Tom Mendoza: Technology and Culture from a Silicon Valley Pioneer

If you hit everything you said to hit you're shooting too low. Your aspirations should be such that it's okay if you don't make all of them but you're on the way to somewhere special. You know when you look back at your life I could say with pretty great certitude you'll never regret something you tried it didn't work. You'll regret things you didn't go for that you wanted to. And to me I always wanted to build something that the community felt was valuable to an incredible amount of people. Welcome to the Sidcast the podcast where we sit down with a fascinating guest each week to hear their story who they are and how they got to be that way. My name is Sid Finkelsen, a professor at Dartmouth College and your host and guide as we embark on a journey of learning, discovery, good old-fashioned conversation. Welcome to the Sidcast this is Sid, Sid Finkelsen and I am your host and creator of this podcast and it is a pleasure to say that we are beginning season three and this is our first episode actually episode number 91 in the entire lifetime of the Sidcast and so it's really exciting to see how this has been going and going strong. When I started with season one I didn't actually call it season one then I just started with episode one. I really had no idea whether I'd keep going. My goal has always been the same to have fascinating conversations and I mean really interesting conversations. The type we all seldom seem to have because we're just too busy or we hang out with people we already know really well or maybe because it's kind of weird to start asking all sorts of personal and professional questions to someone you just met but that's what I do and that's why this has been such a labor of love for me. All the things that I've done from books and obviously teaching a Dartmouth and consulting and speaking and this has really been one of the great joys for me to be doing this because I learned so much and it's just fun to have this type of deep conversation with someone that you don't really know very well and I know that it's been resonating because listenership keeps going up from season one to season two and certainly even from episode to episode so that's really exciting and I hope that will continue into season three. In fact I know that it will because we've got some really fabulous guests on tap and yeah you know my listeners you guys are really loyal and you're engaged and it's been one of the most rewarding aspects of doing the sit-cast. I get emails and comments suggestions and lots of people saying well where is season three you've been off the air for a while Will I'm not off the air anymore I'm back and I'm back really with a stellar lineup of conversations. I'll be talking to entrepreneurs, religious leaders, political leaders, academics, actually academics who have studied everything from Dante and Italian food to how our brains work to what's wrong with opinion polls. Talk about diverse points of view. We'll have business leaders and most of all we're going to have all around really kind of cool and interesting people which gets me to today and our episode with Tom Mendoza. So who's Tom? Tom's the type of person you'd actually love to be sitting next to at a dinner party because he's a master storyteller. He is a very successful business person, a thoughtful leader who really understood before many others how important culture is in any company, let alone in a Silicon Valley company. And he has been and continues to be a generous benefactor specifically to the University of Notre Dame where he actually endowed their business school and it's called the Mendoza School of Business. Pretty important, pretty big impact. And I'm happy to say he's a new friend of mine and really interesting. What's the formal bio? What can we tell you about Tom? Tom is the former vice chairman at a company called NetApp which is one of the most successful companies in Silicon Valley for years and years. It was voted the number one company in America to work for many times. Actually it was in the top 10 places to work for for more than a decade all overlapping with his time there. He started in 1994 when it was pretty much a startup and he was responsible for sales until becoming the president in 2000 and in 2009 he became the vice chairman. Tom has given talks on the power of corporate culture and leadership all over the world to people in a lot of really diverse organizations. In the US Marine Corps, West Point, the CIOs, Chief Information Officers, Oracle, Stanford University, he's won a bunch of awards including the Morgan Stanley Leadership Award for Global Commerce which is really exciting. He did of course go to the University of Notre Dame and he has such a soft spot for it, not just a soft spot, a hard cash spot for it because he made a very significant donation. With all of that, the thing about Tom is he's someone really cares and that might sound kind of just simple and a throwaway line but he really does care about people and in every organization he's been and every job he's been, that's been the hallmark and you just have to talk to some of the people that work for him over the years and you really see that impact. So you know one of my loyal listeners and here's a shout out to you, Len Sherman. I had a great idea for my podcast intros. He noted that not all of my guests are household names. In fact that's part of the purpose and initial founding idea behind the sit-cast to find people that they're well-known in their circles but not necessarily well-known everywhere and to bring them to you. But if there are people that you've never heard of, some people might just say, well, maybe I'll skip this episode and listen to another one because they just don't think it'll be that interesting to them. We all do that. So what's the solution? Well, what Len suggested is that it may be kind of cool upfront in my introduction as in right now to highlight a couple of the fascinating insights or takeaways or lessons or other highlights that come out of the episode. That way, you know, even if you don't know the guest or you're not sure where the topic is really up your alley, at least you have some idea right from the beginning. What's up with each episode and why it might be worth your time? So I decided to take on Len's suggestion and this being season three, I think what I'll do is I'll share with you three things I learned or thought about that I didn't know before and that I think listeners that I think you will find really cool and interesting. And sometimes there are things that I didn't know before, other times there are things that help me through my conversation with the guest, help me think about things a little bit differently. There'll be some variety there but there'll always be three and three has always been my favorite number so it's good that we're in season three. So for this episode, here they are. Number one, we're going to talk about fathers with Tom Mendoza. Maybe it's apropos. Father's Day is not that long from now. It's in a week or so and Tom's father was really, really influential in his life and in fact one of the most exciting things when we talk he mentions this as well. One of the most exciting things that ever happened to him is just after he had made the donation to University Notre Dame and there's a big celebration all weekend and there was a football game and marching out to center field before the football game to be honored was Tom and Tom's father and his father was you know a little bit older of course and he remembers looking over at his dad and really feeling something really meaningful something powerful and he knew that for his dad this was a special moment he'll never forget and you know very few of us are walking around the midfield at a football game because we made a multi-million dollar donation to a school or to any organization but all of us can think about ways of honoring and remembering our own dads. My dad is passed away in fact he's been gone 24 years which is hard to imagine it's been that long but there's lots I remember and I'll just tell you one thing and I may have talked about it in the podcast in this episode as well. I remember the alarm clock going off in my house growing up as a kid at 3 30 in the morning because that's what time my dad woke up to go to work and he would take an hour an hour and a half to get there he didn't have a car it was all public transportation and after a while of course you don't hear that alarm clock because it's normal something that goes on all the time you sleep right through it but there were occasional times especially when I was a teenager and I was a little bit more alert to what was going on that alarm clock went off and I have to say I didn't always appreciate just how big an impact that was just what kind of dedication that was to beginning up that early and be working out of blue collar job that opened the door for me and my brothers to live a good life and have the resources to go to school to do almost anything that we wanted. That's a really good discussion a really good conversation Tom and I had a good memory and maybe one that you'd like to share in as well as you think about your own dads. Number two don't just ask for what's going wrong in your organization or in your team ask what's going right what a radical idea right most of the time we want to know and I've said this myself in various lectures and work that I've done you know you want to get in some insight into what's going on in your team and your organization and you need to know something's going wrong you got to find out about it as early as you can so you could do something about it and okay that's important but how about asking people to share when somebody in their team or someone in the organization someone they know did something good they did something good because they wanted to do the right thing not necessarily because they were just paid to do it but they did the right thing and Tom started this practice of asking people again and again and again to share with them any examples of people doing something that was good and then he would call them and he would thank him that's what he would do he'd call him and you can imagine he was one of the top top executives of president of the company as I mentioned for a number of years and he might be calling somebody you know that's entry-level employee working in some office somewhere and you know who's on the phone it's Tom and those are the president of course they're getting nervous because they're wondering what do they do but he just called to thank him and he would make these calls you know five or ten a day every day that's the type of idea I think that is so easy to use so easy to employ it doesn't cost you anything doesn't