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Something Ventured (2011)
I was in my laboratory...
probably talking to students. Here's a call, comes out of the blue. This young guy... wanted to know if the technology was ready to be commercialized. Then he said the magic word. He says' "I have access to some money that would allow us to get started." And I said, "Okay." I said, "Where does the money originate?" And he said, "I'm a junior member at a venture capital firm." I went to look up what "venture capital" meant. I had never heard of it before. The risks were just enormous. They came to me with no business plan. Willing to risk everything You have to be a street fighter. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. We didn't know what we were doing. Silicon Valley. Technical breakthrough. $100000. A million dollars. $10billion. Intel. Apple. Genentech. Cisco. Good markets. Create companies. Growing companies. The sky's the limit. The rest is history. I don't know to write a business plan. I can only tell you how we read them. And we start at the back. And if the numbers are big, we look at the front to see what kind of business it is. You have to look at the way conventional wisdom works and abandon it. No one has ever accused me of underestimating... myself. Jobs and Wozniak came up to see me. Steve Jobs is a national treasure. He is so visionary and so bright. Uh, I had to fire him though. These men didn't always wield such influence and power. In the beginning, they barely knew what they were doing. Fifty years ago, they were just young guys from modest means... who thought they could help build innovative companies. This is the story of a handful of men... who stirred up a revolution in finance and technology, because they saw opportunity where others only saw risk. Venture capital. I don't think I thought of it first. But I don't know anyone... who used the term before I did. Back in the spring of1957, Arthur Rock was just a junior banker on Wall Street. But then one day, an unsolicited letter arrived at the office. The letter was unusual, and no one else at his brokerage firm knew what to do with it. It was a cry for help. And it would forever change the trajectory of Arthur Rock's life. You gotta be lucky. Everybody's gonna be lucky at some time or another. Thing I'd say is, I was lucky to be lucky early. The letter on Arthur Rock's desk... had come from eight engineers in California. A group of brilliant young men... who would soon become known as "the Traitorous Eight." We were young guys. A bunch of young engineers and scientists mostly... working together at Shockley Semiconductor. They were having a hard time with Shockley, and they were gonna leave. Things had deteriorated at Shockley Lab. He was a very difficult person to work with. And a group of us started considering the possibility at least of leaving. So anyhow, we did write- "'This prospectus is to introduce a group of senior scientists and engineers... who have been working together at the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory." Shockley had just won a Nobel Prize. It was probably a little presumptuous of us to think we could push him aside. "A group feeling arose to the effect... that rather than leave one by one, we believe that we are much more valuable to an employer as a group." These were, by their resumes, very superior people, and I thought, "Gee, maybe there's something here." Something more valuable than just to be an employee. That "something" that Arthur saw... inspired him to step out of his ordinary role as a Wall Street banker. And that's when we met Arthur Rock. Arthur came out to meet with the group of us. And Arthur said, "You ought to start your own company, and we'll find financing for you." They hadn't thought of this idea themselves. Nobody thought of starting their own company in those days. It was a new idea, but it was a good one. At that time, there was no venture capital, so starting companies was new. It was innovative. Arthur Rock had to get creative about finding capital for the Traitorous Eight. His bank had contacts with rich families like the Rockefellers and the Whitneys, but they weren't interested in backing a start-up all the way out in California. So we, uh, made a list of companies. In fact we sat down with the Wall Street Journal- Looking for companies to ask to invest in these eight fellas in forming a new company. I think we had 35 companies. All of them said no. "No!" The attempt to start a new company... might have ended then and there, with the Traitorous Eight returning to their job search... and Arthur Rock admitting defeat. But then Arthur received one last lead. We were pretty much at wits, end. And somebody suggested that I see Sherman Fairchild. Sherman Fairchild was an entrepreneur himself... and also a very wealthy man. He right away saw the possibilities, and decided that Fairchild Camera and Instrument... would invest the million and a half dollars we were looking for. I call myself "the accidental entrepreneur." With the 1.5 million Arthur raised, the Traitorous Eight started Fairchild Semiconductor in Mountain View, California, a sleepy rural town 35 miles south of San Francisco. Fairchild was the first company to manufacture... the sophisticated silicon chips that would power computers, rockets and spacecraft, paving the way for the high-tech age. In time, the fruit orchards surrounding Fairchild... would give way to electronics companies, and the area would become famous as the Silicon Valley. If they hadn't stayed together and formed Fairchild Semiconductor, probably there'd be no silicon in Silicon Valley. Arthur Rock had gotten a taste of something exciting and significant. But as it Tuns out, he wasn't the only one... trying to figure out how to fund young companies. Just up the road from Fairchild, a handful of businessmen... were experimenting with their own version of venture capital... together, around a lunch table in San Francisco. The best things in life are free But you can give them to the birds and bees I need money In the '50s and '60s, there were a group of us in San Francisco that used to get interested... in small, high-tech companies down the peninsula. There were, I think, five of us in our group. We all had jobs, but we had other time on our hands too, and we decided we just would put a little investment club together. We were just a bunch of young men in San Francisco... who knew each other and respected each other. What it was like was a very close fraternity. I guess I can use that word carefully. We'd have a table of six or eight for lunch. None of us had enough money to do an investment by ourselves, so we had to have help. If one of us ran across an entrepreneur... who was trying to start a company, we would invite him up for lunch. And after lunch, we would ask him to step out onto the street corner for a while. Give us 10 minutes, and we would make up our mind as to whether we wanted... to invest