Stanford

"In 1983, Dan’l was asked to solve a big problem for the company. Apple needed to crack the university market, but it had no direct distribution into universities. Dan’l examined Apple’s approach and delivered his verdict: “I need to undo everything you’re doing.” He laid out his terms to Steve, demanding complete control. “Stay out of my way unless I ask for help, and pay me when I’m done,” Dan’l said. Steve agreed. Dan’l built the University Consortium virtually single-handedly, establishing relationships with twenty-four universities, including Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Michigan. As he traveled, Dan’l kept hearing the same demand: Professors wanted 3M machines. The term 3M referred to workstations with a megabyte of memory, a million-pixel display, and enough processing power to handle a million instructions per second—instructions being the tiny steps a computer takes to get anything done, from adding two numbers to moving a pixel on the screen. The leading laboratories of the day, including Xerox PARC, had released a handful of 3M computers to Stanford and Carnegie Mellon. But the devices were so expensive they had to be donated. Meanwhile, the everyday PCs housed at university departments had one eighth to one third of the 3M’s power—not enough to enable meaningful research advancements. Scientists and researchers were eager to see who would produce the first commercial 3M machine. They wanted to buy them in large numbers and for the price of no more than $10,000 each (about $33,000 in 2026 money). In essence, they hoped to put supercomputer capabilities on individual desks. Despite the lack of a 3M machine, the Apple University Consortium became a massive success, moving nearly fifty thousand units of inventory while Mac retail sales stalled."

"Steve, still pondering, couldn’t shake the idea of a 3M machine. When he later told the founding story of NeXT, he would bedazzle the press with the perfect tale. But it was largely a myth. It went like this. Steve first met Paul Berg, a tall, gregarious biochemist, at a Stanford luncheon in 1984. Paul, fifty-nine and the winner of a Nobel Prize for creating the first recombinant DNA molecule, was teeming with bleeding-edge insights about the creation of life. In late August 1985, Steve and Paul sat for lunch in Palo Alto. Steve began grilling Paul about how researchers used computers—and why they didn’t more often. Specifically, he wanted Paul to explain why biologists weren’t using computers to model DNA experiments. In theory, computers would speed them up exponentially. Over two and a half hours, Paul described to Steve the level of complication involved in conducting biology experiments. With each trial, Paul’s team had to choose different temperatures, enzymes, and other variables and then wait to see what worked via trial and error. The 3M machines capable of handling all of these factors were prohibitively expensive, even for well-funded laboratories. Steve left the lunch in awe. And Paul reciprocated Steve’s respect. He loved the Silicon Valley start-up culture that Steve had helped forge and he insisted that his own Nobel-winning research could only have been possible in the cooperative, entrepreneurial environment of the Bay Area. Steve came away from the meeting feeling confident that he could offer scientists and researchers the product they clearly needed: a more affordable 3M machine. “And gradually,” Steve said, “my spirits started to come back little by little.” This story Steve told about his lunch with Paul was far more elegant than the real story. As Dan’l later recalled, Steve understood the power of being able to say, “I met with Paul Berg, and there was an epiphany.” He knew that name-dropping Nobel Prize winners carried weight."

"Michael Carter, who directed Stanford’s academic computing strategy, told the team that professors needed tools simple enough to build simulations and tutorials on their own—“as easy to use as MacPaint,” he said, referring to the dead-simple painting app for Mac. Institutions would buy the computer if it was priced between $3,000 and $5,000, Michael said. But if Next wanted to reach students directly, the price would have to come in below $2,000."

"As investors, Don and Pierre reflected their circumstances. Don was drawn to companies addressing large markets and, though he admired idiosyncratic engineers, was not particularly interested in understanding the technical particulars. Pierre, on the other hand, liked deeply technical undertakings and was less comfortable investing where, at the outset, he did not detect a pronounced technology advantage. At one point, while we were trying to invest in biotech companies, both Don and Pierre attended weekly evening classes at Stanford. At the end of the class it was Pierre, not Don, who would linger behind to grill the professor about an obscure detail of the lecture."