take a lot of time when you get right down to it and it can add a lot of value but it's also a great thing and it helps enhance helps build the type of culture where the thing we always say is people come first where they seldom come first but this is one of the ways in which you could actually make that true and bring that to life And number three, this kind of interesting, Tom, we share a story in this episode, but how back in the late '80s around, I think it was 1989, he talked to six top venture capitalists, not to pitch them on an idea, because he wasn't gonna come up with that idea, that wasn't his thing, it was to let them know who he was, because Tom was a guy and is a guy for that matter, who can make things happen, he knows how to execute on strategy, he knows how to build sales organizations, he knows how to generate revenue from whatever your idea is, which is a rather important skill. And he went around and had these great kind of one-on-ones with some big venture capitalists, so they get to know who he was, because what Tom wanted to do in the next stage of his career is he wanted to work for a startup, and he wanted to run basically the business while the R&D and technology side would be run by the founders and the inventors. And how do you do that? Well, you talk to people that are looking for talent all the time, and got me to thinking of, where's someone big hockey fan coming from Canada originally, there's a very famous line, most you will know it, from Wayne Gretzky, and he said, you need to skate to where the puck is going, and not where it was, you need to skate to where the puck is going, not where it was, and if you apply that to yourself, you would say, okay, where are you going in your career? And what do you need to get there? And Tom did that, he was going towards becoming a chief operating officer of a startup that's what he wanted, and he needed to talk to the gatekeepers and the influencers, but we all could do something of that, right? If we think about where we want to be, where we want to go, and who could we talk to to learn about that, to talk to people? In the last episode of season two, it was with Eric Jackson, who was very successful hedge fund manager, and one of the things he said early on in creating his hedge fund is that he would just schedule as many coffee dates as he could with smart people to ask them, you know, what's the next big thing? What are you looking at? What do you find interesting? What companies do you think have some potential? And that's how he learned, and that's how he actually began to create the portfolio that makes up his hedge fund. And I give you one other example. Recently I just finished reading Bill Browder's book called Red Notice, it's a very famous book, it's a few years old, and it's on his Russian investment fund and what happened to him. And it's a powerful story, an amazing story. But early on, there are a bunch of examples where he's kind of thrown into his job, he's at Solomon Brothers, which is an investment bank now part of city group. He was on the Eastern European desk, and he had to figure out how to generate business on his own. Just because they gave him a job doesn't mean they handed him the work, he had to go create it. And so he called everyone he could, many cold calls, and just asked for a conversation to learn, maybe potentially scope out other opportunities. And when you do that, and something comes up, people sometimes call you back as well. So this point really got to me because it says that you really want to be entrepreneurial as you think about pretty much anything that you're doing. And one of the best ways that you could be entrepreneurial when you don't know something, when you don't know the answers, go talk to people who might. I mean, it takes a little bit of courage because you're calling people that can hang up the phone on you or never return the email. But the truth is a lot of people do want to help. And that's a really interesting lesson, I think that comes out of this episode as well. So a lot going on, that plus much more, Tom Mendoza, here we are beginning of season three and the sit-cast. I hope you enjoy this episode with Tom Mendoza. I know you will. Welcome to the sit-cast. This is it Finkelstein, and it's an absolute pleasure to be talking to Tom and Dosa today. Hi there, Tom. Hello, sir, how are you? I'm great, and I'm excited to talk to you for all sorts of reasons. I say pioneer in the tech industry and knowing a lot of the key players and extremely active today as a board member in tech. But also for someone who is one of the maybe very earliest or fewest people to bring in culture and leadership as central dimensions to what it takes to be a leader in the tech world. Even today, and we'll talk about this, even today, it's not clear that everyone has gotten that memo. But let's start with the early day. So where did you grow up, Tom? - I was born in New York City. I lived there till I was six. So my parents, my dad's father was from Cuba. His mother was from Ireland. - Wow. - A natural match that in New York City. And my mother's parents were both from Czechoslovakia. So they came over pre-hittler. All their families got caught under comedies and after that. But they grew up in the city, you know, Ellis Island, depression hit. They were born in the 20s as a depression hit. They grew up in a depression. Which has quite an impact on them, quite an impact on who I was brought up. - Yeah. - And so I was born in the city, lived there till I was six. Then my dad felt we had to get out of the city. You know, we only had a one bedroom, no bathroom. We had to go down the hall to the bathroom, no way to shower, no bedroom for me and my brother. And so we moved in with my grandmother on Long Island for one year while my dad saved his money. And then we bought a place called Komech Long Island, which at the time was just developing. It's now a very large town on Long Island, but at the time it was the furthest place you could go away from the city that the railroad would still take it. My dad had to work in the city, so. - Oh yeah, so he took the train in every day. - Two hours each way. You see, I know we live in an era. People live in cities, even in our post-COVID, it's never post-COVID, but people are escaping cities, of course. But there's a lot of people actually all over the world that have these long commutes. My father was the same way. He didn't have a car, he didn't drive. He took public transport in about an hour and a half for him to get to work with multiple buses and then walking. And he was a factory worker. And he worked the early morning shift that started. Well, I'm not even sure when it started, but I know his alarm went off 3.30 in the morning. - Whoa. - And as a kid, you don't hear the things that keep happening, right? You just don't hear it. But as I grew older and became an adult, I reflect back and think about what a sacrifice, what a dedication to give us all myself and my two brothers a good life. - My father is dad, Diagonia, is young. - 14. - And at 16, Pearl Harbor happened to 7/7 and he enlisted on his 16th birthday and his mother had to sign it. And the only reason she signed it, he had lost a finger in a printing press. He was working in a newspaper and took his finger off. He wasn't 16 yet. And it took half this finger off. So she was sure he wouldn't get in. And then they took him. - And they took him. - They took him. He was champion of the home services boxing in two eight classes at 18 years old. Everyone was in that war. Everyone. So he was the youngest by far to win that kind of thing. So he grew up having to defend himself. I've been joking about the Spanish Irish, but it wasn't like he decided to come in and his dad was gone. And his brothers literally became fighters, the other two became professional fighters. - Really? That's how they grew up. - Yeah, the other thing is worth remarking on is the immigrant story, right? This is a country of immigrants. And no matter what our politics are, we should recognize that has been built on. And actually you're very active in technology, investing on boards. And what are these companies? They're from other countries, aren't they? A many of them. - I read yesterday that more than 50% of the, I think the top 200 startups in the last decade are founded by immigrants. The three companies I'm on the board of all of which are tremendously successful. One is called Verona. It's a public company. The founders is really. He worked for me at NetApp when he was in his 23, 24 right out of the military. And then founded the company 20 years ago. And he was 25. And I joined his board to look at it in New York City. Vast data is also an Israeli company. And the third one's called UIBATH, which went public a week ago. So in mid May, and it's a Romanian company, which shows you that technology or leadership can come from anywhere. They couldn't get funded in Romania. They got funded by Excel and London on the condition that they would move their headquarters to the United States. Because they knew that even if you create technology, you know, place like Romania, which is not odd because it's like great engineers, it hadn't distributed globally as much more of an American phenomenon. There were other examples of other countries, but the most successful global distribution set up in an American model. So all three moved to the US. But they all have a global viewpoint because they didn't come from here. Right. They started with that. One of the three founders of NetApp, James Lau, his father was executive with an airline in Hong Kong. And he moved to the United States when James was 12. And he didn't speak English for a long, long time afterward. And he became a baggage handler at United. So that James could grow up in the United States. James graduated in Cal and Stanford before he turned 22 for 23. Hold on, Tom, you said that his father was an executive in an airline and he became a baggage handler here. So James could grow up in America. He wanted to give his son that shot. