Basically, I left Northern Telecom after 7.5 years of being in one company after school. And then, I ended up in a series of start-ups. The first of those was a company called Sitech, and they were in local area networks.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I ended up working in Michigan for a young company called Sycor out of Michigan, worked there, and that company got bought by Northern Telecom. We became the Bell Northern Research Labs of Northern Telecom.
I sensed my chance and embraced the telecom business. I started marketing telephones, answering/fax machines under the brand name Beetel, and the company picked up really fast.
I was approached about having my own network many, many years ago. There were some people who wanted to start up a network, and I didn't want to get that involved in the business aspect of it.
I started one of the first online video companies way back in 2003.
I could imagine, some number of years from now, starting my own company. But not yet. Not for a while.
In the space of three weeks, I met a fair bunch of the guys who were just starting those little programmers' co-ops, and everybody was talking about starting businesses.
It was really a very small company when I started and it changed very rapidly during those first periods.
Over two billion people now use the broadband Internet, up from perhaps 50 million a decade ago, when I was at Netscape, the company I co-founded.
I started NetSuite. NetSuite was my idea. I called up Evan Goldberg and said, 'We're going to do ERP on the Internet, software-as-a-service.' Six months later Marc Benioff, finding out what NetSuite was doing, and kind of copied it.
I worked for three years in a small IT firm in Chicago. I managed our client base, so I translated into human speak for our technicians. But our company was sold, and the atmosphere and the culture really changed, so I quit without having anything else lined up.