"In recent years, the number of people from Taiwan going to Silicon Valley to study, to sightsee, or to settle has increased greatly. Most people believe the living environment in Silicon Valley is much better than in Taiwan. But if Silicon Valley today is a paradise, then Silicon Valley more than twenty years ago was simply like heaven. From San Francisco to San Jose, a north–south stretch of sixty miles and about ten miles east–west, it is now a bustling metropolitan area, with every kind of urban problem: dense population, traffic congestion, increasing pollution, soaring housing prices, and worrying public safety. When I was studying at Stanford, none of these problems had yet appeared; what there was instead were beautiful scenery, a pleasant climate, and a leisurely atmosphere."

"Just as the literary giant Hemingway described Paris as “a moveable feast,” I describe my year at Harvard the same way. After that, I went through various stages—MIT, employment, entering Stanford for a Ph.D., and working at Texas Instruments—but no matter where I went or what I did, I carried this “feast” with me and continually enjoyed the knowledge, interests, and insights that this “feast” gave me. Even decades later, when I returned to Taiwan, although changes in time and place made it feel as if I were in another world, this “feast” still did not lose its freshness. It was as though I were still immersed in a rich, ever-changing, refined, and captivating atmosphere."

"Then we came to the racing-stripe option for my white car. I was really proud of myself for not being seduced to buy crazy mispriced features I didn’t need. But the racing stripe was only about $ 150 more, and it was kind of cool. He showed me a picture of a sleek blue stripe along the side of a new white car. I hemmed and hawed, reluctant to give this salesman a victory after I had stayed firm up to that point. Finally, he ran a number on his desk calculator. “If you go with the racing stripe, it will only add $ 1.50 per month to your monthly payments,” he said. A buck-fifty! That was less than a cheeseburger a month, and I was a fancy investment banker heading to Stanford. What the heck! I went for it. We shook hands on the new amount, and he left the room to process the title work and get the car ready for me to drive off the lot. While I was sitting in his office, I gazed out the window to the side lot where my new car was parked. I smiled, thinking about my first big purchase and what a great deal I had negotiated. I started thinking about packing and cruising to California. Then I saw this guy come out from the service garage. He had a roll of skinny blue tape in his hand. He walked up to my car, started at the front, applied the sticky tape to a point near the side of the front headlight and unrolled it as he paced toward the back of the car. He carefully rubbed his finger along the tape line to ensure it was affixed to the car. When he got to the back, he pulled a small blade from his pocket, cut the tape, and pressed the loose end to the car. He then did the same thing on the other side of the car. Voilà! Instant racing stripe. I felt like shit. I had just paid $ 150 for a guy to spend thirty-five seconds with a $ 1.50 roll of tape. I could’ve done that! I felt so stupid. Then I realized what had happened: On a $ 13,000 purchase, the cost of the stripe was a rounding error. The salesman had made it even more insignificant by showing how little it affected my monthly payment when baked into my financing. But in absolute terms and on its own, $ 150 was a meaningful amount of money, especially to a twenty-four-year-old kid. If I had someone approach me the day after I bought the car and ask if I would pay them $ 150 to run this strip of blue tape down the side of my car, I would have laughed. Perhaps $ 1.50 maybe. In the context of the larger trade, however, I had become numb to a real number and forgot to value that trade on its own merits. I was a victim of the bias that behavior economists have now documented well. At the time, I felt like I had been taken advantage of. Similarly, I had negotiated a deal where the car dealer was only making about a $ 500 margin on the entire sale of the car, but then, with perhaps a full $ 150 margin on the racing stripe (assuming that roll of tape cost about nothing) the dealer was able to increase his margin by 30 percent to $ 650. From then on, every time I got into that car, I looked at that damn stripe and just shook my head. All I could think of was the mechanic with the roll of tape pulling $ 150 out of my pocket!"

"Of course, at the time, I had no idea how life-changing the Stanford experience was going to be. It was there that I found lifelong friends, a wife, and an opening to write a letter to one of Stanford business school’s 1968 graduates—Richard Rainwater."

"For its supporters, the Review offered a breath of fresh air to Stanford’s stifling political correctness. For its detractors, the Review engaged in disingenuous devil’s advocacy, opting for provocation over substance. The Review became famous on campus for its political heterodoxy. Its inaugural editor-in-chief would later become infamous in Silicon Valley for his."