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. One of literally millions of such stories that I think we just need to celebrate more and more. Yeah, 100% agree. Yeah. So back to your upbringing. So what was your proudest moment with your dad and your family? Well, it happened numbers of years later. I'll jump ahead. First of all, my dad was the biggest influence on my life. No doubt. And the main thing said is, if he walked into a restaurant or a bar, he wouldn't know people going in. He'd know everybody before he left. Oh, really? No update. Kids, I'm not talking about the owner. I'm talking about the waiter's book. He always felt the need to make sure people felt appreciated, which had a big influence on him. So I fast forward to the year 2000, and I had endowed the business school at Notre Dame. And my dad was there to see it, which was pretty emotional for me to start with. My mom had passed away unexpectedly at 67. So here we are, prior to the game. They did a weekend of celebration, a black tie mess, on Friday night. That doesn't happen on football weekends, right? Black tie mess. But Saturday morning, my dad and I went to mess with the team. We were playing number one in Nebraska, undefeated in Nebraska. And then we walked through the locker room together with the team. I went down the tunnel, the fabled tunnel. And my dad and I came out, the interviewed me on NBC, talked to me a little bit about the gift. And then my dad walked the flag out for the National Anthem, 80,000 people. My dad walks the flag out, and walk in behind him. And in Notre Dame, it's a very solemn, they're with the intonely. We owe the country. That could do. And then my dad presents the flag to the Irish garden and they take it up. And as it goes halfway up the flag, three mirage fighters come right over us. And the stadium is roaring. My dad snaps into a salute. How am I? And I stand behind him. You know, World War II veteran sees his son in this spot, the name of the business going up the day before. You know, people always say, "What's your proudest moment?" A lot of people have to guess. I will never forget that moment. And it's great that your dad saw that success and not just success, but giving back, which sometimes I talk to people and their dads or their moms are huge influences on their lives. But for whatever circumstance, like you even said, your mom died unexpectedly, young really, that you can't share with them. It's really powerful. Well, it's an interesting side story that's of my roommate in college named Jerry Gable. We're still my best friend all these years later. I wouldn't tell him that, but he took out a loan when we graduated Notre Dame to do a partial scholarship every year to a student in his father's name to honor his dad, who was a construction foreman. And I thought, "How great a thing that would be." So I actually endowed a scholarship in 1994 that's still going today. And my father's name right after my mother died. 1994, year we started net-app actually, but my mother died in her sleep 67 years old. No warning. Never had any issues. A side of heart attack. And I wanted to do something on my dad just in case. Or she'd know those things often don't go well for the surviving long-term spouse. And so I did it. So every year, I said, "There's three conditions on the scholarship." You know, on the other end of the phone, they don't want to hear this condition. Granddaughters, incoming call. I want to give you money. Bad news. I have conditions. And they go, "What are the conditions?" I said, "Number one, I don't care if it's man, woman, black, white." It's got to be the kids' dream to go to Notre Dame. And so if you get this kid to the Arthur E. Mendos' scholarship, and that kid says, "I'm going to consider it. You blew it." Plenty of kids. This isn't the Notre Dame thing. It happens if you were at Wynn. But whatever school you are attached to and care about, there's an amazing amount of people really wanting to go there. And I want one of them to get the opportunity. Done. What's number two? Number two is this kid has everything you want in a student, everything. I'm not going to be involved in the process except money. And you're going to call him and tell him someone they never met. My dad, in this case, is paying for their education. They go, "What's number three?" "Let's go figure out." I said, "Number three is they got to write my dad letter every semester." My dad was a letter writer. My mother just passed. I said, "I want a relationship with my father." So, fast forward six years, I do the endowment for the business school, and my dad's going with me. I'm going to start the day with him meeting these kids. He has six kids on scholarship. He panics. He goes, "I don't want to meet him." I go, "What?" He goes, "They're going to want to see you. My picture's up below." I said, "Let's test that out. We walk in a room. These kids, they were their father, they put their scrapbooks about their own war experience." They said, "Oh, it's great you're doing what you're doing. I want to meet your dad." They spent that time with my dad. Now or later, I go, "Dad, we got to go. Go ahead, I'll see you later." And he had that for the rest of his life. When he passed away, he said, "I won't get into this much. We're in the hospice." The only thing in that room, pure white room. I arrived. They told me he's not going to last much longer. Is a picture of him and the Mendoza College of Business, sweatshirt and a wall, and all those letters. The only thing they allowed him in that room were those letters by his bed, which had been thumbed through an uncountable amount of times. It meant a lot to him. That was stipulation number three. Yeah, they got it right by dad. They didn't write them once. They wrote them multiple times. That relationship was great. You understood your father. That was the awesome thing that came to me. What could I do to help him? It wasn't about money, it wasn't about anything. I just wanted to make sure he felt appreciated. So while we're talking about Notre Dame, what is it about that place that makes a lot of so important? Now look, you might not like me anymore, but my first academic job was at USC. So we're going to get over that. We're going to get past it. Now I'm at Dartmouth for years, which has unbelievably loyal, actually both schools, right? Unbelievably loyal. So I understand a little bit about it, but what's the story of Notre Dame? Why is that? I have a couple of points to make on it. Number one, 2% of the student body is from the state with the schools, 2% from Indiana, less than 20% of from the Midwest. So it's a school where everybody is away from home when you show up, everybody. So I think you bond in a different way. If you go to a school with 60% of from the state you're in, which is not abnormal. And then the other people, the ones coming in, you got to get used to that. So I felt that everybody bonded extraordinarily closely at the beginning. Number two, I think to go there, if you decide to go there, you're not taking an easy route. Nobody's talking about as the greatest fun school in the world. Nobody's telling you, you're going to have to do the work. And that's true of athletes or non-athletes, you have to do the work. When people recruit against Notre Dame in football, they'll love to say, you go there, it's going to be so hard. You're a computer world class student and world class athlete. You come to our school, you don't have to worry about that. You can work out, don't worry. Somebody's got to be saying, that's what I'm looking for though. I want to be in that room. And so there's a shared experience that once you get in there, I want to make the most out of this opportunity. And people bond. They really do. As you know, they get crazier every year. Somebody said to me, hey Tom, I made a crazy Notre Dame. He said, do me a favor, call me when you find one that's not. I mean, you have other workshops. You know, one of the things I think all these schools have in common is that they have more, I don't know about the data, but I suspect this. They have more self-selected students than most other places. People want to go to Notre Dame. They want to go to SC. They want to go to Dartmouth. Whether they have a family member or did or not and not when they do, but that's the place for them. That's true, even in the business school at Dartmouth Business School, we have a disproportionate number of students that only apply to Tuckin. If they don't get in, maybe next year they'll try something different, but that's the place they want. Because it's a unique, it's a different, we're in this little town, Hanover, and Hampshire. It's cold here. And there's not a lot to do other than being with each other. That bonding that you described is exactly the name too. Notre Dame is a very beautiful campus, it's large, but you don't go off campus. Like four years, they rarely went off campus. More than three miles from campus, that's what that was. So you do. They have intramural sports, they have football and pads intramural between dorms. You got high school Americans playing for your dorm. Kids come out and support it. They have a thing called Bengal Bouts, which is Phyllis Upper Stadium. Phyllis Upper basketball arena for boxing. And so there's a competitive aspect between dorms. There's no fraternities, there's no sororities, never has been. So they grade pride in their dorm. Like Dartmouth and USC, people who go there have a tremendous pride in what it is. And the fact that they're there. And that actually addressed your life, I think. So you talked about your phone call for the scholarship for your dad and the conditions. I'm curious about when you decided to donate, and it was over $30 million to the business school. Were they cultivating you as most schools know how to do, or did you call them out of the blue? How did they add to the blue? The second incoming call to the same guy. That's a pretty good phone call to get, I think, if you're sitting in your office. That's a funny story, but it was the first time the first guy, same show on Trump's travel. When I called him the first time, I said, don't bug me again. I did the scholarship. I'm done. Well, I'll send money, but I don't be sold. Yeah. And he did. We friends, we didn't bother him. And then our stock had done very, very well. It was the third best stock of the '90s on the Nasdaq. Third best stock on the Nasdaq. I decided I wanted to do something significant for the school. And I told him, so I called him and I said, look, you got to think this through. I'm not just calling you to give you money. It has to be something that makes sense to me. So I met him and a gentleman named Father Bo Chan, who was now as the president of Portland University at that time. He was the provost. And they came and see me in Palm Desert. I had a place there and they came to see me. We were going to play golf the next day with another name, legend named Johnny Lujack. I was in trophy 147. And they were going to lay it on me. So the guy started off with engineering school. I said, you guys have not done your homework. If you put my name on an engineering school, people leave it. You get out of that school. What are you doing? They go, have a hockey arena. I don't even care about hockey. Come on. Tell them to you. And then they said, the business school, I'm fine. I was about that. And I let it go all the way down to, you know, like the Ural and the men's basketball arena because they're going to get something, right? When they got done, I said, how much for the ASL, two other ones. And I went back