in his company or not. I don't remember that. We didn't do that. We were too classy to do that. That's a little bit quick, I think. If the guy's a real nut' why, you'd say good-bye to him... without asking him to go get a cup of coffee. Two members of the group wanted to do even more... than gather around a lunch table every six weeks. In 1962, Pitch Johnson and Bill Draper... put up all their personal savings, quit their day jobs... to form a partnership, and hit the streets. Pitch and I each got a Pontiac leased, and went around and knocked on doors. And if it sounded like ABC Electronics, then we'd go in, ask the president to sit down and tell us, "What do you do?" You know. "Well, what do you do?" "Well, venture capital." "What's that?" My kids would go to school. "What does your dad do?" "My dad's a policeman." "My dad's a fireman." "My dad's a banker." "And what does your dad do?" "Oh, he's a venture capitalist." "Dad, what do you do actually?" You know? We were just stumbling around, trying to figure out what to do. But we just knew that if we got involved with good people and good markets, we could probably build a company. Growing companies. Create companies. You're helping to create something where nothing existed before. And quite a large community gets sustenance... that wouldn't have existed unless you had gotten together with this entrepreneur... and his team and helped him along the way. The Lunch Group had established a good formula. Everyone was sharing in the profits and success at these fledgling companies. But over at Fairchild it was a different story. Fairchild was an imperfect vehicle. I joined Fairchild at the end of the '50s. I was not part of the Traitorous Eight. Fairchild was owned by a corporation. An eastern corporation, and the sense of division of equity... was both unknown to them and repugnant to them. All of the East Coast companies had this hierarchy. And they didn't understand... about giving options to all the employees... the way West Coast start-ups saw fit to do. So none of the people in Fairchild, including me, had any kind of significant ownership position. So, in the early '60s, people began leaving Fairchild to set up start-ups... and to begin to participate in what people correctly realized... was going to be something special. Meanwhile, back at his desk in New York- Well, I had wanted to do more of these venture capital type deals, but the money was all in the east. And the scientists who had moved from the east to the west... had all the ideas. So I saw a great opportunity in bringing the East Coast money out... backing these people on the West Coast. "Go West, young man." In 1961, Arthur Rock raised five million dollars from East Coast investors... and moved to San Francisco to start his own venture capital firm. He found a partner in Tommy Davis, who had been managing investments for a California oil company. Davis and Rock quickly became the biggest venture players in town, funding a series of hugely successful technology companies. And in the close-knit Silicon Valley community of the 1960s, it was only a matter of time before Arthur Rock... would once again cross paths with the Traitorous Eight. Throughout the 1960s, Fairchild was bleeding talent. The lure of stock options and independence... inspired many of the brilliant young engineers... to peel off and start their own companies. But Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce, its two most important founders, remained loyal to their company- until May of1968, when Fairchild's East Coast management made a fatal mistake. Noyce was the logical internal candidate to be the next C.E.O. But they decided they were gonna look on the outside. That changed the whole ball game. Noyce said, "I'm gonna leave. Are you interested?" So I said, "Okay. Let's do it." They needed financing, and they called me... to see whether I'd be interested. They came to me with no business plan, other than what they verbally said they wanted to do. Arthur said he needed something to talk to potential investors with. Just to give people something. We wrote a business plan, and it was one page- Double-spaced, and that was it. It just says we were going to make things out of silicon, and some interesting electronic devices. Oh, I said in general terms we were going to make memories. It has lots of typos in it. I think Bob typed it himself. It's not a very profound document, but it's really kind of cute. I said, "How much money do you need?" And they said, "Two and a half million dollars." And I said, "Okay." "What percentage of the company do you think you'd be happy giving up... for two and a half million dollars?" And they thought and said, "Well, how about half?" And I said, "That's fine." And within a day and a half, I had raised two and a half million dollars. Intel opened its doors in July of'68, and Arthur Rock's partnership with its founders was only just beginning. Arthur was our chairman of the board in those days. I spent a lot of time there. Venture capitalists do write the check, but that isn't all we do. Writing a check is easy. Yeah, it doesn't take much ink. I attended staff meetings. Arthur asked good questions. I was on the phone to them a lot. Was an excellent board member. Offer advice. Planning. Setting up an audit committee. Customer relations. Interviewed a lot of people. Built all the pieces of an enterprise. I just brought what I consider common sense to the table. He even met his wife there. He gave us guidance on when not to go public as well as when to go public. I was very involved in that. This was all new to Intel, but wasn't new to me. We went public the same day that Playboy Enterprises went public. At the same price. And a few years later one of the analysts says, "The market has spoken. It's memories over mammaries, 10-to-1." And the home of the Brave You know there's lots of things that I'd like to do Yeah, child, I want to do them with you And that takes money Hey, look at those power men Yeah, lots of money, child Shortly after Arthur Rock went out on his own, Forbes profiled him in an article that caught the eye... of a young investment manager in Boston. When they said, "Well, now that you and Mr. Davis... are doing separate things, what are you going to do?" He said, "Well, I'm gonna find a younger partner and do it all over again." And I said, "You know, gee." I had never even- I mean, it was a light bulb. And I sat down and I wrote him a longhand letter. And I never had ever done anything like this before. The following Monday I got a telephone call. "Mr. Rock's on the line." I said, "Really?" Dick's letter was very intriguing. He's just generally knowledgeable and on the same, uh, piano as I was. And then I found out later that there were over a thousand responses to the article. And that Arthur had a handwriting expert that analyzed my letter. Isn't that funny? So that's how I got in the venture business. Well, you know, there are no firm rules... in the venture