"To win recruits over, the team crafted an edgy sales pitch. Years later, Levchin described the approach to a Stanford computer science class: Engineers are very cynical people. They’re trained to be. And they can afford to be, given the large number of companies that are trying to recruit them in Silicon Valley right now. Since engineers think any new idea is dumb, they will tend to think that your new idea is dumb. They get paid a lot at Google doing some pretty cool stuff. Why stop indexing the world to go do your dumb thing? So the way to compete against the giants is not with money. Google will outbid you. They have [an] oil derrick that spits out $ 30 billion in search revenue every year. To win, you need to tell a story about cogs. At Google, you’re a cog. Whereas with me, you’re an instrumental piece of this great thing that we’ll build together. Articulate the vision. Don’t even try to pay well. Meet people’s cash flow needs. Pay them so they can cover their rent and go out every once in a while. It’s not about cash. It’s about breaking through the wall of cynicism. It’s about making 1% of this new thing way more exciting than a couple hundred grand and a cubicle at Google."

"“We are living in the heaven of PalmPilots,” observed Reid Hoffman, a Stanford friend of Thiel’s and early Confinity board member, “and we could walk into every single restaurant and go to each table and ask how many people have PalmPilots.” He guessed the answer was between zero and one per restaurant. “And that means your use case can only be used between zero and one times, per restaurant, per meal cycle! You’re hosed! It’s over on this idea.”"

"“If there were two paths where we had to choose one thing or the other, and one wasn’t obviously better than the other,” he explained in a 2003 public talk at Stanford, “then rather than spend a lot of time trying to figure out which one was slightly better, we would just pick one and do it. And sometimes we’d be wrong.... But oftentimes it’s better to just pick a path and do it rather than just vacillate endlessly on the choice.”"

"Frezza and Levchin’s efforts to apply this technique to patterns of fraudulent activity yielded another breakthrough: now, PayPal could match not just numbers to numbers but patterns to patterns. They augmented this with computer-generated rules that triggered an alert if one pattern resembled an earlier fradulent one. If such a fraud pattern registered frequently enough, the team could write a blanket rule in the system to prevent it from recurring again. “A simple layman’s explanation is that we started fighting patterns—more than [fighting] fraudsters,” observed engineer Santosh Janardhan. “Patterns are mathematics. Some of the folks who ended up working on this stuff were basically mathematics folks from Stanford that Max ended up hiring, and they ended up creating models that detected changes and anomalies in patterns, which was a very advanced way of looking at things at that time.”"

"In a 2002 talk at Stanford, a questioner asked Thiel what advice he had for PayPal. “The larger market is off eBay,” he said, “and they should develop a lot of product features and functionalities that enable point-to-point payments in a non-eBay context.”"

"For its supporters, the Review offered a breath of fresh air to Stanford’s stifling political correctness. For its detractors, the Review engaged in disingenuous devil’s advocacy, opting for provocation over substance. The Review became famous on campus for its political heterodoxy. Its inaugural editor-in-chief would later become infamous in Silicon Valley for his."

"“We are living in the heaven of PalmPilots,” observed Reid Hoffman, a Stanford friend of Thiel’s and early Confinity board member, “and we could walk into every single restaurant and go to each table and ask how many people have PalmPilots.” He guessed the answer was between zero and one per restaurant. “And that means your use case can only be used between zero and one times, per restaurant, per meal cycle! You’re hosed! It’s over on this idea.”"

"Frezza and Levchin’s efforts to apply this technique to patterns of fraudulent activity yielded another breakthrough: now, PayPal could match not just numbers to numbers but patterns to patterns. They augmented this with computer-generated rules that triggered an alert if one pattern resembled an earlier fradulent one. If such a fraud pattern registered frequently enough, the team could write a blanket rule in the system to prevent it from recurring again. “A simple layman’s explanation is that we started fighting patterns—more than [fighting] fraudsters,” observed engineer Santosh Janardhan. “Patterns are mathematics. Some of the folks who ended up working on this stuff were basically mathematics folks from Stanford that Max ended up hiring, and they ended up creating models that detected changes and anomalies in patterns, which was a very advanced way of looking at things at that time.”"