to their business school. They wouldn't necessarily know that some zero, you know. And they threw out a number. And then I said, would they put the name on it? And they said, yes, we would for that amount of money we would. And so the only thing I thought about there was my dad seeing the name going up. And I thought, business school, that makes sense to me. And so I didn't really want to put them through the paces. And the next day we get out on the first tee. And these guys are all low handicap golfers. Johnny Lujack's like a seven. And these guys are all even lower. I'm not. I'm like a 1560 at the time. We got a first tee and I go, hey, I'm doing it. I mean, everybody hits the ball right down the middle of walks away. And I'm like, that's it. That's it. I'm like, I expected more. And we play out three or four holes. And after three or four holes, Sean comes up to me, goes, it's killing us. What are you doing? They don't know if I'm doing the urinal. I said, no, I'm doing the business school. This is the one that makes sense to me. And it was kind of crazy. So anyway, we got all in. And then they inked the ball out of bounds. No, I felt better. Too bad. You ran out. Oh, no, I'm good. That's more like it if you're going to put that amount in. That's more like it. Come on. That's funny. Exactly. That's funny. And yeah, that is something. There's not that many names on business schools around the country. Any of the top 50 or whatever the number is. The Tuck School, that name is 100 years old. That was with the founding of the school. My joke about that is that we should try to resell the name. But you might not find that so. funny. Come on now. It's like a Lincoln Center. I think every Fisher Hall became Geffen Hall. David Geffen did. But you made this donation. This is around 2000, right? And you were not retired. You were not done with your career. So you did it kind of early. How come? I did it early and it was a significant part of my wealth. It wasn't like I was Bill Gates giving a little bit of money. It was a big part of my wealth. And I knew, you know, you could say, "Oh my God, if I just kept it myself, I got it. I actually said, it's 50 years old." And I said to myself, "I'd like to do it while I can contribute my time and energy, try and help the young people in the school." If you're going to give back, I felt education is the best thing you could give to you. Anybody who criticized what people give to probably don't give anything. That's a philosophy. So whatever you want to give to, I'm good with that. But I feel like that's a gift that really does keep on giving. If you give people an education, I might not have got it. You're helping to plan it. You're helping to people. And then I thought, "Geez, I know a lot of people in Silicon Valley that I could bring back and expose the school to a whole area. They might not be that exposed to. I brought South for cats. There's not a seat, you have Oracle. Charles Phillips was the president. I brought John Mortgridge, who was the chairman of the Board of Cisco. So people I knew well, and I brought him in, and they had a lot of interaction. I brought Warren Buffett. I played around the golf with Tiger Woods, and Warren was my catty. So that's another story. But anyway, he came to Notre Dame afterward for me to spend the day. And so I've done a lot of that, and I'm very involved in this day. I'm doing a speaker series for him, where I'm interviewing some spectacular people. The three so far, and they asked me a year ago, the new dean, new in the last 18 months. Dean Kremher said, "I'd love to start a speaker series of people you know, and it's gone on Zoom, you know? It's gone incredibly well." Paul Eschenbach calls the president of VMware, now he's probably the most successful VC in the valley for Sequoia Capital. He just did Zoom, he did Snowflake, and he did UI Path in the last two months. Then J.S.U.L. and J.S.U.R.I. is spectacularly successful CEO, and my last one was Guy Shurillo. Guy Shurillo is the president of First Data, but the point of all the interviews is what worked for you guys? And all of them give back the old lives I respect. So I've tried to do that now for a long, long time for the school, and I was my thinking and I've never regretted it. Because now what we hear, the giving pledge among Warren Buffett and Bill Gates were the leaders of that, and lots and lots of billionaires have signed on to that, which is not just kind of amazing and fantastic, and to your point. However you give, and even when you give, if you're giving, that's what counts. But this is something that I don't think we see in other countries. There's something about America, I think in Europe, for example, they think we're crazy to do this. I understand. Yeah, many people see that to me. So you also, that's right. Well, you're doing that. Maybe it's because the government plays a bigger role there. The taxes are higher, they think that. But, okay, I mean, that might be true. But when you're giving your own money, and you're talking about large sums, and you're a case in some of the other names, but whatever it is, it's you doing it. You're making that choice. You don't get to choose how your money is being spent when you pay taxes. You get to choose how your donations are being. And I think it's a great thing about America that is yet another thing that's not recognized and appreciated by the global community. Because we get a lot of bad press in this country, a lot of bad press. So Sidney Portier and I are good friends. And we've been friends for 20 years. He and I were having a lunch at Spago, Wolfgang Puck, and he had been friends for 30 or 40 years. In the middle of our lunch, literally, as we're eating, a young guy comes over to him, and he says, Mr. Portier, I have a bone to pick with you. There are not many people have a bone to pick for Sidney Portier. And Sidney's an incredible gentleman, stands up. He says, well, first he said, how are you? He's half a point of what's the issue? He says, you just flew to Africa and you were there when Oprah opened the school for girls. You said, right? By the way, a long trip. And he said, I don't understand why you go to Africa to give support when you could be supporting people in the United States. And Sidney said, well, you have to write your opinion. I don't agree with it. What I believe is if you'll reach your hand out to help anybody in the world, I want to help you. And he sits down and that's when I said to Sidney, I'll bet that guy's never given anybody. That guy's never done anything for anybody. He took the time to come over and criticize what you chose to help. Takes a lot of nerve to do that. I mean, it's just, that's rude. If you can help somebody else to live a life that's meaningful, it's not about what you make or take. It's all about the imprint you made on the planet, the influence you made on other people. Yeah, I mean, that's a central element of the research I do on leaders and developing leaders. But it's also what your time as gratitude, isn't it? People that feel gratitude to others, they actually are happier themselves. That's kind of the irony and the whole thing, right? So when you're giving, you actually get more. I don't know if it's true for everything. I suspect it might be true for almost anything. Like networking, what's networking about? When you help other people, that's actually the best way to help yourself. As opposed to waiting for someone to kind of network with people to see who can help you do something. It's the opposite way of thinking. It's helping without expecting anything in return. Yeah. As a side, you chose to be a professor by definition. You're trying to help young people develop, right? You give back every day and you have to believe that you wouldn't do it. That's where the meaning comes from to use that word and the topic we talk about a lot on the podcast. Everyone needs to create meaning in their lives. They have no choice but to do it even if they don't care about it. It's happening in your brain. And so how are you going to look at it? How are you going to feel about it? So let's go back to the early days. You started NetApp in the mid-90s, something like that, right? 34. 94. 94. What was your technology world like in '94? That was beginning of the internet, really. Wasn't it the world wide web was around that time? Actually a couple of years later it was when the internet really hit '96. You know, it was interesting. I worked at a company called OSPEX in 1989. I went to Stanford for their executive program and I came out and I took the time to eat the top six VCs in Silicon Valley. A friend of mine was one of them. And he said, they're going to want to know you. You're not looking for a job. He said to me, Tom, do you think you're going to come up with the next great technology idea? I said no. He said, I don't need it. He said, but the guys who do are going to want to know you because I knew I had to build a go-to-market organization. That's my background. And so he said, I'm going to introduce you to these other VCs, Sequoia Capital Excel and all these other guys. And he said, and from that you can find out what they're investing in where you think the market's going. So this is 1989. As a side story, John Mercury, which was my boss's strategy, he was the first CEO of Cisco, you see you at the time. He called me to join Cisco in 1989 and I said, "John, it's too late, your public." Oh boy. Thank God, MetAperc. That would be a terrible story. Oh man, I would less have learned. Guess it wasn't too late. But anyway, my point of it was, if you think about a computer for a moment in the mid-80s, you had an operating system, a CPU, database network and storage. That's a computer, it was all in one big box. Well, from 85 to 90, you saw all of those pulled apart by companies that were horizontal and became those valuable companies on earth. Yet the chip, Intel, AMD and others, the operating system, Microsoft, Unix and Linux, the network, Cisco and database, Oracle. These are incredibly valuable companies. But once they pulled it apart and the PC revolution hit, now data is everywhere. It's not in a data center. And when I got at it, listening to the VCs, the next challenge is, "How do you store that information?" How do you store it in a way that you don't have to have a monster amount of people managing it? I'm like, "And so, one of the VCs said to me, I just invested in a company called OSPEX where they do a server just for data. And I joined there and Dave Fitz and James Laugh, who founded NetApp with the key engineers in the mid-20s. And they came into an executive staff meeting and I was running North American sales. And they said, "With the speed of networks, we now can do in software what we've had to do in hardware." And the CEO said, "We don't want to do that