Cisco

“But Stanford said, no, you cannot license this technology. They would not entertain any licensing. We had done our part, and we had taken the government's money. This is all public domain. We'd invented all of these wonderful things, but the Office of Technolo…”

“Len and I agreed to sell our stock on a very joint basis, and we did it because we fundamentally had no respect for people running the company. And it wasn't really that we didn't believe in the company. I mean, I was the one who said that Cisco would be a bil…”

“I was sitting in my little office in the corner, as I did every day, and he came in, and he sat down in the chair without making an appointment, and he said, ah, you know, I think it's time you retire. He says, you've got all this money now, you just, time to …”

“Cisco was actually the 36th name that we tried to get. Anything having to do with computers, we couldn't have.”

“We ended up paying them, I think, a very fair royalty for the first Gosh, I want to say three million dollars a product or something. Very fair royalty. And we had to fix their network for three years.”

“And so Len, I think you probably could have knocked over both Valentine and everybody else like little bowling pins when Len walked up there and walked out with me.”

“We ended up getting it back, but only because it would have looked very bad for the stock six months after when both of the founders walk out, and you can't tar and feather the other one with, girls don't know how to play on a team.”

“And the problem was that, you know, at this point, the investor community, which was a whole bunch of old, you know, Fairchild semiconductor salesmen, they didn't think that you could make any money on a public protocol because, of course, everybody would do i…”

“Yeah, and he denies it, but I will swear on the lives of my cats, the first thing he said to me was, I hear you're everything that's wrong with Cisco.”

“Remember that right after that, Len and I put 70% of the proceeds into charitable vehicles.”

“First of all, there was a woman founder, and they're all 60 or 70. They just didn't know how to relate to a woman In business”

“By 1987, with no sales force, we were booking a quarter million dollars a month.”

“We went through about 70 or 80 of them.”

“He gave us 2.6 million dollars, and Len and I got about 30%, but remember, he was the chairman of the board of the company, and he got stock from that, and all of his friends got stock.”

“With no sales force, we were booking a quarter million dollars a month.”

“There were so many times that company could have gone under, and we were saved by circumstances out of our control. So there was huge luck in there.”

“We ended up paying them, I think, a very fair royalty for the first, gosh, I want to say three million dollars a product or something. Very fair royalty. And we had to fix their network for three years.”

“Yeah, it was probably time for me to go. It was probably time for Lem to go. We're just not good people in a collaborative environment.”

“Yeah, and he denies it, but I will swear on the lives of my cats, the first thing he said to me was, I hear you're everything that's wrong with Cisco.”

“Len and I agreed to sell our stock on a very joint basis, and we did it because we fundamentally had no respect for people running the company, and it wasn't really that we didn't believe in the company.”

“He gave us 2.6 million dollars, and Len and I got about 30%, but remember, he was the chairman of the board of the company, and he got stock from that, and all of his friends got stock.”

“Our first customer was Hewlett Packard Laboratories. The second one was Rutgers University. Third one was Boeing.”

“Remember that right after that, Len and I put 70% of the proceeds into charitable vehicles.”

“Cisco was actually the 36th name that we tried to get. Anything having to do with computers, we couldn't have.”

“Len and I walked into a four-year vesting plan after funding the company for three years, clearly a mezzanine investment. We're making, we're booking a quarter million dollars a month at that point.”

“Stanford said, no, you cannot license this technology. They would not entertain any licensing. We had done our part, and we had taken the government's money. This is all public domain. We'd invented all of these wonderful things, but the Office of Technology L…”

“We went through about 70 or 80 of them.”

“The investor community, which was a whole bunch of old, you know, Fairchild semiconductor salesmen, they didn't think that you could make any money on a public protocol because, of course, everybody would do it.”

“When we made those calls out to these other companies, nobody had a solution. Nobody was, they all had a huge problem.”

“I remember the actual difference between making money and not making money that first year was that I said on a Vlogbrothers video, if anybody knows anybody who would like to sponsor an online video convention, please email me. And the daughter of an executive…”