"“If there were two paths where we had to choose one thing or the other, and one wasn’t obviously better than the other,” he explained in a 2003 public talk at Stanford, “then rather than spend a lot of time trying to figure out which one was slightly better, we would just pick one and do it. And sometimes we’d be wrong.… But oftentimes it’s better to just pick a path and do it rather than just vacillate endlessly on the choice.”"

"In a 2002 talk at Stanford, a questioner asked Thiel what advice he had for PayPal. “The larger market is off eBay,” he said, “and they should develop a lot of product features and functionalities that enable point-to-point payments in a non-eBay context.”"

"Dobbin’s respect for Stanford became enormous, and he expressed it in various ways. In 2004, while liquidating many of his long-held properties in Newfoundland, Dobbin decided to retain one of his original apartment buildings on LaMarchant Road in St. John’s. Built in 1967 as the Bellevue Terrace Apartments, the building had undergone various changes over the years and was serving as a low-rent residence when Dobbin informed Stanford he wanted the complex converted to a hotel. Dobbin wasn’t interested in making a lot of money from the hotel business. “Basically,” explains Stanford, “he wanted a place to hang out.”"

"familiar with Stanford’s role, however, attributes a substantial portion of Dobbin’s success to Stanford’s unique talents. Newfoundlanders do not wear their heritage or their hearts on their sleeves, but their language and demeanour—Gaelic and open, devoid of any hint of intrigue—identify them with their deepest roots. Stanford expresses himself with warmth and humour, his words delivered in an accent as authentically Newfoundland as a school of cod."

"from me and went down the list of twenty-five names, drawing a line through twenty-three of them, skipping my name and one secretary.” Included on the list of highlighted names were the president, vice-president, financial analyst and sales and support staff. “He handed the paper back to me and told me he wanted to meet the people on his list the next day at nine o'clock,” Stanford continues. “As soon as they showed up for work in the morning, he gave them their notice on the spot. That’s why I didn’t meet Craig Dobbin for a year. He basically went into hiding.”"

"The more Stanford met Dobbin’s demands, the more Dobbin asked of him. The demands grew substantially in Dobbin’s later years when, in contrast with his previous attitude, Craig Dobbin became almost obsessed with tracking changes in his liquidity. During this period, Stanford’s duties included providing a daily review of Dobbin’s assets, showing changes in market valuations and cash on hand from the previous day. “The report had to be on his desk by nine in the morning,” Stanford remembers. “If it wasn’t there by ten after nine my telephone would ring and I would hear Craig’s voice bellow, ‘Where the hell is my daily report?’ But this was rare. It was usually there for him.”"

"A Counter-Positioning challenge is one of the toughest management challenges. When I started teaching at Stanford in 2008, Nokia was the leader in smartphones. By 2014 they had disappeared from this market. Their CEO Stephen Elop’s “Burning Platform” memo in 2011 captures well the immense frustration of a Counter-Positoned incumbent: While competitors poured flames on our market share, what happened at Nokia? We fell behind, we missed big trends, and we lost time. At that time, we thought we were making the right decisions; but, with the benefit of hindsight, we now find ourselves years behind. The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don’t have a product that is close to…"

"Our global MBA program draws qualified candidates from such top business schools as Harvard, Stanford, Chicago-Booth, MIT Sloan, Columbia, Wharton and Kellogg in the U.S., as well as London Business School and IESE in Europe and CEIBS in Hong Kong. In 2014, we selected 21 MBAs for the program from a pool of 642 applicants."

"Carlos Brito, in his “View from the Top” presentation at Stanford in 2011, “Great people are what forms great companies.” For a company to be great, the majority of its people have to be great: there is no magical ingredient to the equation."

"Thinking of Apple’s investment like a government program is instructive. Year in, year out, China didn’t have the talent or expertise to build the products that Jony Ive’s studio conceived, but the engineers Apple hired out of MIT, Caltech, and Stanford, or poached from Tesla, Dell, and Motorola, routinely got them up to speed. Apple could send a caliber of talent to China—what one Apple veteran calls “an influx of the smartest of the smart people”—that no government program ever could. And the culture was such that the Apple engineers would work up to eighteen hours a day. Moreover, whereas a government program could at best train a workforce to engineer products, it wouldn’t have the ability to actually purchase the goods. But Apple could and did."