because you can't lock people in." That's a bad thought. Anybody has ever thought you lock people in. You bring value. That's where they stay with you. So, he said, "I'm not going to do that." Dave and James left. They formed a pen-based computing thing which didn't hit because it had to the market. And then they came back and they formed NetApp. In 1992, they spent two years developing a product and they came and got me in 1994, runs US sales, and up in Worldwide sales one year later. And we felt that how people store information then is if you had an IBM, Yule Packer, whatever computer you'd dialed now, the storage was on that computer. And so, if each of us had a different computer, mine was 20% full and yours was 20%, and that guy's 100, he has to find more storage. The idea of a shared server is we share that only when the whole thing's full do we need more. So, you scale out the storage separately. We were one of the first companies that are to do that. And we did it over Ethernet, which was a popular way of moving data, but not for storage. We were the first. And so, when we went to raise money, when Dave and James went to raise money, there was a lot of resistance. They were like, "I don't think so." You see, it only does one thing. It moves data. And you're competing with companies that do compute end data. Why would somebody just do that? And our model was Cisco only does networking. They don't do a lot of things. They do it really well. And so, this idea of a appliance, really NetApp was one of the pioneers, by doing an appliance that was simple and easy to manage, you can move it out of the data center. You didn't have to bring people with it. It became a popular idea. The problem we went to solve was software development. We spent up software development. And then, the year earlier, went the internet in 1996. And we realized that was a fantastic application for internet-based storage that you didn't have to manage it. You could scale and move wherever you want. And we exploded with the internet. So we grew from zero to one billion in revenue in six years. We went from 250 million in revenue in 1898 to a billion in two years. Hyper growth. Yeah. So, you know, this description of your company. computer, you're using 20% of your capacity, I'm using 20%. So why do we need to have such an efficiency, right? Did you use the word of the cloud in those days? I mean, that's kind of what you're talking about, right? - You wanted to move it out of the data set, right? Used to be if you couldn't remember when payrolls were run on Friday, everything was punch cards and they were done on schedule. If you needed data outside that schedule, you couldn't get the data. If something had a backup, you couldn't get it back. Think about a PC, you can get whatever you want, the moment you want it, now a Google at all. So if we took advantage of taking unstructured data, you get what you want when you want it, put it anywhere, we could grab it quickly, get it back here. - I was thinking of it in the analogy, I don't know if it's a stretch, see what you think, but you think about self-driving cars. So you think about your car. Your car's sitting in your garage or my car. How often am I using it? I might be using a 10% of the, I mean, that would be a lot actually, if you think about it. So why do I need one car, two cars? If you have a service, and this is maybe Uber's future, or some such thing, right? - This is why Uber explode. - Yeah, they're always available, I mean, self-driving makes it even easier, but regardless. So I don't need to have a car, now I want a car for various reasons, but I don't have to have two cars, other than having it as a pure luxury, just for the fun of it. So it's kind of a similar idea, isn't it? It's taking advantage of fundamental inefficiency and capacity usage of a high expense product. In this case, a car, your case, a computer. - This car goes on over and over and over again. I mentioned I'm on the board of a company, a UI pet, which the evaluation at the IPO is $35 million. Four years ago, they evaluated $100 million. And what they do is they automate work. They take processes that are repetitive and rules-based, and through software, they automate that. So these are back-end processes, cash payable, cash receivable, auditing, and accounting firm. I think the things that done the same way, over and over and over again, and they had to keep getting approvals over and over again, it's all automated. There's taking inefficiency out of a system. How many times are you waiting for an approval in a big company, and we'll have it back in seven to 10 days. You're like, seven to 10 days. How about if it's rules-based and it fits the rules? It's done. So it's just an example. There's many companies that do examples of that. Zooms are a great example. As a company, it made meetings simple. You don't have to get on planes if you don't want to, right? Change the world. - Were you surprised by during COVID way Zoom, literally Zoom didn't took off? Not only Zoom, because Microsoft Teams have been used way, way, way more. Maybe Google Hangouts or whatever it is. I think there are a few others, but Zoom is the big one. In retrospect, it's kind of, okay, well, what else are we going to do? But going to the early days is something you thought about because you know this industry so well, and we're surprised by how it's grown. - I became a big fan of Zooms before this happened. From nowhere, we were using Cisco's product, and I had a guy work up, we said, "Have you ever, he had gone to a different company?" - He was in Asia, and he runs Asia, and he goes, "If you ever tried Zoom, "he said, "We don't even have any offices anymore. "We've done away with offices. "This is Palo Alto Network, which is a major company." I said, "You don't have offices, no, we do Zoom calls." And so I went into NetApp, and I'm saying, I think we should look at this. Everyone's saying the experience is much better, it's much more interactive. I could cut our travel costs. It's not, doesn't do away with the, I think we'll have a hybrid life going forward, but my career at NetApp, my first 20 years, I never did under 250,000-year-old miles, commercial. And my last year as president, I did 375. Said, "Sirconvending Globe is 25,000 miles. "Put that in perspective." If I had Zoom, I think I could have cut that in half. I still would be there to meet my teams, be with my teams, meet with customers, but there's so many meetings I could have had like this, this kind of format, and Zoom created that. Eric is a spectacular person. Is a guy who cares about culture, by the way. He actually reached out to me, as if we could talk about culture probably two years before they were public. And I was just so impressed by him, that's why I was sold on the company. Right, it is always about the people. About you talking about culture, and I wanted to ask you about that. So where did this idea come from to emphasize and recognize culture? And you've been talking about it, you've been leading it personally at NetApp and talking about it afterwards. What's your experience with this? Where did this come from? My experience was that in the companies I had worked for, none of them had a great culture. None of them. Two were awful, and one was just okay. But my groups, and some of the other sales groups, had great culture. We had to create our own culture for our group. High performance, show appreciation, never denigrate anybody in public. If you have an issue, you talk to a one on one. Simple things. That wasn't the culture of the company. They were run by engineers, and the way they viewed sales, they sell a lot to keep them if you don't, you fire them. Not asking what accounts did they have, did they get an easy territory, hard territory. What's the challenge? So I always thought, and I ran my sales teams like that. So I had super high retention, super high people wanted to join them. And when I came to NetApps, Dave and James said to me, we would love to build a company with the culture you built in sales at the previous company they work with me at. And so I was brought in with the idea you're gonna be the influence of the culture. Dan Wormenov and became CEO six months later, you're CEO for about 20 years. And Dan and I were on the same page right away when we came in. First off site we had, he came in November 1994, we had our first off site with the executive team January. And we said, the question is, what are we believing and what are we gonna stand for? And so we did our values, which if you're not careful, that just goes on a wall and two days later, nobody can even tell you what they are. And so he said, we wanna go through our values. I remember one of my sisters get stuff done and cause we could go through all these things. But then we said, what is the behavior that we want to witness wherever we do business in the world? That's the culture we wanna promote, which means if we sign up for it, that's the action we will take. That's how we will act. That's what we'll hire to. That's what we will rate people against. Promote, not promote. And so what we came to said was, we're gonna build a company we're proud of the rest of our lives. Wasn't like, we're gonna be 4 to 500, which we were, great place to work. You know, we voted number one in the United States in 2009. We voted number one in all 15 countries. It wasn't about ratings. That was it. It's a great filter when you make decisions to ask yourself if you're proud of that decision. Yeah. I'm proud of the person I just hired. So I thought this was a spectacular opportunity for me. I am incredibly aware that you can make a lot of money without treating people well. You can obviously rise up to the highest levels of this country and not treat people well at all. I didn't care about that. That's not something I'd be proud of. I wanted to show that you could build a company, built on high expectations, recognition of the individual, the humane approach to business. And the right people, like if we did an interview and sits in a viewing and Joe's interview and I tell you, look, here's the challenges. Here's the opportunity, but here's the challenges. Here's where our culture is. You're not gonna make, there are companies who pay you more if you don't work out, they'll fire you. But we're gonna give a very good wage. You can make quite a bit of money here if the company does 'cause we're betting on the company. Two people here in that mess is SIDGOs. That's what I'm looking for. And Joe goes, I'm not, you're both right. You're both right. People coming in, I never had a single person say to me, boy, that's a lot different than you said. And people who came in care desperately and deeply about, they're good, their boss is good, their group's good, but most of all the company had to be successful. If