Sun Microsystems

“In those days, each frame would take an hour or two to render, and they could only render like three and a half minutes of footage per week. They were on this Sun Microsystems hardware that was state of the art at the time, and they had a 117 of them clustered…”

“Where we were coming up with, like, pretty high overhead, and this was actually at Netflix, and it took us about, you know, maybe a couple of weeks to resolve it, and it actually turned out to be a JVM bug because they were using IBM's JVM versus Sun's JVM, an…”

“I think Linux wouldn't exist if we'd open-sourced Solaris x-eighty-six early, and that would have been a tremendous transformation, because there was a lot of amazing things in Solaris.”

“Every time we have a super cycle, it tends to start, you know, in these prosumer ways, right? The internet did this, right? Like, remember when Sun outlawed the browser, right? This is like Sun Microsystems, right? But they didn't really know how to consume it…”

“The first two years, everyone built on sun and Oracle, everyone, all the startups did and. Five, six years in, no one did.”

“People still think of NVIDIA as making GPUs in the sense that they make chips and sell chips. That's not what they do. They sell computers. They sell custom computers, kind of like Sun Microsystems did with a whole networking stack and a software stack on top …”

“Even today, if you go to the Facebook office you will see one hack away, a big sign that has the Meta logo and behind the Meta sign is the original Sun Microsystems sign, because Mark wants to have that as a constant reminder about how it is so important to ke…”

“I got an offer actually from Sun at the time which had a had a unit, they had a software unit of Sun at the time called First Person which was creating what became Java later with James Gosling.”

“Apple was almost bought by Sun and Sun balked at the price. I think it was like two billion, two point something too much.”

“When our CTO was at Sun, they had a team of 70 whose job it was to gain benchmarks.”

“My biggest mistake ever was I was at Sun and Cisco routers was software running on Sun machines and Sun's logo or tagline used to be the network is the computer. And I didn't see, and nobody at Sun saw, routers as more, as maybe a huge thing, even though we ha…”

“Not many will remember, but when AWS launched their cloud service, there were cloud services around. For instance, Sun Microsystems had one, ah, but AWS came out with something that cost a 10th of what they had.”

“So, they got their five top salesmen in the world, and they brought them into the home office, and they said, the guy who breaks the compensation plan most significantly gets a gold Rolex. It worked. They found out all the holes in the plan.”

“And there was a period, there was a three month period where we almost went bankrupt because we had a hardware problem. Monitors we were buying from Philips were breaking every 30 days.”

“Well, what happened was that overnight, like hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue evaporated.”

“So, 10 years ago, everyone would look at Fidelity and Morgan Stanley, and those were the prototypes for the data center. And it was, guess what? It was EMC storage, an Oracle database, a Sun Microsystems server, and a Cisco switch. And the entire world copied …”

“Sun Microsystems was our biggest seller. So we said, wow, that's amazing. And they had sold like three million dollars worth of servers on eBay. This is when eBay was largely beanie babies.”

“We ended up accepting an offer from Sun Microsystems for four hundred million.”

“The revenue at that time was right around fifteen million. Annually.”