capital business, except that there are no firm rules. Did you have any problems in convincing your colleagues? Oh, yeah, they thought I was out of my mind on this one. By the early '70s, inspired by the success of Arthur Rock, more members of the Lunch Group began to quit their day jobs... and setup their own venture funds. Reid Dennis gave notice to his boss at American Express. He said, "Reid, are you sure this is what you want to do?" I said, "Bill, I've never been so sure of anything in all my life." He said, "Well, we really don't want you to go, but if you're determined to go' you ought to take some of our money with you." And that's what gave us the impetus... to start Institutional Venture Associates. A career in venture capital now seemed so alluring, and potentially so profitable, it was attracting people outside of finance. Two Silicon Valley engineers, Eugene Kleiner and Tom Perkins, formed what would become one of the most successful... venture firms of all time. Well, I sort of got into venture capital by the back door. I was working for the Hewlett-Packard company... when I had an idea for a radically improved kind of laser. And then I started a company... to manufacture the lasers. When it was all over I realized, gee, I had been a venture capitalist. I put up the money. I put up the management. So then when I met Gene Kleiner, who had left Fairchild, we were both planning to go into the venture capital business. And we realized we complemented each other. I mean I'm pretty intense and high-strung' and Gene was sort of calm and portly... and had a soothing Viennese accent. Eugene was just brilliant. He was fun to be with. I remember once we met an entrepreneur, and after he left I said, "Gene, you know, do you trust him?" And Gene said, "I would trust him with my life, but not my money." And that's how it started. We hung out our shingle' and nothing happened. The phone didn't ring. We had a part-time secretary- We called out, nobody called in. We saw some deals, and we did some deals. We lost money in our original deals. And I'll mention them, even though they were very embarrassing. The most notorious, and maybe the funniest' was a company called Snow Job- Which was a scheme to convert motorcycles into snowmobiles... and back and forth. Which actually worked, and it was a lot of fun, But one of the fuel crises landed at about the time we were ready to go into production, and we couldn't get distributors, and, uh, so it failed. So Eugene and I thought' you know, "This is not working. We've got to do something differently." Tandem was a huge risk for Kleiner Perkins. If Tandem had failed, there would have never been a second Kleiner Perkins fund. I think I was 33. I was young, in terms of people starting companies, but there weren't a lot of people starting companies, so- Well, Jimmy Trey big-very smart guy. Very impressive. He had this idea, which he'd carried- not the technical part of it, but the need... for a truly fault-tolerant computer. A computer that would never fail. At that time, for instance, the New York Stock Exchange... would fail about every day, or every other day. And something would go wrong in it, and it would destroy data. People knew the problem, but they didn't have a solution. So just think of it. I mean, credit checking, airline reservations, banking. All financial things. - Hospitals. - All communications. Just all kinds of things... where it's just not acceptable to have the computer go down. We knew-Tom and I knew- that if we could figure out a different kind of computer architecture... to solve this problem, that we could create a big company. The problem was IBM had won the mainframe battle in '74. And there was an article that said there would never be a new computer company. Never. That was '74. And the cover was a picture of a shark, and IBM was eating up every company. When you think about what decisions are being made, you got IBM wiping out GE, Siemens. So it would be easy not to want to go after that, right? So you have to be brave. I mean, you have to see it, and you have to be brave. And being brave is one thing you got to say about Tom. You gotta look to get money from strong people. Because weak people don't invest in tough times. But that's when most of the big winners are created. Well, first of all, we didn't want to be the only backers of Tandem. We tried to raise venture capital. I made a trip back east. I remember the first time we gave the pitch. Jimmy was straight out of Texas, a real character, and I didn't think he'd go over very well on Wall Street. He had to take me to buy a suit. He probably shared that. I literally took him to Brooks Brothers. And shoes, socks, the works. He always said, uh- I forget what he said, but, "He could buy the suit, and that still didn't help." And took him back to Wall Street, and of course the first thing he said is, "Well, how do I look? Tom dressed me!" You know- Tom was, uh, a little more sophisticated than me. But we didn't get the money. Untried management. An unlikely idea. Most people would not have thought this was gonna be a big winner. But I felt strongly enough about Tandem that, uh, even if we had to put up all the money, we would do it. And then finally, at the last minute, Pitch Johnson put in a small investment. I like to think that Tom felt my presence... would be helpful in raising money elsewhere. It ratified our concept. I was credible in those days. Hi. I'm standing here next to a beautiful Tandem computer. I think everyone recognizes this fine computer. It took us a long time to get that first order. The very first customer was Citibank. But when we got the first order, and the computers performed as expected, even better, the growth took off and became explosive. We went seven, 25, 50, 100 million, 200 million, on up to a billion, and we were a Fortune 500 company in '82. You use a Tandem computer today... pretty much any time you use your credit card for anything. When I started in the venture business, it never occurred to me that we would have multiple funds... that would easily exceed a billion dollars. I got into the business somewhat fortuitously. When I made the decision, I had already put in 13 years working in real companies. In 1972, Don Valentine decided... to trade on his connections in the semiconductor industry... and went in search of capital to start a venture fund. We went to see a guy at Salomon Brothers, and he said "You know' I've listened to the pitch, but, you know, you didn't go to Harvard Business School." I said, "Great observation. True. Guilty as charged." He says, "Why didn't you go to business school?" I said, "I went to Fairchild Semiconductor Business School. Great business school. Start-up company. Pioneer in a technology. Phenomenal leadership and recognition." I said, "I don't need to go to a business school for what I'm gonna do." Rebuffed by Wall Street, Don Valentine found a mentor... in a Southern California mutual fund manager... who