we're gonna do what we came here to do, it's about building a great company. It's no different than great sports teams that get built. People buy into the culture of that team, and maybe that wasn't even their culture before. I always said to the right hires, if this is the right hire, you should feel like you're coming home. This is something you've been looking for and haven't found. I can't tell you how many people, when I retired from MedApp, which was August 15th, 2019, I could have 400,000 views on the message I put out on LinkedIn in probably 24 hour period, maybe two days. And I actually have a book on a table over here, it's every one of the messages. There was something like 5,000 comments. People took the time to write to me, and most of them were people who either are own employees, are partners or our customers, talking about what a meant to do business or be a part of the NetApp experience. And that's why I said, that's what we came to do. We influenced their lives, we helped these families. This is something people, people who they've moved on or not, they're proud of that forever. That's about legacy, isn't it? I have seen that when some executives, CEO, senior executives retire, occasionally you get this kind of reaction from people that they helped along the way, or they influence in some way. And at the end of the day, when you rise high enough and long enough, there's plenty of money, but there's not plenty of, did I change people's lives? That's a different shader, and I've always been a believer in encouraging my own students to think about their careers and exactly that way. And we don't all hit everything we set out to hit, but no matter what you're doing, there's always room to help other people influence other people. If you hit everything you set out to hit, you're shooting too low. Your aspiration should be such that, it's okay if you don't make all of them, but you're on the way to somewhere special. You know, when you look back at your life, I could say with great certitude, you'll never regret something you tried that didn't work. And to me, I always wanted to build something that the community felt was valuable to an incredible amount of people. A couple of things about the company, we gave one week vacation to any employee, every employee, excuse me, to do whatever they want for a charity, paid vacation. People were asked us to do the heart walk, they told her about cancer, and we're like, we can't make all these decisions. We did support some of them, let's let them support whatever they want. I thought, and what we as backers, they would write us a letter about what it meant to them. And they could do it, their family, do it, their coworkers. Part of the culture is, I started saying, our second year in business. I knew everybody the first year, second year started to be, so I said, if you see some, I call it catch someone doing something right, and I said, if you see somebody, do something, being extraordinary to help the company, to help society, to help each other, customer. If you'll send me an email, I'll call them. And I average 10 to 15 calls a day. I did that for over 20 years. Yeah, and you know, it's funny. It energized me. I called a viral culture building because people would call me, "I got to tell you about the person on my left or right." First I started with bosses and I said, "If you see somebody and then it got taken over by the employees," he said, "Do you mind if I tell you about it?" I made it clear in all my talks. You know somebody who's a great representative of this company and they've done something. Then I switched it about nine years later. I remember I was giving a talk to engineering and I said, "How many of you have heard about cats someone doing something right most of the hands were up?" And I said, "For whatever it's worth, you've asked me to thank less people than any other group of net-out." I said, "So there's two reasons I could think of one as you're not doing anything you should be thankful for." And a guy in the referral actually said, "What's number two?" And I said, "The second one is, you know, in sales, people could call when you want to sell or there's big events over and everybody." I said, "In engineering it's always a process you get done with this year on to that so maybe it's not so clear. I want to be clear. I'm trying not to thank the end achievement. I want to recognize the effort to break through different barriers to get us on the way to achievement." And I added something I said, "Let me say something today." I'll bet you all knows somebody in this company who's a terrific example of our culture and they're struggling right now. Maybe we overgold them if they're in sales, maybe we under-resourced them as they're engineering or demanding times that are not reasonable. Maybe they have issues at home, maybe there's health issues in the family. If you tell me what their story is you don't have to spend a lot of time just give it to me. I will call them and I'll see if there's anything we can do to help. And I had more people come back to me later who got calls from me for achievement that said, "The one I'll never forget is when I was struggling." You took the time and I always say to them, "Remember if people don't take the time to pick that phone up I'll never know." And so I usually ended those calls with, "If you know somebody who needs a phone call, I didn't email ever. I phone-called." I said, "If you know somebody and I tell you, I don't make dermit as a CEO of ServiceNow, he's spectacular, right? Bill was the CEO of SEP. He called me. There was a book called Contagious Success by Susan and Nanzio, PhD professor at University of Chicago. And she talked about her book. Her book was about if you treat people well, it's actually good economics for the company. And it does a chapter on me and that app in there. And Bill read that about cat someone doing something right and he says, "I got to ask you how do you find a time? 10, 15 calls a day." I said, "Bill, how long do you think the calls last?" I said, "If I call I go, Sid, Tom and Dowson, Sid's like this. What did I do?" "Oh, I'm Jesus. Not now what? I'm on the fire of life or something. Now I got a call from the president that comes from his kid." And I go, "Sid, this is good news. Somebody told me last night there was a network issue on an account, not even your account. I know you just joined from Cisco. This is a true story. I know you drove three hours and solved the problem rather than calling somebody else because you knew you could figure it out. Didn't say anybody drove home and I know you're on vacation. I just want to thank you for that." It's not a long call. If it's a minute that's 10 to 15 minutes a day. That's nothing, isn't it? That's the same thing. I said, "What are you doing at some point? You don't have 10 to 15 minutes a day to say thank you." You cannot say thank you enough. Was that a true story? Actually, they're your example. On vacation. On vacation, just during the company two weeks prior was actually in the South. So you had to drive three hours to it because it's not like that. Somebody said, "You know, believe it. This guy did. He came from Cisco. He knew it was a router issue. He saw the report and we were going to send it up the chain. They would have seen it with a storage issue." He said, "No, no, no, no, I know it is. I got it. Another one I'll never forget. I got a call about this young lady in Houston marketing and they were put on seminars, two days seminars. The only time somebody usually recognized the person putting on seminars of the coffee's cold. Food's not on time." That's usually the. He said, "This young lady, first of all, seminars are fabulous." He said, "The end of the day, after the first day, I sort of take all the food and put it in a car." That's kind of odd. Second day, season doing a getty walks up and he goes, "You must have a big fam." She said, "I'm taking it to a homeless shelter." He said, "I just don't think we should be wasting this food." I'm like, "I called her up and I said, 'Doin' the right thing because it's the right thing to do. Nobody's ordering anybody. That's the essence of a great culture. People do the right thing because it's the right thing to do." Yeah. You're reinforcing with these stories and sharing these stories with other people. No, nobody keeps it a secret that they got to call. That's the fact. They would think, "Tom call me. Why do you call me?" Yeah. And they tell the story. What did you do? People emulate the behavior you recognize. That's why it's important. You're thoughtful about how you give recognition. What I like about this example, Tom, especially, is that I think anyone can apply it. You don't have to be the president of the company to be doing this. You can be anyone anywhere and look for these opportunities. Maybe it won't be 10 or 15 calls a day, but it doesn't matter whatever they are there. You know, when I give talks around the world, I've had so many people adopt this. I had a guy in Singapore, a big guy, he ran C-gate technologies in Singapore and he said, "He raised the thing and said, 'What if someone calls you and says, 'Sid's doing a great job?' But people around said, 'Aren't such big fans.' I said, 'You know, you can think of a reason not to do anything. I'll take that risk. I'll take the risk. I'm not going to give it a lot of thought. If someone says, 'I've got to tell you about SID, I'm going to call SID.' And you know, he sent me a note later, he said, 'I was thoughtful. I thought more about that and you're 100% right because I don't do anything because I've talked quite a lot of it.' I said, 'Most people leave jobs because they don't feel appreciated, don't feel respected. They don't feel like anybody even notices. I don't want that to happen. I want them to know we care.' The other thing is that most of the time in an organization, you have all these systems to find out the bad stuff. You got to know what the bad stuff is going on.' And there's a reason for that. So you could step in and fix it, you don't want to get, you know, but this is kind of going out of your way to find the good stuff. And that makes it unusual. You hit 100% on why I did it to start with. I said, 'I've been everywhere where people can come forward with issues and certainly if we have a serious issue and you have an idea how to solve it, otherwise called bitching, I think this isn't working. What would you do? I don't know. I haven't given any thought. Bad discussion.' And so you want people thinking about it. It's all problems. But I said, 'The bigger issue I care about it, people give us their heart and soul. I want to make sure they know we appreciate it.' My leadership mantra that everyone knows me knows. I didn't create this, but I lived it. There's people don't care what you know