them.

I want to talk about, you know, you touched on Java, right? Java at Sun Microsystems and the challenges it faced, right? And almost near cancellation. So talk about that, the creation of Java, the challenges and how you guys saved it.

So I'll take a little credit for Java only in the sense that I allowed James to do it. So we brought James on and he was doing a great job working at Sun. And I heard through the grapevine that James was going to leave the company. When Bill Joy calls somebody the greatest programmer on Earth, you don't let him leave your company. So I called James into my office and I sat him down right opposite me and I said, James, what's going on? He goes, well, I've been working on, you know, B2B stuff. I want to do B2C. I want something that's going to be in the billions. I want to do something that, you know, is in the consumer space. And I go, okay, what do you want to do? He says, I want to take all these 15 clickers that we have on our coffee table and put it down into one universal box. I thought, well, yeah, I could use that. we're not a B2C company, but what the heck? We're making lots of money growing. I said, all right, why don't you do it here? I said, you take as many people as you want, whatever budget you need, get whatever building you want anywhere in the world. I will set you up. I will fund it. I will protect everybody. You can just go do it. But I have one requirement. Show me your. Show me what you want to build, your plant, and come visit me every year. Once a year, come in and sit down and tell me how you're doing. But you're not leaving this company. You cannot leave. You must do this. He looked at me and he said, really? Are you serious? I said, yeah, I get out of here. You're back in a couple weeks. Tell me. Come back and tell me what you're going to go do. So he went off and he set up. He raised the pirate's flag and set up a separate group and went out and started building this clicker, this big clicker. And it was big, it was like a lunchbox when he had his first prototype. But everybody started to say, Hey, this programming... He created a new programming language because he couldn't do what he wanted to do without a new network-based, object-oriented, strongly typed containerized virus-proof operating system and a programming language. So he created the Java Virtual Machine, the Java programming language, the Java architecture. And he was still thinking about the applications for this when we met with Andreessen and Barksdale over at Netscape. And the automatic idea was to embed the Java Virtual Machine with the Netscape browser and everybody knows what happened with that. So you took one and one and got one trillion. I mean, that really is that plus TCP/IP.

Is it before IPO or after IPO?

The IPO is nothing to me. It was just four days on Wall Street giving a million presentations and then getting really inebriated at night.

The reason I asked the question is, you know, There's always this pressure from investors to, you know, and from your employees, right? Suddenly you are creating this new project that's not proven, but, you know, obviously your top engineers are putting on, that's the right thing to do. That's absolutely the right thing to do what you have done. And, but how difficult that was, right? It's an easy to make the decision, but you feel pressure from shareholders, you feel pressure from the other employees.

Did you face that or how different? I mean, I've got my son, he started a company called Little Horse.io. you can check it out. And I'm trying to convince him, don't go public, don't see investors. There's an advantage to and an overhead to having a cap table that has people who want an exit. And Colt's young, he's got a great idea, he's got an interesting project. I'm saying, I'm gonna keep your cap table clean. I'm gonna lend you whatever money you need to get this thing started. He'll pay me back easily and you'll have a cap table that is absolutely clean. And stock options aren't all they are put out to be because sometimes they're worth zero. A lot of times they're worth zero. Most of the time they're worth zero. And the nice thing about paying people in cash bonuses and commissions and quarterly cash bonuses is that cash is an immediate exit, which you can then put in stocks or do venture investing on your own. So I think there's, you know, it's kind of a maybe an overhyped strategy. But, you know, venture capitalists have their place, but private private has its place, too. So I didn't. But, you know, when we were running Sun, I just we were we were growing so fast that, you know, we actually had fairly low cost of capital requirements for a hardware company, which is why we were able to get as big as we did.

Right, right, right, right. So how did the TCP/IP came about?

Right?

So that's, so the Java was obviously claims.