staked the money for Don's first venture fund. I'm not interested in entrepreneurs who will do it our way. I'm not interested in entrepreneurs who think there's a dress code. I'm interested in entrepreneurs who have a vision... of doing something consequential, preferably that becomes big. For most people, there's something intimidating... about the idea of interacting with a computer, but that is what's happening here. Atari had one of Silicon Valley's... absolutely larger-than-life personalities leading it, Nolan K. Bushnell. Bushnell was a young engineer... working for game manufacturer Nutting Associates... when he decided to strike out on his own in 1972. The real thing that allowed me to start Atari... was I worked for Nutting, and these guys couldn't find their butts with both hands. I said, "You know, I can run a company, and I won't make any of these same mistakes these idiots are doing." The first game Atari designed was Pong. Nolan took a prototype of the game, strapped it to his back... and placed it in a bar in Sunnyvale, California. By the next morning, customers were lined up outside... clamoring for a chance to play. We put it on location. It earned a lot of money. Production soared, and there seemed to be an insatiable appetite... for the coin-operated game. From the outside, Atari looked like a wildly successful company, producing an endless stream of popular games. But there was one key problem. The company was started with 250 dollars. And so we never had any money. If you're a hardware company, you need a lot of capital for inventories. The more successful, the more you have to raise. Because the more inventory you have, the more customers you're waiting to pay you. It takes a lot of capital for a hardware start-up. In 1974 Atari was flirting with bankruptcy... and desperately needed financial help. But Nolan found the traditional channels off-limits. Banks-in the traditional sense of banks-lend on assets. So, "Do you have a house? I'll give you a mortgage. Do you have a car? I'll give you a loan on your car." Nolan had no basis for a bank to be comfortable. I went through the factory, and the smell of marijuana nearly knocked me to my knees. And I was gasping and coughing. Nolan says, "What's the matter?" And I said, "I don't know what those people are smoking, but it's not my brand." Don might have passed on Atari... had Nolan not shown him a surprising new product in development- Home Pong Atari's engineers had discovered they could get the entire Pong game... down to the size of a shoe box. At the time, playing video games at home was a revolutionary concept. We showed Don our plans for the home games. He finally decided there was a business there. Fabulous product. Giant market. He used to say, you know, "The coin-op business-you think it's big?" He says, "You ain't seen nothin'." Huge. Once we decided to finance Atari, it was a matter of trying to figure out who else would invest in it. Funds in those days were tiny, and in order for us to start a company, we had to very collegially work together. I brought him other investors. However, it takes a while to get used to Nolan. And there's a story there about one of our meetings, where the man from Fidelity was sitting in a chair with his blue suit on, and the rest of us were in the hot tub. Nolan was unrelentingly picking on him... about his prudish behavior and why he wouldn't get in the hot tub. With a controversial entrepreneur... and no existing market for home video games, months went by while the other investors remained on the fence about Atari. So Nolan himself took his Home Pong prototype on the road in search of customers. Of course, we were young and felt we could solve... any problems that came along, and, you know, selling them to Toys R Us, that can't be that hard. It was, actually. I like to tell the story about... taking the Pong game to the toy fair in New York and selling none. So we thought, "Let's try the television shops." And they didn't want it. These are very fragile companies with a lot of things missing. And the approach we've always taken is, if we make this investment, is our Rolodex... strong enough to help these people? So much luck goes into these things... that without it, I think very few of us would have very many successes. One of our investors was a very big shareholder of Sears. And they facilitated the introduction... to the buyer at Sears who would buy a product like this. I think he was charmed by Nolan... and found this experiment might be fun. Everybody's talkin' 'bout a new way of shopping Do you wanna lose your mind? Home Pong hit the shelves... just in time for the 1975 Christmas season. And of course, the rest is history. When he plays the game from Atari Have you played Atari today? Have you played Atari today? My father was the sole proprietor of this little candy store. My father was a very petty union member. My dad was a wonderful guy, and, um, he really encouraged self-reliance. Well, we sold a little groceries, a little magazines, a little candy, a little ice cream, cigarettes. At a very early age, I worked there. I clerked. I was six years- seven years old. It's easier to explain he drove a truck... than it is to explain what he did in the union, 'cause I didn't understand what he did in the union... other than fight with the head of the union. And we used to have a lot of, uh, arguments... once I understood what a union was, and he couldn't understand why I was so adamantly opposed to the unions. It probably has to do with my... deep-seated sense of disobedience. When I was 12 or 13, I was trying to figure out how to earn some money in the summertime. So I said, "You know, Dad, maybe I could sell light bulbs." So I went down to the local general manager... of the Sylvania operation. He said the smallest amount that he could sell me... would be a half a freight car full of light bulbs. And so I asked my mother if I could populate our basement with all these light bulbs. And so I got this wagon- this big wagon- and I went around and I sold light bulbs for a whole summertime. I called it the Bright Boy Light Bulb Company. It's a little bit over the top, but that's what it was. I was a nerd. A highly motivated, impatient, driven workaholic nerd. Um-Who accidentally became an athlete, and got some sort of social polish... at a school for nerds-MIT. I scrambled to get into a degree where I thought I could earn a living, which was electronic engineering. I did that for a while, and I thought, "God, this is pretty boring." And I thought, "Well, you know, I've heard about business school. Maybe I should take a crack at that." And this is where I got inspired by Georges Doriot. Professor Georges Doriot... was a father figure to a generation of young men... at Harvard Business School. This French expatriate had the distinction of starting.. The first corporation dedicated exclusively to venture investing, American Research and Development, founded in 1946. Ironically, Doriot's