unless they know that you care. They just don't. If you know I care deeply about you and you care deeply about me, there's someone comes to your mind right now. If that person called you would get off of this call and say, 'Tom, I apologize.' Someone I care about deeply needs help. I got to go. Another thing about leadership, I believe for you to ask back, you should have given so much of yourself. Now when you ask back, they do it because they don't want to let you down. That's something I felt about my dad. He used to make everyone of my little league gains. He was a traveling sales guy. I'd see the car going like that, but he made it. And when I got to college, one of the key things that kept me in the right space was I just didn't want to let him down. I wanted to maximize the opportunity because I knew how much it meant to him. So the reason I flew all those miles is I could bring crowds. I could do dinners and bring prospects. I could go visit the key customers open doors. So that when I came back, if I ever said I needed something, I experienced this in space. People said to me, 'You know, if it was possible, right before you in public, 1995, Dan Wormenovitz says to me, 'Look, we have one day left in the quarter. We had already had a sensational quarter. I had North America. International did almost nothing at that point, which is why they handed me international in the next year. But he goes, 'If you can have the biggest day in the history of NetApp tomorrow, it's small numbers, but still biggest day we ever had. We can go public.' And this is way before the dot com bubble. So if you had a window open, you wanted to go. And so I put out a voice mail at night, which I'll never forget. Nor will a lot of the people heard. I said, 'Cause we used to do it by voice mail. We didn't have email. So every time we had a win, we'd put it on voice mail. If I had a message to the team, they'd all listen to a voice mail to hear me talk. And I said, 'You know that I believe in a workplace and life balance tomorrow was not that day.' I couldn't say why. I said, 'So what I'm asking you?' I said, 'I hope you feel like I burned the right to ask, but my request for tomorrow is, 'I don't care for your son's little league game, your wife's birthday. I know you have plans, but I'm asking it for one day of your time.' And I want you to do anything odd business-wise, but I don't want you to go home until you're absolutely sure there's nothing you could do that you get business from that up tomorrow. If that happens early in the day, go home. But if you can do something, I want you to do it. I hung that phone up and I had a moment of serenity that if they could, they would. They ended up doing it. We ended up going public, but even if they didn't, I knew it would be not because of lack of effort. They would do anything they could. And I felt absolutely comfortable that I'd earn that right. I had flown everywhere to try and help on all these deals. And all I was asking is, 'One day we need you.' Now, I could say as an employee, 'I'm that guy who wants to get that call. I want the ball. I want someone to care enough to say, 'Tom, I know you've done a lot, but I need more tomorrow.' I love that. And that's part of the cultural effort. I've always felt high performance people want a high performance person and a committed person on their left and right. And so I always tell people, 'You know, you got to be all in.' The only thing I'm asking back is your attitude as I am all in. I'll give you everything I got. I like the analogy. If I want the ball, it makes me think also when you're a kid, you know, playing softball or little league or whatever. I hope they don't hit the ball to me. I'm gonna make an error or something like that. And that's, I mean, I know where that comes from. But that's not the way to build anything. And yeah, you know, the It might hit it to you and you might make an error, but at least you're going for it. And you'll think about it and you'll try to get better, but you want the ball. I love that analogy. - Can I bring up one comment about what you just said? - Yeah. - Another important point that we covered in our culture was how do you handle risk? How do you handle failure of risk? - Yeah. - And you'd probably have seen examples where someone's asked to take a risk or when it fails, nobody can remember, oh, man, I guess it wasn't so good. Nobody remembers that, you got sent off on the risk. - So I'll give you an example. We had to get a relationship with Microsoft in the early 2000s. Microsoft wasn't sure if we were good or bad for them 'cause we could solidate it as servers. Steve Bommer said, "Keyman, so I said, I don't know if you're friend of folk." He said, "The Royal Bank of Scotland went from 104 servers down to four or five with us. That limits my licenses." And I said to him, "I could be honest with you, "we're not trying to solve your problem, "we're trying to solve their problem, "we're just going to solve anyway." You can just change your licensing to take advantage. Nobody can manage 104 servers. Eventually Microsoft came around to that way of thinking, but not initially. We sent two or three of our best people to Microsoft for 18 months to try and convince the community and they moved the ball, I would say, if it's a hundred yard field, they moved it 60 yards. And at that point, they're up against the wall, they're getting battered and bruised, politics were in their way. I pulled them out and each of them got promoted. They got significant and public promotions for the effort they put in. The second team, same thing, the third team accomplished the goal. And people started signing up for risk. How did that person's, how did their career take off? We were at same level there here and we talked about, look, a lot of people only take on problems that they're comfortable with and they like doing. That's usually not the toughest problem that the company has. People who will take on tough problems for the company. And all you have to accomplish, you don't have to solve cancer. If people say, you know, whatever we give Sid comes back better than we expected, you're on a rocket ride. And I said, each of the individuals that we have sent did better than we expected. And we said, what else can we put them on? And we moved into another significant issue. And over time, they rose to the top of the company because they were the problem solvers. So it started with, we had literally had a discussion about, we have to be cognizant of when you send someone on a risk, you take a sales territory, you say, I'm gonna give you 10 accounts that have no net. 100% of our competitors accounts. Obviously that's a tough job. As opposed to giving you a constant net up or he has a expand them. And so you gotta make sure you compensate this person differently. It's a doing all the right things that's not working. You either add support, add compensation or put them on a different challenge. But most people just wanna look at a scoreboard. It's a bad way of leading. Yeah, so the scoreboard shouldn't be the same for everyone. You have to have a scoreboard that's customized to what you're asking people to do. 100%. Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting subtlety that you don't see very often. It takes more work for the leaders. That's what I'm gonna do it. That's what I'm gonna do. Anybody can say, who's on top 10? Great, bottom 10 fire. Yeah, which some famous leaders have done over the years. Jack Wells, bottom 10% gotta get fired. Jack Wells, in particular. I wanna make sure I know why they're in the bottom 10%. We had a guy in the West Coast who is the number one salesman in history of netting. So multiple billion dollars personally. Think about that. Well, I'm talking about in his third or fourth year, the guy has made our sales club three or four years over which means you're overachieving. And then he doesn't. And when I used to say to the, when we got the list of who's gonna go to the sales achievement club, I'd looked for people who normally made it and didn't, his name was on. I was like, his name was Mike. I called him up, I said Mike. I called only, I didn't call it people. I called people missed to talk to him about it. And I said Mike, you know, you've made four in a row and you missed this year. I'm interested. What happened? He said, well, last year I landed Apple a two years prior. And he said, and Steve Jobs mandated they could only use Apple product. So I got the goal for it. And I had no way to sell to Apple. And I go, I said, is there anything you would have done differently? Nope. Is this something I could do for you? Yes. He says, I'd like to give up all my accounts, but Apple. I'm like, why would you say that? I mean, Apple just said they can't buy it for a beer. He says, time, I'm convinced that Apple, I know why they're doing it, they're doing it for smart reasons, but they don't understand how intensely I owe is to get their job done. If they have a failure to be the front page of the Wall Street Journal, which it was. And if I'm covering seven other accounts, somebody else will be there. And they will turn needing to solve that problem right now. And we'll be out. I want to bet everything on that. And he said, I only asked one thing. I said, what's that? He said, if I'm successful, don't cut my compensation. Give me time to run it out. And he became the highest compensator, the most successful salesperson in history in America. And he got the Apple contract. Oh, he got it. He did a fabulous job on his move going to be his major executive now in the company. But he wanted to invest. He was willing to bet on himself. How could I not bet with him? Right, these are great examples and stories, Tom. We've been going for about an hour. So I want to be able to wrap up soon. But I'm wondering whether we could do a little word association just for fun. Because you know everyone and know every company. And you could elaborate if you wish, but we'll probably keep it on the order site. Keep it tight, that's the right word. I'm going to tell you a name of a company or a name. And I want to know what you think about today. 