Bill Joy just walked in the place and he said, we're going with TCP/IP. It's the right answer. It's open source. That was really key. There was Apollo's domain. There was IBM's, I can't remember them. It was a funny name for their networking scheme. DEC had DECnet. There was Novell with their, their networking protocol. All of these people were out there. Microsoft, you know, had their proprietary. And he said, this is the open one. And it was interesting. Tiny little Sun. We weren't the only ones, but we were the ones that really pioneered TCP/IP on all of the computer architectures. And then when you threw NFS on top of it, on top of an open source SunOS, All of a sudden, every engineer at university was using that TCP/IP NFS, SunOS, and eventually Java Stack to go create. And it was zero barrier to entry. Zero barrier to entry. Just download it. And TCP/IP and NFS allowed you to download it. And that really kicked off the revolution that you see today.

So on that open source and versus closed source, right? You guys championed the open source and we have seen over the last 30, 40 years since you guys have done that, you know, there's sometimes open source one, sometimes closed source one, you know. So how do you think, you know, we're also at the same interesting juncture with AI, right? You have closed source AI model and open source AI model. How do you think that's going to play out based on less than last 40 years.

I've learned if you can win with closed source, you'll do way better than personally than if you win using open source. And so I always looked at myself as a good capitalist because we share. And you look at all of the remnants of Sun everywhere on the network from operating systems and microprocessor work that we did with open spark and all the rest of it. There is sun DNA in, I think, probably every electronic device out there, practically. And that's a good thing. It wasn't a great thing because I ended up getting bought for a song by Oracle compared to what Apple or Google or Facebook or all of the others who don't really play Microsoft and Intel, you know, not they didn't play in the open space. But if you can establish a proprietary Standard. Standard means high volume. It's always misused. It's only a standard if it's in high volume and open means it's published interface and either the interface is open or the interface and a reference implementation is available for free. And we just did super open open and shared all of this technology from our MicroSpark architecture all the way through to all of our networking protocols and user interfaces and everything else we made open. It turns out that in downturns or if I mismanaged a little bit, which I did, you know, then you get snapped up by, I mean, I think Oracle went after Sun for one thing and that was MySQL. We had bought MySQL and that was going like crazy. And I think Oracle didn't want to see that erode its Oracle database.

That acquisition worked out very well for them.

Yeah, they made money on it.

Actually, I want to stick with the one open source and closed source. One question that came out, if you intuitively think about it, open source should be the winner. So why does so many times closed source become such a big success? Why is that?

Because computing is very complex. It's hard to learn how to use it. It's hard to write to a binary. It's hard to engineer a system that works. Most companies don't have good software programming talent in them, and they spend a ton of money building this hairball of microservices and hairball of APIs and hairball of custom code and people in the loop, AI in the loop, all these other things. And it becomes absolutely, the barrier to exit is enormous. Try getting off of Oracle. Try getting out of a mainframe. Try moving your team off of a Windows desktop. Send them on relearn, relearn Mac. The barriers to exit are so high. And what you do is you price your next contract at five dollars less than the barrier to exit. Now try and get off of Oracle 14 or SAP, whatever, or PeopleSoft, whatever, or Salesforce. You got so much data, so much corporate memory and reflexes built around that. And that's really what Colt's all excited about. My son with Little Horse is building the the open source operating system for enterprises that sits above Solaris and Windows and Mac, and sits above VMware and all the other virtualization software for racks, and sits above Kubernetes, which is all of the virtualization of cloud, and sits on top and allows all of your legacy apps, all of your new apps, all of your microservices, all of your AI assets, all of your humans as human in the loop to all talk to this orchestration management and authorization and display for observability of this whole system, this whole crusty mess that you have with no rip and replace. We're moving to that next layer of abstraction. out there. And I think only open source can win at those levels. And you see the, there haven't been a lot of super proprietary new things happening out there. AI is where they're trying to go do that. But, you know, open source models probably will win out longer term.

Let's talk about, you know, one of the things you guys have done really good job at Sun Microsystems, you're creating this, you know, amazing talent factory. Like so many of them, Sun Microsystems, people like Satya and others, became the CEO of other companies. And so what is the culture that you created that really led to so many people from Sun Microsystems later became the CEO and have senior roles?