lasting impact... would not be through A.R.D., which in its entire 25-year history made only one notable investment. Instead, Doriot's most important influence... came through the spell he cast over his Harvard classroom. Doriot was very controversial... even at the time at Harvard. He taught a course called Manufacturing, which really had nothing to do with manufacturing. And it was an extremely popular course, and it was all about starting companies, and technology. He talked about entrepreneurs. He had some of them as guests- what it was like to start a company. His lectures were how to dress, how many drinks you should have at a cocktail party. It was sort of a Georges Doriot philosophy of life. Every year, he'd take one whole session... on how to read the New York Times. He'd hold up the paper and say- "You should be able to read this paper in four minutes. What is the first section I read?" He said, "Now the first thing you want to do is go to the obituary page. There you will learn the lives that are important, and the kind of life that you can build for yourself." He would talk about working with entrepreneurs. And when times got tough, as they always will- and he made that point- that he would invite the entrepreneur over to his home. They'd have dinner, and then he'd just sit him down in his library... and play phonograph records of French marching music. You know, just to deal with the psychological wounds, you know. When he was talking about venture capital, starting companies, he was as good as there was, because he was the only guy who understood it. I bought it all- hook, line, sinker. Yeah, the best things inlifeare free But you can give them to the birds and bees I want money That's what I want So give me muh, uh-huh, mo-mo-money At the time we started Genentech, there was no such thing as genetic engineering. And to take the idea of commercializing gene splicing, the risks were just enormous. And I said, "Well, you know, what if God or Darwin won't let us make a new life form?" It was a bet on technology, and you looked at the value of the pharmaceutical industry, and if you had a better way to develop drugs, the power was enormous. Nobody had a clue whether they could pull that off, but you did know... that if they could, it was big. It came out of the blue for me. I had not been thinking about starting a company. I thought I was going to, uh, die at the lab bench with a pipette in my mouth. But, uh, Bob called, and he wanted to know if the technology was ready to be commercialized. Bob Swanson, I think, was the most prescient individual I've ever met. Once he understood... what the potential technology was in genetic engineering, he got the whole picture, way ahead of anybody else. Eugene and I were looking around for someone to add to the partnership, and Bob joined us. But there just wasn't enough going on in those days, amazingly, to really have him full-time working on our ventures. We didn't have that many. But we were interested in doing something in genetic engineering. We sort of said, "Go there, find something. And if you can, we'll finance it. If you can't, well-" You know. So he was motivated to find something. And he calls Professor Boyer at the University of California. Boyer said, "I'll give you five minutes." It turned into, you know, many hours. In those days, funding for research was, uh, difficult. And so, you know, I had some, you know, ulterior reasons... for paying attention when he said he had money. Over the next couple of weeks, Swanson persuaded Boyer... to take the idea of gene splicing into some sort of a commercial operation. And Bob brought Boyer to me. So we go into one of the, uh, Embarcadero Towers, and we go up to the top floor. And you can look out over the world. It was something like out of a movie, and holy smoke. So we go in, and these stern-looking guys are sitting there in a suit, you know. Perkins says, "Okay, Well, what are you going to do?" What do you do? What equipment do you need? How do you know that you've done it? How do you test? It's scary. What are the risks? Contamination? Everything I could think- Here was this rich guy, you know, talking to us about science, and funding science. I paid attention, you know. And I didn't know anything about raising money. Of course, I knew nothing whatsoever about the technology. I mean, nobody did. I had to rely on him. Because there was so much to be done. He was a very hands-on guy. They wanted to raise, um' about three million dollars to build the factory, hire the people, and then see if it would work. But underlying it all... was the-the tremendous risk factor of, you know, would it be possible? It was pure research, you know, and everybody knows that venture capitalists shouldn't openly fund pure research. So my idea in everything has always been to try to put the risk up front... and get rid of the risk as fast as you possibly can. Bob and I were very naive... about how we were going to do what we did. We changed the business plan. I persuaded them to do it a different way. To subcontract the experiment to two different institutions. By subcontracting, Tom Perkins eliminated the need... to buy equipment, build a lab and hire staff. The estimated three million dollar start-up costs... were reduced to just 250,000. Kleiner Perkins put up the money, and Genentech was in business. It was Bob Swanson and a checkbook sitting in our office here. That was Genentech. Boyer and Swanson set out to create human insulin. But, to test their concept, they began with a less complex hormone. City of Hope Medical Center in Los Angeles... would try to engineer a gene for that hormone. Then, UC San Francisco would splice that gene into bacteria... to produce the hormone in significant amounts. After a very long time, City of Hope succeeded in making the gene, and then we transported the gene- Bob had it in his pocket- up to University of California. And Herb Boyer inserted it into the bacterial host. Then it worked. So we had our breakthrough. That was the first time in history... that, uh, mankind had ever made an artificial, um- Well, let's just say an artificial bacteria. Most doctors agree that genetic engineering.. Will be the source of most drugs in the next decade. As scientists look ahead, they see a myriad of products. New vaccines- We haven't scratched the surface yet, in terms of, uh, new hormones and molecules... that the body produces itself to keep itself healthy. The next step, of course- You know, it wasn't my goal to start an industry. My goal was to, um, make sure the science got translated... into an endeavor that would be useful to people. In all the things I've done, I think I'm most proud of Genentech, because it, uh, Well, saved hundreds of thousands of people's lives. Well, isn't it great if you can make money... and change the world for the better at the same time? We are now entering our fourth generation of computers. Difficult problems which once required 30 