"Thinking of Apple’s investment like a government program is instructive. Year in, year out, China didn’t have the talent or expertise to build the products that Jony Ive’s studio conceived, but the engineers Apple hired out of MIT, Caltech, and Stanford, or poached from Tesla, Dell, and Motorola, routinely got them up to speed. Apple could send a caliber of talent to China—what one Apple veteran calls “an influx of the smartest of the smart people”—that no government program ever could. And the culture was such that the Apple engineers would work up to eighteen hours a day. Moreover, whereas a government program could at best train a workforce to engineer products, it wouldn’t have the ability to actually purchase the goods. But Apple could and did."

"Thinking of Apple’s investment like a government program is instructive. Year in, year out, China didn’t have the talent or expertise to build the products that Jony Ive’s studio conceived, but the engineers Apple hired out of MIT, Caltech, and Stanford, or poached from Tesla, Dell, and Motorola, routinely got them up to speed. Apple could send a caliber of talent to China—what one Apple veteran calls “an influx of the smartest of the smart people”—that no government program ever could. And the culture was such that the Apple engineers would work up to eighteen hours a day. Moreover, whereas a government program could at best train a workforce to engineer products, it wouldn’t have the ability to actually purchase the goods. But Apple could and did."

"Meeting Steve and Woz It was about two or three years after the sushi restaurant’s business was on track, so I think it was around 1987-88. While I was busy making sushi at the counter, one of the regulars in front of me glanced at a table in the back and whispered. “Do you know? That’s Steve Jobs in the back.” At the time, Steve had been ousted from Apple, which he founded, and was experiencing difficult times. However, I knew nothing of these circumstances back then. Still, I clearly remember my first encounter with Steve because his appearance at that time left such a strong impression. Even back then in Silicon Valley, a casual look of sneakers and jeans was “the norm.” Older professors from Stanford sometimes wore ties, but that was an exception. However, Steve, who was just over 30 at the time, was dressed in a suit with a bow tie."

"In 2010, just before Reed entered university, Steve seemed truly happy. When I happened to ask Steve, who was sitting alone at the counter, “How are your kids doing lately?” he replied, “My son got into Stanford. I’m very proud of him,” with a big smile. It was the face of a father joyfully proud of his son’s advancement."

"The other person was Mr. Arriaga, a major donor to Stanford. His daughter, Laura, is married to the notable investor Marc Andreessen and also lectured at Stanford. Laura had been a regular customer since Toshiz Sushi-ya, and she had visited Katsuzuki several times with Laurene, Steve Jobs’ wife."

"Desperately searching for someone connected to Stanford, I found out that Mr. Bass was the head of Stanford’s real estate division. What luck! I sent an email, and he called immediately, listened to the situation, and seemed to know the hotel person in charge. He promised, “I’ll talk to them.”"

"Letting Off Steam Equally important was our practice of giving every full-time employee an interview every six months. At Stanford I’d been taught that employees never organize because of money: they organize because of un-listened-to grievances. We set up a program under which each employee (including some part-timers) was interviewed, not by the immediate superior, the store manager, but by the manager’s superior. The principal purpose of this program was to vent grievances and address them where possible. And I think this program was as important as pay in keeping employees with us."

"McCaw's empire building had begun, though no one at Stanford had any inkling of this side of his life. McCaw quietly ran his business by long-distance telephone, calling managers in Centralia and checking with Marion on estate litigation and creditor negotiations. His penchant for secrecy would ultimately become a tremendous business asset. "He put a helluva mask on," says Fred Morck. Jeff Ruhe was a close friend at Stanford but always knew that McCaw maintained a private zone. "He's a great listener," says Ruhe, who later became an executive with the ESPN sports network and is still a friend of McCaw's. "He doesn't give away much, but he takes in a lot.""

"Despite his frivolous reputation, McCaw itched to get on with his life, to get going in business. He hated the parasitic idea of living off the family-owned company. He wanted to expand Twin City, to start making acquisitions, to be creative—like his father. So even before his graduation from Stanford, McCaw contacted Bill Daniels, a communi- cations broker who had worked with Elroy, and said he wanted to buy another cable company—something small and affordable that he could seize upon, make his own, and begin growing."