So you probably won't believe this answer, but it's the truth. My dad was vice chairman of American Motors, president of AMF. He ran a PR agency and I idolized, I would sit on Saturday morning by his briefcase and read his briefcase with him, see what notes he wrote on them. And I, you know, I always, but he never saw any of my sporting events. I asked him one time, he said, Dad, why don't you ever go see any of my, because I loved playing sports. I played multiple sports. And I said, you've seen one event, one hockey game in my entire, through my high school career. Why did you do that? He goes, you know what? I was CEO of American Motors. We had tens of thousands of people. We were on the brink of bankruptcy. If I didn't work my butt off, they could all lose their jobs and I could impact all those families. And you were a good kid and I wasn't worried about you. So I worked hard. And I said, thanks for sharing with it. And I said to myself, I don't ever want to be CEO. I don't ever want to be in charge. I'll be number two in charge. I'll help out, whatever. That's why we had a big fight when we started. my son Vinod and I, Vinod says, you,'ve got three years business experience, which is more than the other three founders combined, you be CEO. And I said, no, I don't want that job. I don't want to work that hard. And I said, Vinod, you be CEO. So he was CEO for two years. He got kicked out. And the board asked me to take over temporarily till we could find a real CEO. I said, I went out and had dinner with my mom. She said, Mom, I don't want to do this. I watched Dad. I want to get a family, I want to be with my kids, I want to, you know, I just don't want to be that responsible for all these people. She said, Just do it for a little while. And so 30 years later, you know, but I spent that whole 30 years trying to find my replacement. And so I was constantly, I just wanted to get somebody in there, somebody else, and I kept looking and trying to find somebody, things were going well, you know, nobody was coming to me and saying, Scott, you got to get out of there. That happened early, but that's another long story. It's kind of interesting. But the bottom line is finally, I found the gal of my dreams, Susan. We've been married over 30 years. And I had a two, four, six, and eight-year-old at home. And I just told the board, I said, I'm done. We got to pick. from whoever's out there and we nanomously picked somebody and we went, but then the company got bought a few years after I stepped down. I mean, I would have loved to have, I had the best job in the world. I would have loved to have continued, but I'm so glad I got to grow up. I see my two, four, six, and eight-year-olds grow up and I got four little superstars that are my favorite start-ups of all time. so that's, that's why we created so many. Because I kept moving people around, trying to develop them and turn them into general managers and making them learn. And we counted up over 200 former Sun execs became CEOs in the valley. Over 200. That's just the ones we could keep track of. I'm sure they're, I mean, there's Satya at, at Microsoft. There was, you know, Eric Schmidt. some of the more famous Carol Bartz over at Autodesk.

And so that was kind of like, so your model was kind of like a GE model, you know, for like moving people around and trying to make-.

I was on the board and I learned a lot from Jack Welch on that front. I don't think, yeah, I don't, yeah, I only say nice things.

So one last questions about Sun and then I want to move on, you know, your posts sun life and discuss, you know, what do you think now, what's happening in the world? So I think a little known story is that there was almost a merger with Apple at some point. So can you share what happened and why ultimately you guys didn't do the deal?

Let me just state right up front, I'm so glad. Or sort of not so glad, given that I am an Apple user today is so frustrating. I miss Steve. I think the technology has just gotten clunkier and more buggy and more hard to use.

What happens to Apple? I want to get to the Apple market thing, but what do you think? It seems like they lost their innovation.

They lost Steve. CEOs matter. I mean, Elon Musk matters, Larry Ellison matters, Steve Jobs matters. I like to think I mattered a little bit. And Apple just hasn't been the same. But Steve left and then they got, you know, really sideways and we were talking and we were very close. I'm glad for Apple shareholders that son didn't get it because I couldn't do what Steve did when he came back. He was a wizard before he left, and he was a wizard after when he came back. And really, there's very few people, they're rare, the Dave Duffields who's done it a couple of times, Steve Jobs has done it several times, Elon Musk continues to do it. These are really, really rare, freaks of nature that are generational talents. And he was one of those. And if we had bought it, we wouldn't have got Steve back. And, you know, he probably would have gone off and done something else better. But the reason it didn't happen was just kind of a really obnoxious investment Banker on the Apple side. And he shall remain anonymous, but He just was an absolute jerk and finally we just walked away and said, get out of here. And I don't think I would have iTunes and, you know, the phone and all the other things that Steve did after. So it was, you know, I was not a B2C guy and he was a B2C guy. And so the good news is it did fall apart. We were close, though. Very, very close.