hours of work by a computer as large as a house... can now be solved in 12 seconds by a computer no bigger than a bathtub. In 1976, the computer was about to get personal, expanding beyond the government, institutions and businesses to enter the home. For venture capitalists, this represented the opportunity of a lifetime. We turned down Apple Computer. We didn't- We didn't even turn it down. We didn't agree to meet with Jobs and Wozniak. Oh, that would have been a fabulous investment if we had made it, but we didn't. We said, "Oh, no, we're not really in that business." I thought, "How can you use a computer at home? You're gonna put recipes on it?" I sent my partner down to look at Apple. He came back and he said, "Guy kept me waiting for an hour, and he's very arrogant." And, of course, that's Steve Jobs! I said, "Well, let's let it go." That was a big mistake. In 1976, the only people who believed in the personal computer... were the geeks and nerds who gathered at Home brew Computer Clubs. At one such club, 21-year-old Steve Jobs had partnered with Steve Wozniak... to create a circuit board kit they called... The Apple I. Steve Jobs was working at Atari at the time, so the most obvious person to ask for start-up money was his boss, Nolan Bushnell. They needed an investment, and, uh, they offered me a third of Apple Computer for $50,000... and I said, "Gee, I don't think so." I could have owned a third of Apple Computer for $50'000. A big mistake. But I said, "Call Don Valentine." 'Cause Don had a high probability of seeing the opportunity. So we had our meeting. I went to Steve's house. And we talked, and I was convinced it was a big market... just embryonic ally beginning. Steve was in his Fu Manchu look, and his question for me- "Tell me what I have to do to have you finance me." I said, "We have to have someone in the company... who has some sense of management and marketing and channels of distribution." He said, "Fine. Send me three people." I sent him three candidates. One he didn't like. One didn't like him. And the third one was Mike Markkula. Mike Markkula worked for me at Fairchild before he went to Intel. He called me up and said, "There's two guys over in Los Altos that, uh, could really use your help, and you ought to go see'em." I said, "Okay." 'Cause that's what I did on Mondays. I was retired. I think I was 32 when I retired from Intel. But one day a week, I would help people start companies and write business plans. I did it for free, just for the interaction with bright, uh, people... that had a lot of fire in their belly. So I went over and talked to the boys. The two of them did not make a good impression on people. They were bearded. They didn't smell good. They dressed funny. Young, naive. But Woz had designed a really wonderful, wonderful computer. Technology that was really advanced. The problem was, you could walk down the street in 1976... and talk to a hundred people and say, "Would you like a personal computer?" And they'd go, "What's that?" And so I told them. I said I'd help them write a business plan. So I got to working on it, and I'd say, "Gosh", you know' "the opportunity here is just too great." The business plan said that, uh' with $142'000 we could be cash-flow positive in nine months. And I came to the conclusion that we could build a Fortune 500 company in less than five years. I said I'd put up the money that was needed. Not only did he write the check, Mike Markkula came out of retirement, becoming the president and C.E.O. of Apple. His first order of business, build a board of directors. And the first call he made was to Arthur Rock. Arthur would have missed Apple if it weren't for Mike Markkula. Jobs and Wozniak came up to see me, and they were very unappealing. Goatee, long hair- Markkula said, "Well, before you make up your mind, there's a computer show. You ought to come down and see what's going on." And he did. He thought somethin' was happenin'. He wasn't quite sure what. There was this huge auditorium, and there was this booth with everybody around it. I couldn't even get next to it. And it was the Apple booth. And it turned out that I sure made an investment. Then I got a call from Don Valentine. "I want to put some money in that compa-" I said, "Okay, you gotta come on the board then." Don's background is sales and distribution and customer satisfaction. Arthur's expertise comes from the way financial markets work, and, uh, how to choose people. I don't think there's a company today... that could say that they had a better board than that. I mean, we couldn't- We couldn't lose. Taking his place alongside the venture capital luminaries... was the young Steve Jobs, who had never even seen the inside of a board room. There was one board meeting that he took his shoes off... and put his bare feet up on the-on the table. And I said, "You're excused until you can come back here... and act like a board member." He put his shoe back on and everything was fine. He just needed some training and some direction... and some, um, manners. You know, in the venture capital business, if you look at 200 deals, and you-you might do 10 of'em, and you will think they're all great, and if one of'em is great, then you're in the hall of fame. If you make 10 deals, you know, if you do it well, some of them are gonna succeed, some are going to fail. There's usually one in there we call the living dead. Living dead, living dead, living dead. They don't succeed, they don't fail. They just sit there and lap up your time. You're doomed. They fail for all kinds of reasons. If it's struggling, you probably should just get out. Well, we hated to give up, you know, and hated to admit defeat. It was always traumatic. You get personally involved in these companies. Everybody's heartbroken. It's tough to lose money. Losing money is not a good thing! Programs are instructions to the computer... that can be recorded on floppy disks or cassettes. In the early '80s, a new kind of company... began to attract attention in Silicon Valley. These programs are called software. A Data Quest report says there are now 27,000 software programs on the market, with a new product being introduced every 11 minutes. Dick Kramlich had been listening to endless pitches from software entrepreneurs... in his office at New Enterprise Associates, a venture firm he'd co-founded after leaving Arthur Rock. One day, an entrepreneur named Rob Campbell marched in. I was out always looking for money. And I was flying from Boston to California, and I was sitting in the back of the plane in the cheap seats, where entrepreneurs are supposed to sit. And I noticed half the people on the plane had their briefcases open, and they had overhead transparencies. And they were thumbing through 'em' and they were marking'em up. That really was kind of the genesis of "Why PowerPoint?" I liked the way Rob was doing this, and I was really impressed with PowerPoint. You see' you sort of automate a very cumbersome process, and