Andy Grove's class, Wyc Grousbeck, and meeting David Marquardt

The next semester, I took a class called what was it? The first course that Andy Grove taught at Stanford. It was called Technology Strategy in the Technology Industry or something like that. It actually, the lecture notes he created working with Garth Saloner, I think, was the professor he teamed with. Oh, no, it was Robert — a kind of a German-accented professor who I loved. Robert Burgelman! So, he was the co-teacher. My buddy, David Yoffie, was also visiting at Stanford that year from Harvard. He was the longest-serving or the youngest board member on Intel's board. He became my mentor. Anyways, I didn't get into any of the classes I requested, including Irv Grousbeck's class on entrepreneurship, so I got stuck taking Andy Grove's class. And Wyc was there because he didn't need to take a class from his father.

So, anyways, we had a class project, a little thing we were supposed to do. So, Wyc, who knew I was the smartest guy in the Stanford Business School because he's the one that told me I had the name 'Hare-Brain' and he was very, very connected, and I didn't actually know what a venture capitalist was at the time. I literally did not know what a venture capitalist was. I had no idea. I'd never heard of the concept. Because I'm a commune boy. And we dealt with like Wall Street people and real money, not these little feudalistic kind of, you know, just little guys, right, who'd heard of those people. This is 1990. So, tech sector was in the toilet. There's only one company anybody paid attention to, well, actually two. There's like Apple, which was pathetic, and Microsoft.

So, he got me to work as his partner on a project for Dave Marquardt. He says, 'You need to meet this guy. He's on the board of Microsoft. He's one of the most prominent venture capitalists anywhere. And I'll get you a meeting with him. We'll do a project for him.' And it was for a portfolio company of David's called TOPS. So, it was a sort of little Macintosh networking company. They had these little daisy chain little networking things for basically LAN, local area networking, for Macs. And he was trying to figure out what to do with it. So, I came in and did a study for him. And because of that, I bought all the books on networking. I actually knew a little bit about networking because I took a class on SNA, which is the Systems Network Architecture. That's the networking architecture that IBM uses, because that's what we used when I first started using IBMs back in the '70s and '80s.