This episode of Founders' Field Guide is brought to you by Microsoft for Startups, Microsoft for Startups is a global program dedicated to helping Enterprise ready B2B startups successfully scale their companies. The program has been around for a couple of years, but I recently became intrigued when former investor like the best guest, Jeff Maas, took over Microsoft for startups, provides companies access to technology, including Azure, Cloud and GitHub, coupled with a streamlined path to selling alongside Microsoft and their global partner ecosystem.

Microsoft for Startups has a very compelling approach to working with startups and driving their long term business value. If you're a founder running a B2B company targeting the enterprise, you should definitely check them out at Startup Stop Microsoft Dotcom.

To hear more about the program, stay tuned. At the end of the episode to hear from me, Jeff Marr and Greylock partner Sam Mohammedi.

This episode has also brought to you by Venta. Does your startup media çok to report to close big deals, or do you already have a stock to report and want to make it easier to maintain? Venta has built software that makes it easier to both get and renew your SOC two with Ventus continuous monitoring solution. You avoid hosting auditors on site and taking screenshots to prove that you're compliant so you can focus on building your business. Vantiv partners with audit firms who file your SOC to report directly inside Eventa at a fraction of the normal cost.

Hundreds of companies, including more than one hundred Y Combinator businesses, are leveraging van't us today to streamline compliance and focus on building their businesses. Founders' Field Guide listeners can redeem a one thousand dollar off coupon. Advanta dot com forward slash Patrick That's Venta Dotcom Forward slash Patrick.

Oh, hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Founders' Felgate. Founders Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs and operators building great businesses. I believe we are all builders in our own way and this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types. You can find more episodes at Investor Field Guide dot com.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shannassy Asset Management, all opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shannassy asset management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of O'Shannassy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

My guest this week is John Chambers. John was the CEO of Cisco from 1995 to 2015, where he helped grow Cisco from 70 million to 40 billion dollars in annual revenues. In this conversation, we discuss the best business lessons he learned from longtime GE CEO Jack Welch. His key lessons from acquiring over 180 companies for Cisco, pattern recognition and playbooks, capitalizing on market transitions enabled by new technologies, the value of time off sites, and a lot, lot more.

I was immediately drawn into John's magnetic personality, and it's easy to see how he was so adept at running a 40000 person company for two decades. I hope you enjoy this great conversation with John Chambers. So, John, I was toying with how to begin this conversation for everyone to hear, and I thought a really neat entry point would be the observation you told me about from Jack Welch that you need a near-death experience as a company to become a great company.

Can you walk me through that idea and the episode for you, Jack Welch?

GE was one of the greatest business leaders of the generation in front of me. And I'd say many people would say he was the best. He did many things well. But one of the things he did was benchmark companies learn from them. And you see, when they sent his teams out, the benchmark companies, if they got one idea from the company, it was great. When they benchmark Cisco, we were shocked. They came away with twenty two areas they wanted to emulate and learn from and direction.

And Jack Welch, even though he was not a technologist at all, understood the market transition going on. So we became good friends and developed a trusting relationship in the mid 90s and we were on our way to becoming the most valuable company in the world. I was talking to Jack and he said, John, you've got a good company. And I said, I know, Jack, that you're beating me on this. I think we've got a company that is pretty close to becoming a great company.

What am I missing? He basically said, John, a near-death experience. And I said, well, I've gone through some tough times and I rattled off the economic recessions, et cetera. And he said, no, John, until you go through a near-death recession setback type of approach, you will never be a great leader yourself because you have to question your own ability to lead your friends who suddenly turn on you. You've got to go through that and your company has to go through it as well.

That's one of those things. When you hear pieces of advice, you go, Patrick, that was good advice, but probably not. I'll put it over here to the side. Two thousand one, the dotcom bust. He was exactly right. It was the hardest year of my business career. We had never missed a forecast. We'd created ten thousand millionaires in our company. We were on a roll. We'd run every award imaginable as a company.

And all of a sudden people were questioning, how do we go from the most valuable company in the world to a company? Should I even be leading the company? It was a tough year for me. We had to lay off seven thousand five hundred people, very painful. These were my family. I knew many of them very, very well personally. And so it was the year that I felt that I did not do a good job of leadership.