when you see it, you know it! It's just that this goes right through your bones. So, we started funding it. Dick Kramlich's firm provided Rob Campbell's company, named Forethought, with an initial round of funding to develop this new software. But while the Forethought team was working on PowerPoint, the company was giving its venture capitalists cause to worry. Any new business seldom does what's written in the business plan. And we had a multitude of problems. Limitations of the operating system. Months invested in trying- Couldn't develop it. Engineering was delayed. They were all "R" and not much "D." Decision on acquiring File Maker- Our largest distributor went into Chapter 7. So the bankruptcy judge is now selling our products off. Campbell's company was burning through its investment money fast. He approached Kramlich and his partners, looking for another infusion of cash. Rob came in and did a presentation' talked about File Maker, talked about what the presentation product was going to be. N.E.A. had hired a-a new, um, partner, and he didn't like us. He didn't like our company. I don't think he liked me. And then my other partner got up and said, you know, "Basically, you have one product where you pay too much in royalties, and the other one which is not gonna work, so this isn't worth it. Dick, we're saying no." And I said, "No more money?" He said, "No more money." Despite his partner's doubts, Dick Kramlich wasn't ready to let PowerPoint go so easily. My mother used to say, "Don't ever underestimate Dick. 'Cause if he takes on a challenge, he's going to get it done." I said, "You know, this presentation product is really a pretty good product." So I said, "Would you all mind if I did it myself?" And they said, "Well, you can do what you want to do. It's not gonna be a conflict, just so long as we don't have to put any more money in." So I called my wife, and I said, "Pam, um, stop work on the house." I said, "I'm gonna fund this company myself." We would never do what Dick did. Never. There's so many potential problems with a venture, that if you have a serious partner, a good partner, who says, "I just don't see this"- How can you proceed? As a matter of policy, we wouldn't permit that in our place. Well, he asked permission. Well, we would say no. Then there wouldn't be PowerPoint! Good. I remember telling Dick. I said, "Dick, you did not make a mistake." I thought it would be a million-dollar product right out of the chute. And, instead of a million dollars out of the chute, I think we had two and a half to three. It was much better than what I had hoped for. And so, I was thinking this was enough to validate a public offering. I think Dick would have liked us not to be acquired. He said, "You know, we really don't have the structure in this company to be a public company." You know, I was nervous about access to capital. He said, "Actually, we've been approached by Microsoft. And they have a presentation product, but it's not nearly as good as PowerPoint. And they would like to acquire us and kill their own project." I said, "If that's the way you want to go, it's okay with me." Another one of my greatest mistakes, of which I have many, is when Microsoft did the acquisition, they wanted to do it all in stock. So I was, like, "Oh, you know, Microsoft stock has way too much risk. They could dump their stock on us at their peak!" So we did an all-cash transaction. And don't ask me to calculate what that cost all of us. It's too-It's too hurtful. Money don't get everything, it's true What it don't get, I can't use I want money That's what I want That's what I want That's what I want That's what I want That's what I want That's what I want That's what I want The facts are, in Silicon Valley, probably 40 % of the companies that are financed... change presidents in 18 months. I mean, I always tell the young C.E.O.'s, you're gonna work hard, and you're gonna, you know, if you're lucky, you're gonna be successful, and your company's gonna get big. And then you're gonna get fired. Firing people is always the hardest for me. That's a gut-wrenching thing to do. If they gotta go, they gotta go. I'd rather find the right people and back them, uh, than find the right idea and have to change the people. Well, nobody plans to do that, but those are the facts. So, I operate from the principle that- Give him his shot. Help him as much as we can. Hope that he makes it. If he doesn't make it, off with his head and on to the next guy. In 1984 Cisco Systems was a two-person company- The husband-and-wife team of Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner. Cisco was a typical start-up. It was certainly run out of our house. A number of very illustrious companies I think have that distinction. Through Cisco, Sandy and Len were early evangelists... for what would one day be called the Internet, but which, in 1984, was really just a jury-rigged network of computers, used at universities and in the military. Cisco's product was called a router. And it solved a very big problem. It allowed all kinds of computer systems to talk to each other easily for the very first time. This opened the door to the development of an online world. It was a desperately-needed product. But... no one would finance Cisco. We tried from the very beginning to-to get funding. Uh, we just weren't successful. We were not the first people to see it, as armies of people have told me- That they saw it before we did, and they turned it down. They took the position that this wasn't a tenable business model. I-I don't think, in their position, I would have disagreed with that. But I wasn't in their position, and I did disagree with it. These things are not so clear. Different people see them differently. The person who got us involved with Cisco said, "You are probably the only person in North America... who would be willing to deal with these people." The people at Cisco- If you were designing hard-to-get-along-with people, they got the model right down. Difficult to do business with... on any basis. Totally intolerant of a mistake made by anybody. But very instrumental in starting that company. I think that we were difficult to work with. We were all very independent. We were used to having our own way. You know, certainly there's the mind-set that has to go along... with years and years and years of people saying that, you know, "You can't do what you say you're going to do," "You can't make money' even if you could do it," um, and that "You're the wrong person to do it." We bought a third of the company for $2.8 million. And we had an agreement that basically said, "You get a third of the company' and we get a third of the company' and we will find the people to run this company." None of us had ever built a company. We understood that there was an enormous need for-for more structure, and to bring in people that we had no way to reach. Sandy and Len agreed to step down into new roles. And Don Valentine recruited