Very, you know, it's so fascinating. so post Sun Microsystems, you know, incredible for children, you know, including your famous, you know, son who is a golfer, you know, Maverick McNally.

And his very famous, very famous Caddy, who's his younger brother.

He's a very young brother. And your son, Colt, and, you know, also building great business. Talk about, you know, I think a lot of times people, when they leave and go start, leave the business, you're so important and everybody's calling you, suddenly you left and now you focus on family. How did you find that transition? Because a lot of my former CEO friends, they find that transition very difficult.

I haven't been bored, raising four boys through their teenage years, coaching hockey, going to golf tournaments with them. But I also put out the shingle and said, I'll be an advisor for free, because I had a lot of knowledge. And by the time I stepped down at 52, I'd seen just about everything. I'd managed 235,000 employees in my career, raised tens of billions of dollars, done deals around the world, traveled around the world, been there, just, I think my passport had more stamps in it than the entire Congress combined. and so there, I thought, I can't just, like, impart all this on teenagers. So I would do advisory for free. My phone just blew up when word got out, and I said, all right, I'll do advisor. But, you know, I'm gonna stack rank my energy by who gives me the most stock options, the most valuable stock options. Because I didn't know how any other way free, infinite. Free has infinite demand. And so if people thought I was doing good, they could give me more stock options. And I've done very nicely. I mean, I've made way more money than I ever thought I would just by advisory stock options.

I have to ask you, which one is your favorite, like most successful advisory company?

ForgeRock was really, really good. The one that I think made me the most money was Lambda. Lambda Labs recently, but there's others that are, I mean, I wasn't even paying attention to, you know, my options and all of a sudden Lambda's like holy mackerel and they all surprised me. I don't care. I just want the CEOs to learn and do well and try hard and hopefully be successful.

So that's a good example. You have seen it everything, you know, there's two questions I want to ask and I'll throw both questions you can answer however or already want.

One is.

I see myself, be where the technology founders behaved, say, 15, 20 years ago versus how they behave, how the Silicon Valley culture 20 years ago versus now has changed dramatically. So my one question would be, going back 1984 or 1980s when you guys started this company, versus, you know, today, how do you think the Silicon Valley culture has changed for positive or negative? That's one. And then the second question is, what are your advice for the founders and the CEOs that, like, two or three best advice that, you know, that you learned over last, you know, what, 40 plus years?

It's hard. You know, I'll sound like a crusty old man who's totally out of touch. but, you know, I'm a raging libertarian kind of personal responsibility. You know, the government is there only to preserve your rights and privileges and assets, not to take them and redistribute them. That's a very on current strategy with a lot of people. I believe companies should be apolitical. I believe the government should be out of so many private industry businesses, and they shouldn't be spending money in that. They should let the, I'm a capitalist. I'm a raging capitalist. I really believe that is the best allocation of resources. Let Venture capitalists do it. Don't let Congress do it. And I think that There's a lot of, you know, it all started with, you know, people like Eric and others going, Eric Schmidt going to talk to the government. We didn't, I didn't go talk to the government. I hated talking to the government. I only went there because they restricted our ability to export computers because they thought the M tops, the millions of transaction operations per second made them weapons of mass destruction. And I said, our workstations are weapons of mass destruction. only if we drop them in volume out of airplanes onto major cities. But, you know, they use that to say, hey, give me money. And, and, and the government got way too involved in our capitalist environment. The regulations got out of control. And, and that's why we're in the mess we're in right now. So I think that too many CEOs are, I have to, have to get involved or proactively got involved in government instead of leaving the private sector to do its thing. I don't know how you fix it. We didn't let our kids have social media until they got into college, until they got a college application. Now, if I had kids now, I wouldn't let them apply to college. And I, you know, so the world is so different.

Yeah, so what will be one or like two or three advice for the CEO?