And he called me up at the end of 2001 and said, John, you have a great company. This may surprise you. You are now a great leader. And this is the best I've ever seen you execute. And I said, Jack, you're probably the only person that would even say that, because many people who believed in me before and believed in our leadership are suddenly questioning, can we do the job well or not? He said, no, you'll see this play out.

You'll have a much stronger company. You'll come back better than any of your peers. And candidly, you'll be a much better leader. I said you're going to be the only one that ever tells me this year was 21 was my best leadership year ever. By the way, he was the only one that said that. But his point was a good one. And now I try to do that with my young leaders. I try to remind them that they will develop more stress than the good times, and I try to give them the comfort level even a little bit more gently injected with me about as you go through this tough time, here's what the ups and downs will be like.

The pits in your stomach where you worry about are you the right person to lead this, your ability to motivate a team once you put your vision in place. So that is what leadership is about. And it was something that probably is one of the best pieces of advice I ever got as both a leader.

And I guess just more generally, how were you in 2002 to the most different than you were in nineteen ninety nine, having gone through that near-death experience?

Well, if I can expand the question a little bit, how we handled the challenges in twenty eight, the Great Recession, what I learned from my mistakes and two thousand twenty one that was keep doing the right thing too long, becoming way too dependent upon numbers which never failed me. I mean, Patrick, I could tell you, based on the first week of a month, how the quarter was going to go and probably how the year would go based upon pattern recognition that we had seen around the world, number of new orders, etc.

. We knew every order within 30 seconds that occurred. We knew what to forecast, where we could compare it to the exact same time the prior years, etc. seems foolproof. However, what we neglected was the psychology side of this, that the stock market was dropping in two thousand, that there was an indication something wasn't going right. And I should have spent more time out with the customers around the world to understand it, because once I did my trip in January of 2001, I realised that it was going to be a 100 year flood.

I made the mistake of using that term with the press, which they beat me up on pretty hard times, just Cisco. But as we know, it was not in terms of the direction. So two thousand eight, we were using both data, but a lot more time with customers asking about trends, etc. We saw that coming one year earlier. In our summer before the economic downturn, all of a sudden my pattern on my numbers were really good, but one group of key customers, i.e. the financial institutions, suddenly slowed their ordering down in a way by about 20 percent off the normal order rates.

But as all of them at the same time and I called up the CEOs and because I knew them well, I said there's something going on here I need to be aware of. And they said, no, we're just a little bit cautious at the present time. We think everything's fine. Eight out of eight is in question. That is the trend. So we prepared ourselves for an economic downturn and we froze expenses. We prepared how we would navigate through this.

And nine months later, everybody was in that downturn and we had already positioned ourselves for the future and were already playing offense. And we came through it with unbelievable strengths, including loaning billions of dollars to the automotive companies. That time, no one else would give them money to purchase their equipment. We bought a relationship and trust because we had the financial strength to do it and we were positioned expecting problems. Long story short is not only did it navigate through that better, and once again we broke away from our peers in every downturn.

We came out of stronger than our peers and gaining market share, and we gained loyalty of customers and trust in our culture that no one else have. And that company, Cisco, still has that to this day because of how you interface to customers during the toughest time and their survival time in a way that no one else did draw a parallel that goes back to my challenges as a young person almost drowned when I was six years old and I was a competitive swimmer at that age.

But my dad and I were fishing in Rapids, West Virginia. He said, John, you've got to be careful here. This rapids are really bad and it's fine for you to fish, but do not get too close to the edge. He said, I'm going to be fishing up here a little bit above. You never told me to be cautious. He said, I do want you to be very cautious. What is a six year old?

Do I started to catch a fish or one to see if I could get the lure out further. I got closer and sure enough, I fell in. The minute I went in, I knew I was in trouble. I mean, the rapids plummeted. They knocked me head over heels. And as I finally surfaced for the first time in the rapids and I was just getting started in them, my dad is yelling at me from one hundred yards away, hold onto the fishing pole.

And each time I'd surface out here, you see him running down the side of the bank trying to catch up to me and yelling, hold onto the pole. And I just got knocked up, skinned up pretty good through there. And finally he got below me and was able to swim out and pull me in. I was a little bit shook and he sat down. He said, Do you understand what just happened? I said, Yeah, from the fishing pole.