John Morgridge, a veteran of several high-tech start-ups, to run Cisco. Morgridge's first task was to address what he and Don Valentine saw... as a troubled corporate culture. The quarter that I arrived, we hired a shrink. He eliminated fighting in the open hallways. Physical fighting, I mean. I actually had the, uh... vice president of engineering deck the sales vice president in my office! We really did have a trench mentality. This is not a good big-company mentality. Quelle surprise! But, on the other hand, I think that there was no one there in that original group... who didn't ardently love that company. As Cisco grew, a culture clash developed... between the original employees and the new hires. And ultimately, this clash centered on Sandy Lerner. She was definitely a strong personality, and she definitely was the reason the company existed. Sandy was an incredible piece in the puzzle... of getting things done right for the customer. Silicon Valley has not always been the place where the customer's thought of first. They may, in some places, be thought of second or third. But Sandy was ensuring that the customer was thought of first. Unfortunately, at the expense of some of the other major managers. I had very much alienated the other people in the company, because, you know, other than Len, they hadn't been there very long, and, you know, I saw them, rightly or wrongly, as the people I was trying to protect the customers from. By her own admission, she would detonate. Usually in my office. At Cisco, you know, being the only woman and a technical woman, I think I was just very, very frightening. And there just wasn't a box for me. And I think that I didn't make it... particularly easy for them to ignore me. And I didn't make it particularly easy for them to find a suitable box. Um, in that, you know, the boxes that existed for women at the time didn't seem to fit what I thought I-I was doing. Finally one day, my assistant said the conference room is filled... with eight Cisco employees demanding to see you. All of the vice presidents of the company were in the conference room. They walked up Sand Hill Road and said, "Either she goes, or we go." "Terminate her, or we're quitting. All of us." And he called me and said, uh, "Do you want me to handle this?" And I said, "No, I'll handle it." And Sandy was retired. First of all, I mean, let's just get it out. I was fired. John called me into his office. He said, "You know, you're now worth so much money, it really doesn't make any sense for you to work this hard. You know, I think it's just a good idea... if you just, you know, retire at this point." I said, "But, John, I have a lot to do here. I-You know, I think I have a, you know, a place in-in the company, and I-I-I don't really want to retire right now." I was... 35 years old. Um, and he said, "Well, I think today's your last day." I walked to Len's office' where Len informed me that I must surely be mistaken. And I sat in Len's office while Len went up and talked to John. And, uh, came back and walked out the door with me. And we never walked back in. You know, this idea that 45 % of founders will be gone in 18 months? In retrospect, that was clearly the mind-set. Len and I clearly did not understand that that was the game that we were playing. You know, the first rule of any game is to know that you're in one. It's an unpleasant thing to do, to fire anybody. But it's clearly the facts of life. I think each of them went away with 170 million. I don't know how people think of what comes next... after the first 170 million, but, uh, I don't think they've ever forgiven either of us. I was once asked, did I start Cisco to make a whole bunch of money? And I said, "No. If I measured myself that way' I probably couldn't look at myself in the mirror in the morning." Um, I don't. I think I've been a pretty good tool-user, and money is a tool. You know, technology keeps evolving, and ever since Leonardo da Vinci, it's been evolving, and it will continue to evolve through good times and bad times. It will evolve. Venture capital is here to stay though. Well, I get my greatest satisfaction out of thinking back on the companies... that I helped start and helped grow. It's... nice to sit in the glow of your adulation, but... without the entrepreneurs, you're nothing! You have to have these real people with the ideas... and their willingness to commit their life. I don't think, and I would not say... that Silicon Valley is the result of good venture capitalists. Not at all. Entrepreneurship is the main show. Venture capital is an aid, and sometimes people got lost- "We must have venture capital." No use having venture capital unless you have entrepreneurs. If it hadn't been for the Treybigs and Swansons, where would Kleiner and I have been? Without venture capital, the future wouldn't happen nearly as quickly. New companies are much better at exploiting new technology. They can extend and exploit a new idea. We would all have a lower standard of living, worldwide. It clearly got the first man to the moon. It clearly got, you know, everything from we're country code 1 in the telephone system to, you know, the Internet. I think you can't ignore the role of venture capital. You know, can you imagine, a guy going in and talking to a banker, and he says, you know, "Look, I want to start delivering mail by jets." We go into Kleiner Perkins, we say we want to make insulin in bacteria, and he goes, "Okay!" Great things don't really come out of the status quo. They come out of people with vision and drive to prove the difference. This underlying technology was there, and there was nowhere for it to go, until, you know, the venture capital is up here, saying, "We've got some money. Let's take a chance." We need guys with new ideas about how to do things. All these ideas- You gotta get to the frontier. Do something. Build a company. The entrepreneurial spirit. The entrepreneurial spirit. Entrepreneurship. Making the world go round. Hard-working, visionary. Change the way people work, educate their kids. And you can do it. The best things in life are free But you can give them to the birds and bees I want money That's what I want That's what I want That's what I want That's what I want That's what I want That's what I want That's what I want Your love gives me such a thrill? But your love won't pay my bills I want money That's what I want That's what I want That's what I want That's what I want That's what I want That's what I want That's what I want Money don't get everything, it's true What it don't get, I can't use I want money That's what I want That's what I want That's what I want That's what I want That's what I want That's what I want That's what I want That's what I want I want money I want lots of money In fact, I want so much money That's what I want Give me your money? That's what I want Just give me money That's what I want That's what I want |
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