Where I’m Coming From

You may find some similarity between your experience and where I stood in college in 1995: I started on a traditional path, a computer science and electrical engineering program at Duke University. I went to my advisor, asking about classes that would best prepare me for working in industry. He was a smart guy—a Rhodes scholar and rising star in the engineering school—and he responded, “I have no idea. I’ve never worked a day in industry in my life.”

I was more than a little disillusioned. I wanted to build real, shipping products—not write research papers. So, that summer I managed to get my foot in the door at one of the hottest start-ups in Silicon Valley, General Magic. It was founded by some of the same guys who created the original Macintosh computer, Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson. My peers included some of the top players from Apple’s System 7 (operating system) team and the guy who would later found eBay.

I learned more about programming in my two-month internship than I could have learned in two years of school. I called Duke and said I wasn’t coming back. And so my wild ride in industry began.