And he said, no, what you did is you didn't panic. I use the folks of the fishing pole, you to focus on something you could control so that you let the rapids take its course and then I could come out get you. He said, in life, as you fall into these challenges, you focus on what you can control and influence. Do not swim against the tide the current because you will drown. You have to learn how to get out of this yourself.

Once you've been through that, you know how to teach that. You know how to handle the experience remaining focused on it.

Well, it's an amazing story. I'm glad that I didn't hear it the first time we spoke because it's so poignant and so interesting. I have to remember, I always get yelled at by my team for diving right into the middle of these conversations and not giving some framing for those listening. And for myself, I'd love you to begin by telling me a bit about what you had done up to the point that you joined Cisco in your career, sort of the formative experiences you had and then what that business looked like when you got there.

Because I think what's so unique about your experiences, Cisco, is there. It was established, but by far the majority of its absolute value market cap happened under your watch. And plenty of lessons, too, I'm sure, gleaned from that experience. But we need the set up. So going into that experience, what were the formative pieces of your life and career to that point? And then what did it look like when you got to Cisco?

Your second part of the question was not just your business career, it was your life on it and your experiences and then the business career that set it up. And then what did we find at Cisco in that sequence? I was a product of two doctors from the very beginning, the importance of the quality in life and and that we're all equal in life. So no matter what happened, they knew how to fix this in terms of the direction. But I had a problem reading in the first and second and third grade and it was severe and my parents would read with me every night.

But much like somebody who is just play sports, a golfer or shooting a basketball, if you have something that's basically wrong with your swing or your shot, it's really bad. Practicing it more with that floor only makes it worse and makes it very difficult to ever fix later. And so my parents, once they saw what was happening in school, kids would laugh at me when I read because. I would lose track of where it was turned out, I was dyslexic, and that means you often read right to left as opposed to left or right in it's emotional.

You lose confidence would be an understatement. And I heard the teachers talking one time from a distance that I may not not only go to college, I mean, I graduate from high school. My parents did figure this out and they got a teacher by the name of Mrs. Anderson to really help me learn how to read effectively. And even though the term dyslexia wasn't prevalent, she knew I had a learning disability and she taught me a series of techniques over two days a week after school for three years how to deal with it.

Once I learned to work around and then later in life, learn that you can take a weakness and make it a strength, whether it's in public speaking or the fact that I can't do things. Cirilli but I can go a pattern recognition and outcomes really quickly. Picture the whole thing, make it a strength second thing and formative years. I grew up in West Virginia where we were the chemical center of the world with Carbide, FMC, Dupont, six thousand engineers in Charleston, West Virginia.

Smartest technicians think of that as the Silicon Valley of the world and chemicals. When I was growing up and one hundred twenty five thousand coal miners and a very prosperous state, more millionaires in West Virginia than the whole United Kingdom did. But because we didn't change, we didn't make changes. We fell from grace. Today, we're number forty eight, forty nine fifty in almost every category. Then I watched the equivalent of Silicon Valley in Boston, one twenty eight with my tea.

At the heart of that, like Stanford is out here. And I watched us lead the mini computer industry with Dec and Wang and Data General and thousands of computer technology companies and feeder systems and supply chains groups. And we went from the powerhouse of the world to almost nonexistent in technology computer industry because we didn't change. All those jobs were lost and gone forever. So I've seen when things don't change. So I went to IBM mainframes, big and proud of it, etc.

. IBM didn't change, displaced by many computer players, Wang, Data, General, et cetera. They didn't change place by client servers. They Microsoft's, the Intel's, the world. They didn't change, replaced by Cisco, the Internet, the Internet, it evolved to the cloud, etc.. So I'd learned how technology changes as your business changes in a unique way and they're doing the right thing to long get you in as much trouble as doing the wrong thing does.

I was a product of all those. So when I came to Cisco, the first lesson learned is I was never going to get the interview at Cisco when I decided to leave, when we were going through a series which have lasted a year of layoffs almost every three months. And I did not feel I could look for a job at the time I was laying off people. Now, organization at that time is running the US organization about ten thousand people.

