Yale

"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."

"Students at elite law schools, especially Yale and Harvard, sprang up to act. Students founded environmental organizations around the rallying cry of “[Sue the bastards!](private://read/01k3jwt46q240aq6fe12mqkyr0/16_Notes.xhtml#_idTextAnchor287)” (referring to government agencies). Through the 1970s, both the American left and the right worked harmoniously to constrain government effectiveness. Liberal activists like Ralph Nader declared themselves to be watchdogs of government, constantly filing lawsuits. Ronald Reagan returned the compliment when he replied, “Government is the problem, not the solution.” The lawyerly society grew out of a necessary corrective to the United States’ problems of the 1960s. Unfortunately, it has become the cause of many of its present problems."

"Later that spring, Mix heard the rumor that Feder’s counterpart at Harvard would come to Stockholm to meet competitor Nordic Capital. Mix acted lightning fast. He called up and invited Peter Dolan to dinner in one of Operakällaren’s secluded smaller dining rooms upstairs. The dinner went well, and Harvard also chose to invest in Altor’s first fund. In May 2003, in the record time of three months, Mix had gathered the 650 million euros that was the target; in addition to the pension foundations of Harvard and Princeton, he also brought along Yale’s university endowment, a total of about fifty investors. – At IK, we worked a lot with “shotgun wedding” when looking for investors, meaning we marketed ourselves very broadly. When I started Altor, I did the opposite, he says. Altor has stuck to that strategy. It works as long as things go well; you call old investors when setting up a new fund and ask if they want to join, and if they are satisfied, they say yes. Therefore, it is difficult for new investors to get into the best venture capital firms, their funds quickly become “pre-booked”."

"In November 1993, I made a speech about the impact of these new technologies to business graduate students at Yale. The topic was “The Broadband Revolution: How Technology and Entrepreneurship Will Override Boundaries in Telecommunications.” The speech would become my internal manifesto, and, aside from the title, it was probably the most lucid explanation I ever had given about what I was thinking back then, and what I still believe today."

"I was never a fast learner, but I was diligent and focused, and I had the intellectual grit to stick with a problem. So, by the second year at Yale, I was pretty competitive with the smarter kids in class, and by the third year I was outrunning them. It was my persistence more than anything. I stayed with it, and by the end of the term, I had the answers before most others in class."

"Many of the deals I made were built on the camaraderie of friendships within the industry. When Heritage Communications was the nation’s tenth-largest cable company, it was still run by James M. Hoak Jr., the man who had played a key role in the deal over a decade earlier that created two classes of stock for TCI. Hoak was a Midwesterner who had graduated Yale, interned at the FCC in 1968, graduated from Stanford University’s law school, and started a cable company—at twenty-six years old."

"Many people, however, are concluding on the basis of mounting and reasonably objective evidence that the length of life of the biosphere as an inhabitable region for organisms is to be measured in decades rather than in hundreds of millions of years. This is entirely the fault of our own species. It would seem not unlikely that we are approaching a crisis that is comparable to the one that occurred when free oxygen began to accumulate in the atmosphere. —G. Evelyn Hutchinson, Sterling Professor of Zoology at Yale, writing the introductory article to Scientific American, September"