2021. And let's start with Bezos, Jeff Bezos in Amazon. Incredible. Change the world. I'm a admirer of what he's done. Big time. You mentioned Apple, Steve Jobs. As an aside, Dave hit the founder and NetApp was his roommate at Princeton. He's that right? That's funny. I said the day of one time, how many guys were in the room? He said three. I said, the other guy's homeless. Still-- Hi, I said in the room. That's amazing. So yeah, Steve Jobs. You know, from a culture point of view, you can read these are kind of disconnect from me on culture. But he's Thomas Edison. That's Thomas Edison for our time. Just two nights ago, for not the third, fourth, or fifth time, more than that, I watched his graduation speeches stand for it again. Oh, right. And I'm like, this guy was just incredible. He really was. Facebook and Google. And the revolution that they have wrought in social media. I'm not a Facebook fan. I'm not a Mark Zuckerberg fan. I don't use Facebook. Never have. I honestly don't think-- I know people who respected him an enormous amount for a long, long time and don't anymore. I think that he's lost his way a bit on personal feeling on responsibility for what they do. I have a much higher respect for Google. I just think that both of them have changed the world. I get that. I just personally, what Google does and continues to do, I find valuable for the world. I'm not sure about the trade-offs that Facebook brings. When you mention with Facebook, it's the things that appear that they don't always control. It's out with your thinking of or manage. And what they allow on their thing, as long as it gets clicks, they don't really care about good, better, and different. And I think things that affected the last election, the things that help people hurt our country. I don't think they want to take the actions to shut things down just because it might affect their revenue. I could be wrong, but that's just the impression I have. Yeah. How about Bill Gates and Microsoft? You were working with them in the early days. Yeah. You talked about changing the world. I admire Bill Gates much more 40-- I mean, his story is incredible in tech. What an example of what you can do to help the planet afterward. Blows me away to people trying to figure out ways to criticize. The guy doesn't know their example of no matter what you do. You can't win. But this focus on trying to get chures for disease that we already know how to cure the places that don't have them, which is a big focus. I just think he's really trying hard to make a very big difference on a planet while he can. Yeah. The bigger the name, the more you get criticized. But Bill Gates, especially with the COVID and the vaccines and things people were saying, we're just that rage is crazy. It just goes along with this whole conspiracy thing that's allowed to be promoted about anything that you listen to people. You're like, seriously, think about what you're saying. And Bill Gates somehow became the enemy. I mean-- Yeah. One more, a little bit different. Elon Musk and Tesla. Wacked up. [LAUGHS] The guy is revolutionized. He's-- Yeah. No doubt. OK. And he's been incredibly successful at PayPal. He bet all his money on SpaceX is a big net app customer. I went there incredible. I remember when I first went to SpaceX, they were going, you know, because the US government wasn't sure if they were friendly or they should shut them down, try and compete. And they were talking about being able to reenter. You know, the US would shoot one thing for 10 to 20 X. And I just read yesterday, the SpaceX is using the same booster, I think 10 straight flights. So, you know, what they've done is incredible. I'm not sure about how he handles himself with social media as a CEO. I don't think it's to his benefit. And I don't know. It seems like a guy who takes it can do anything and he's doing it. And he's doing it. Do you think it takes that type of, you know, what adjective do you want to use? But very unusual, ultra creative, breaks all the rules type of person to do some of the stuff he's doing. Maybe. Wacked job maybe a little light. Maybe not. [LAUGHS] I'm just saying some of the things he does, just you go, right? But there's no knocking. He's-- I mean, who is the guy who changed the planet? That changed the planet. And you know what's incredible when you think about it? It said most of these companies were either not around 20 years ago or like Apple was a $6 stock 20 years ago. So these things have all come on in 20 years. So if you say yourself, what's it going to be 20 years from now? Many of it's going to be companies we're not talking about yet. We don't even know. And it's like UI path that you mentioned earlier has a $35 billion valuation. I have nothing. And that's just one of many companies that are changing kind of business. You threw out the cloud before. The biggest impact to me is the cloud. There's a lot of impacts. But one of them is, if you and I started a company today, we wouldn't have to buy infrastructure. If we had an idea that was really compelling, we could do it on the cloud with no infrastructure and easily bring it to market. That's why you see so many things explode. Many of the companies that created in the last 10 years were all on the cloud. I mean, so it used to be you had a significant IT investment, a tremendous amount of money, even if you had good ideas. That's not true anymore. Last tech question and then one final question to wrap up. Gazing into your crystal ball, are you an optimist or I don't think you know how to be a pessimist, but are you an optimist or a minor optimist on the direction of tech? And I think about privacy, I think about anti-trust, I think about the power of the big five which are on the negative side, but I also think about you know your experience with UI path and Israeli companies and others, the amount of entrepreneurship that's going on in tech, the growth of the economy based on tech. What does your crystal ball say for the next five or ten years? Well, first of all, think about how our lives have been proved. I've made a minor whine about Facebook doing not doing the right things, but in general, we have information at our fingertips that we can make decisions with. We have in medicine things that are saving lives, left and I look which is happy with the vaccine. I mean, my God, how it came and it's incredible. So technology has done an amazing job of making our lives better. I think over the next 20 years, you'll see it get what I would hope is it makes it so much easier to make the lives better of the entire planet, not just the companies that are already well off getting better. Today, still 50% of the world doesn't have clean drinking water. We have people dying left and right of diseases we know how to fix. With telemedicine and with technology making it easier to reach people, I think we'll have breakthroughs and who knows what could happen with space. You know, there's all kinds of things in 20 years that see mod now, but at the end of the day, it's a benefit to humankind. 90% or 95%, it's like anything else, we should be thoughtful about the 10% that's not. How do we make that better? We want to do away with any of that stuff, but how do we make it better? Make sure that it's beneficial. Make sure it can't be used for bad purposes. You know, you mentioned use the word scale a couple of times earlier and your comment here makes me think about scale. Almost like a different definition of what it means to scale an idea. If we were scaling vaccine production and we're doing it, but you see what's happened in India and South America in many other countries, it's going to take a long time for the world to actually, for anyone who wants it, have access to that vaccine and that's the real definition of scale on a global basis. One of the things that the Biden administration did right at the beginning of this when I saw it struggling with distribution, I said, give it to the military. There is nobody who understands logistics like the military. I've spoke a West Point before. I've spoke from Marine Corps. I spoke at the Air Force Academy and every general you talk to when they talk about heroes you don't know about, there's so much logistics to put the right things in the right place in a battle or in a confrontation and I'm like, give it to, and that's what's happening. How many people are going to get vaccinated? They go to National Guard Reserves. Unbelievable. The military was there. So you think about what we've done from January to here we are in May. It's incredible how many people have got vaccinated. Now they're trying to convince people, right? If we could do it on a global basis, distribution. I mean, India was exporting vaccines because they felt they had it solved. Their distributions there, issues, that not having enough vaccine, they did not distribute it. Well, that's a hard problem. Yeah. Thinking about scale a little bit differently is one of the first steps. That's required a true global scale. So Tom, this has been really interesting. I have one last question for you. It's my advice question, but it's a particular flavor advice because it's an advice to yourself at the age of 21. If you could magically go back and I guess you were maybe hanging in your door, I meant Notre Dame in the age of 21. Okay, if you can magically go back in time and go to the 21 year old Tom and those and say, there's one thing you really want to know, there's one thing you want to do, there's one thing you don't want to do, there's one thing you want to think about. What would that one bit of a device be to yourself as a 21 year old man? Always make sure you with people that you respect and that make you think bigger and that you're proud to be around. Every good thing that's happened to me in my life, I was surrounded by people that lifted me, that I respected, that made me think that I could do more and maybe want to do more. Monid me to be a better person and I haven't done a much but where I have not had great experiences, that was not true. Yeah. Tom, thanks so much. It's been really an inspirational conversation. Oh, thank you. And I've learned a lot. I love this. I feel like if we went another a couple hours, there'd be so many more lessons to come, but maybe we'll come up with a way to bring you up to the Dartmouth campus one day. That'd be great. That would be fun to have you interact with our students. But in the interim, they'll have this podcast. So Tom and those up, thanks so much for being on the Sidcast and look forward to continuing the conversation in the future. Thank you Sid. That was really a lot of fun. You're terrific at this. I appreciate it. Thank you, Tom. Be well. Take care. Bye bye. Bye bye. Thank you for listening to the Sidcast. I am really excited to be bringing you season three. And really appreciative that you chose into listen to this episode. If you haven't already, please subscribe to the series and you will never miss a single episode. I welcome all feedback and I'd love to hear from you. I've gotten some great commentary over the course of the first two seasons and lots of great suggestions as well. You can contact me via my website www.thesidcast.com or you can email me directly at [email protected]. If you like what you heard, I hope you'll tune into another one of our episodes and please give us a five star review and share with others who you think would enjoy and benefit from the show as well. The Sidcast is produced by the podcast Laundry Production Company.