First thing you need to do is go ask every employee, every customer, everybody in your constituency on a regular basis, if you were CEO, what would you do if you were me? What am I not doing that I should be? What am I doing that I shouldn't do? What am I not doing enough of? And that's kind of the magic, the golden, not the golden rule, but the golden question. And I think if you do that, that's really, valuable. I think having a span of control that is at least 11 all through your organization will allow you to grow quickly and aggressively. And I think don't buy what you can rent would be another thing because of the fluid and dynamic and unpredictable nature of. I mean, I remember walking into the board and saying, you know, our number one competitor is in computers, and they all would say, IBM, Dax, Hewlett-Packard. Apollo, Intel, Microsoft, you know, all these. And I said, no, it's Google. Google is like two years old at the time, and they were already buying 16% of the worldwide motherboards. And they, they were like shocked. And you have to have flexibility. And if you have bought a building, if you have bought Capital, if you have bought a whole bunch of stuff that is not going to be, we used to have surface mount wave soldering machines to do our motherboards. Within five years, we were going to Asia to go buy all of that and we had all this equipment sitting in factories that we didn't need anymore. So just having that flexibility, if you can get away with renting it, do that, because it's much easier to cancel a purchase order than it is to lay off people and get out of a long-term lease. So those are the things I would recommend.

What are the one or two mistakes that you made and you wish somebody could have told you?

Oh, stop. You're going to make me finish by talking about what a knucklehead I was. There's so many that I can't really-.

There are two that somebody would have told you and if any founders and CEOs and- There's several.

We had SunOS was the operating system. AT&T did a deal with us to compete against Open Software Foundation, the Opposed Sun Forever Foundation we called it with IBM deck and he'll impact. AT&T said we had to close source it. So Solaris was closed source for six or seven years. Linux happened. Sun OS would have been Linux had we not done the AT&T deal. So that was dumb.

How would you know at that time?

Hindsight is 2020. the lesson is, you know, if you want something to really proliferate and you're small, you got to open source. The second thing that I didn't realize, and I was too dumb to know, was we had Route D running on SunOS on our workstations. China built their entire network, internet, first internet on Sun. They just took the monitor off and used Route D running on our workstation. And instead of telling Andy, Andy, because he did this later, go build a router. I didn't know what a router was. I was so oblivious. Cisco went out and built routers with iOS, which was, I mean, Sun OS would have been a far better, longer term strategy for routers and switches and firewalls. We could have, we could have been Cisco. I let Cisco opportunity go by. So I could go through about 15 of those, we should have grabbed an open source database the day we started, and just started putting four engineers every year, new engineers on it. And then Oracle wouldn't have been able to overcharge our customers for their database. I could have bundled a free open source database with SunOS, and it never would have, that would have changed. I would still be running Sun today if that was the case. Another big mistake, I mean, these are colossal mistakes. colossal mistakes. I made some management mistakes, putting people, I'm not going to get into those. I wish I could undo those. But the other big mistake I made was I thought we could be arms suppliers to all of the cloud companies. We should have just, before anybody else, we were the cloud engine of choice anyhow, the private cloud. We should have started AWS ourselves. Bezos was smart as a book. selling company to get into that business early. We could have beat him by three years and pretty soon all the cloud companies stopped buying from IBM, DEC, Sun, Hewlett-Packard, all the rest of it, and they built their own. So I just gave you, like, I should be arrested for all of the mistakes I've made. And I could go through a million more of those, but we did a lot of things right too.

That really changes all the time. What I was trying to get to, like, if there's a common thread that that somebody can take it away from it. But seems like these are all.

One.

Off thing that would have, should have, could have, but this is great. Thanks for your humility for sharing those stories. Thank you. And that's, you know, I love about you, you are for everything.

That makes me a good advisor because I've screwed up more than any of the people I've ever worked with.

No, what makes you a great advisor and I love you know, like talking to you is that a person who is so incredibly accomplished, also so humble and such a high humility. So with that, thank you everyone for listening. I appreciate it. I hope you learned as much as I learned and looking forward to the next show. Thank you again for tuning in and I really hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. Subscribe to our show on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcast so that you don't miss an episode. See you next time. All opinions expressed on this podcast are solely those of the host and guest are for general information purposes only and do not constitute professional investment advice.