Search Results for: bechtolsheim

Oh, Andy…….

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One of the richest and least-known people in the Silicon Valley is Andreas Bechtolsheim, who was my business partner and investor for my company Prophet. I was sad to see a prominent story in this morning’s paper about how he was caught trying to hide a $415,726 profit from insider trading. He’s had to pay a financial penalty and is disallowed from serving on a public company for five years.

It’s important to put this into perspective. I did the math, and while $415,726 is a big figure to folks like you and me, proportionately speaking, it is $7.51 to Andy. I’m not trying to be cute; that’s the real figure. So, he’s permanently damaged his otherwise spotless reputation over an amount of money which, to you or me, is equal to a beverage from a good coffee shop.

Much Good Has Sprung From Misfortune

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People are understandably in a funk these days. They’re trapped in their houses. People are sick or dying. Every day greets us with more grim news.

One thing which has been surprising to me throughout my life is how some of the greatest blessings have been born from what seemed at first to be negative circumstances. I thought I’d share three unrelated anecdotes to make my point.

The first is from back in 1994, when my little business Prophet was at the cusp of going under. (If you’re interested in the history of Prophet, there’s a cool documentary about it here.) I had started the company with an investor (the fabled Andy Bechtolsheim, now one of the richest men in the world) and a programming partner.

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Silicon Valley Meets David Cross

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I first moved to the Silicon Valley in 1984. That was before……..well………pretty much everything. No Twitter, Facebook, Google. No Internet. Steve Jobs was about a year away from getting kicked out of Apple. The most sophisticated computer users (like, err, myself) were on 1200 baud modems dialing up to the likes of CompuServe.

Even so, the Valley back then was the home of at least a few riches. Intel, Apple, Hewlett Packard, and other public firms had flooded new money into the area, but in spite of that, it still had very much a homespun college town feel to it. If you just dropped someone into any given neighborhood in Palo Alto – – even the nicest ones, like Crescent Park or Old Palo Alto – – they might guess they were strolling a pleasant suburb in Ohio or Illinois.

I was somewhat shaken, then, to see this on the front page of our town paper:

0804-steak

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Technical Tools Tale (The End)

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Here’s the third installment of my little story, the first and second of which are here and here, respectively. As before, the term “X” is used in place for a certain real name.

Our little company was now under new management. In the months to follow, our respective jobs remained more or less the same, but the interactions within the office grew both peculiar and contrived.

For example, in the arsenal of psychology tools our new owner “X” pulled from his new age bag of tricks, there was something he called “pacing”. During these pacing exercises, everyone in the company would stop whatever they were doing (to the chagrin, I imagine, of customers calling in to place orders or get technical support) and pair off, two by two, and face one another while sitting in chairs. One person would speak, and the other person would “pace” them – – that is to say, the silent person would mimic the body language of the other party. This was not to be done in a mocking way, but instead was assumed to build empathy with the other person. (more…)