When I told the CEO that I've lost confidence in the direction it was time for me to leave, I thought all I'd have to do is send out resumes and wait for the offers to come in. And it was really a humbling experience. No offers came in and I had a pretty good track record and experience on it that teaches you the importance of relationships. Fast forward one hundred twenty days later I had twenty two offers either in hand or close to being in hand.

Twenty one of them came entirely through friends and networking helping me. I had the search firm. We had the search for me that ended up having to search for Cisco as well. When it turned out one of the Cisco employees who had worked with twelve years before, ten years before IBM and I worked with him at WHANG and I helped him out of a tough situation just because it was the right thing to do. I didn't even know he was at Cisco.

He called up my wife and said, I know that John's looking here in the valley. He's interviewing at the wrong companies and he needs to be the CEO of Cisco. I returned from a grueling trip out here on the West Coast. Elaine, my wife asked me how to go and I said it was brutal. But we're getting some offers. She said, I've got a job for you company called Cisco. I didn't even know what they did.

But the take away there is your product. Your currency is your track record, your relationships and trust. And when you use those three, consciously or subconsciously, that often determines your future. And purely because of how I treated somebody before that I get the job at Cisco and purely because of having seen the experience so much I been through it. I was able to share with the decision makers at Cisco why I should be the next CEO and they were kind enough to give me the opportunity.

At that time it was only four hundred people, seventy million in sales. The group was very effective, got very talented group, but it was a leadership team that did not get along and didn't like each other almost. They had to at times get between them in terms of fist fight, but they were very customer oriented. I was fortunate enough to be understood, having seen the movies, the transitions that we'd need to evolve the leadership team that would need to move rapidly.

And I need to focus them on outcomes and made a bold statement that the Internet was going to change the way the world works, lives, learns and plays. And Cisco's going to be the key player there. People say if you build routers, you do techie stuff between researchers on campus. What do you mean it's going to change the world? So that's what Cisco is like when I got there. Great product, by the way, but it was more a techie product.

I helped to evolve with some really talented people around me. How you evolve the corporation. We developed and recruited some of the best talent in engineering and sales, and we did one hundred and eighty acquisitions and we took it from 400 people to seventy five thousand people, 70 million in sales to forty seven billion, number one or two, which our mentality stole that from Jack Welch. Don't enter a market unless you can be the one or two player sustainably in it.

Most companies are only one or two in one product category. We were number one when I left and 12 product categories. So my experience in life and knowing when to focus on market transitions, not competitors and technology transitions, again, not competitors. When you get the two combine, that's when you can really break away. So that's what I learned in life. It's what I learned from the experience. And I learned what you do very well, tell stories to remember points as opposed to take to the bottom line, which I tend to be very net.

Here are the five takeaways. One, two, three, four, five. You got it. Let's go. It's much better if you tell the story so people understand how you think and how you balance one of my weaknesses. I will often when I'm doing an interview like I am with you with one of my young CEOs, I will show that I have trust in my CEO that I'm sponsoring in a way to be able to share with the interviewer his strengths and weaknesses or weaknesses and strengths.

And then I ask the question, what is the one thing or two things you like best about what I bring to you as your strategic partner as well as an investor? And what's the one or two things you need to improve on? All of them were remarkably good on their answers, and I did it one day with one person press person shadowing me. Each one of them gave a different point. But the one who hit home, I thought the most.

It said, John, you tend to think and outcomes and you connect the dots quickly and you go A, B, Z. You get there so fast that you can lose people along the way. And we have to slow you down to tell us what should we look for along the way? What changes have to occur. So we need for you to slow down is to teach us how to go forward on the direction they were. Absolutely right.

So another lesson learned for the listeners as people, not only what are you doing right where you add value, whether it's your own people report to you, your peers, or giving back to society, but also ask honestly, what do you need to do to improve?

There's so many questions and follow up. The one I want to stick to early is this idea of pattern recognition. You brought it up a few times. I think it's something that you're naturally endowed to be good at. But also, I love the negative lesson of watching places and companies and people that don't change and the impact of that. Can you describe the role that pattern recognition played?

Well, the pattern recognition first and the numbers, the ability to be able to see the patterns based upon how a order rate went in a given day of any month, in a given week of any month, any quarter, a given quarter and a year, and see the pattern so accurately that for forty quarters in a row we not only didn't miss, we were plus or minus always at the midpoint or above and the range, the market, even though eighty percent of our business was new every quarter.

So we not only hit our year forecast, we hit the quarter forecast, always at the number, usually two cents above. People said, well, how do you keep doing that? And I was kind of amazed somebody didn't go to the bottom line, just take whatever forecast we had and add one to two pennies per share. And that's probably what we're going to do. But it was that pattern recognition that allowed us to spend money during the quarter and be able to develop in ways that others did not pattern recognition that if there is a problem or an opportunity, we saw it at the very beginning, which we could then adjust appropriately to.

But it wasn't just at the top. It was all the way down through the various engineering and sales arms. They were able to see the numbers so accurately they knew what they needed to change to correct ahead of time on it. So that pattern recognition is OK. The pattern recognition. I've always been driven by customers. There was only one Steve Jobs. He just knew what to build, how he did it, and I knew him reasonably well.

All of us were amazed that still took him seven years. I shortcut that. I get an idea of a market transition. Enabled by new technology, and then I go straight to customers and say, what do you think? So pattern recognition amplified by listening to the right customers at the right time or what they think either on the issue or the company allowed us to do one hundred and eighty acquisitions with the highest track record. I think most everyone would tell the high tech industry they're modeled after what we did at Cisco on we were a machine on acquiring and we had the playbook's, which we haven't talked about, Patrick, but we ran playbooks on everything we did from acquisitions to being one or two in a product category to how you digitize a country, etc.

, in terms of direction. So it is that pattern recognition then put into playbooks that allows you to move a speed that is not a simple issue. Playbook's pattern recognition then replicating that pattern much like a great sports team who runs the West Coast offense or a Warriors team, the past is one hundred and thirty times per game, which is more than anybody has ever done in history, and wins ninety eight percent of the games when they pass on and 30 times on it, watching the patterns, then replicate it and playing it through and being able to tell those stories again on what works and what's applicable.

You mentioned the crazy amount of acquisitions. I think there is more than a dozen. There were over a billion dollars at Cisco during your tenure. I'd love to hear more about this playbook that you referenced, sort of what the mental models were you had for an acquisition. Where should M&A fit in the toolkit and what were the best lessons you learned? Doing so many?

I'll try to go in the reverse order that you ask them first is when you try to do something that has not been successful in nineteen ninety three, when we did our first one, acquisitions and high tech had failed miserably and we knew that when we tried to do it would probably get the same result unless we did it differently. Secondly, there are a lot of smart people who worked hard to do acquisitions. They failed. So if you're doing the same thing they are and think you're smarter, you're just going to be wrong.

We did a study of why do we think the companies failed and what would we do different in the approach and the playbook that came out of it was very simple. First is don't do an acquisition that isn't really strategic. They're really hard. Secondly, understand what you're acquiring and protect at all costs. If you were Bank of America being acquired by NationsBank out of the East Coast, what nations was acquiring was purely brand and geography. They weren't acquiring people.

They lost a fair amount of the people, but they achieve their financial goals. When you're in high tech, what you're really acquiring is engineers and market position. And if you don't keep those engineers and the sales teams etc, then it's going to be a bad financial outcome for you. Most acquisitions when the companies acquire their attrition rate after the golden handcuffs comes off. But those that don't have golden handcuffs over 20 percent a year, their people. So it's a bad outcome.

So we would only do an acquisition where we felt we could keep the people and we looked at it culturally. If there wasn't a macho culture, we walked. And most people don't even think about, is there a macho culture? If you haven't got a similar culture, you're not going to keep the employees of what you're acquiring is the employee's next generation product. It's going to be a bad financial result. So we walk from acquisitions that as we got into the evaluation process, we realized that their culture is different than ours.

They weren't customer focused. We are customer focused, a fanatical extent, you could argue. Is that right or wrong? But for us, it's who we were customers first, our family employees and we are a family. Second, we believed in sharing the success of the company with our employees a very broad range. We could keep that at the top, could have done it easily.

But we felt that if you share the success first, you're going to be much bigger and more effective company. And by the way, the senior execs will be taking care of the company successful. And so we dealt with that type of philosophy. And I tell every acquisition, I know you've got two ugly spots. We'll probably find them, but don't let us be surprised. So tell us where the problems are and we're going to acquire you anyhow. But don't let us find it ourselves.

So in situations where I found them ourselves, one on post Asian stock options and one where they let information out to the market that had either come from the investment bank or the company, even though both of those would have been good financial deals for us. We walked and that was a call from the top in terms of the approach. So it is about how you think through these analysis, how you walk that pattern of what works and does not work.

One that I missed one six hundred million dollar acquisition of a company called Flip. It was a super handheld camcorder that was so unique in the market. And I tried to enter the consumer market once before. Then I tried once after Flip failed all three. But with the flip, I already had the set top boxes in your house for the cable companies or the service providers bringing it in that we were working with the content companies on. How do you add value to that?

I felt. A video would be even more home generated in the future, and if you could use the camcorder to tie into set top boxes, the architecture is a logical move for us. And when we acquired the company for six hundred million, we ran our playbook, got off to a great start. People got the market fit. Then Steve Jobs held up a flip product on stage and said, this is it's an amazing, good product. I want to compliment Cisco on it and my team.

And I said, watch what comes next. You said, I'm going to give this to you for free. You put it on the iPhone for free. And he had me and I should have realized that the product differentiable was not the physical product. It was the software and architecture and the ability for a video in the cloud. And I should have moved earlier to go to all the major manufacturers of phone and say, we need you to put the capability into your phones.

That has be the cloud behind this and a small royalty. And maybe we would have outmaneuvered Apple in terms of the execution. So I got knocked down. Most people would say, well, your growth is still there. Why don't you fight the battle out? I played the chess game and I could not find a way to win. Apple is just too good. Once they closed on us for free, my business model would not work, so we closed it.

I took a six hundred million dollar write down on it in three months. And every time people hold out flaws about Cisco's acquisition strategy, they say, well, the example of failure is flip. And this is why some companies are not good at acquiring Cisco. Pretty was not on this one. And I go, wait a minute, I told you if we do this, world class two out of three acquisitions are going to work, which means one out of three, you're going to fail.

I've done 12 billion dollar plus acquisitions. All of them worked at least for the first three to five years afterwards. And after that, except their internal development for this. And you're beat me up on a six hundred million dollar acquisition. The two acquisitions we did this year, one for one point two billion, one for three point two billion, both worked out. It's two out of three. The best ones worked out. Tell me again what I did wrong.

And I realized at that time you're always going to be criticized more for your missteps or mistakes or the ones that didn't work out than you will. The successes. That's just part of leadership. Get used to it. That's never going to change. So those would be some of the lessons learned, good and bad, what you need to do and the trade offs, etc..

I love the idea of the emphasis on retention of the engineers post acquisition as the key differentiator and a good acquisition. That's a really interesting perspective.

But also understand that is in a issue where what you acquiring is the engineers and the products. That is not true when one bank acquires another bank or railroads merge or automotive companies merge. So your key is understanding what you're really acquiring and protecting it at all cost.

What did you learn about price and the type of deal stock that equity, the ability to deploy? You were kind of the eight hundred pound gorilla at the time, the ability to deploy Cisco's scale and size for effective acquisitions brand was hugely important.

Our customers bought into the concept of we build architectures where routing and switching and security and wireless in the cloud and servers work together on those architectures. Therefore, when we did an acquisition, we could say to our customers, your cell phones in our direction, they watched us do acquisitions or that works. So they weren't concerned about what this would work on it. And we positioned it on outcome at a time everybody else was selling products and direction. As basic as that sounds, that's what we did that our peers did not.

We had a much higher rate on acquisitions working, but we built them into architectures which most people couldn't even say the word. My engineers originally didn't like the concept. They wanted to build best in class products. I said, no, we want to be best in class architectures that we can add to and move with speed on. In terms of our branding and market power, we never used price as a competitive leverage. My view is that we were going for the best margins in the industry, that we want a good competition because we got good competitors.

They force you to change. We would not use our financial strengths to price in ways that others cannot not keep up. My competitors usually were ten to twenty percent less expensive than we were with good margins. So we competed on architectures, outcomes and benefits to customers. And in the team we had the best CFO in the industry was Larry Carter. We had the best sales leader in the industry. We had the best engineers, leaders in the industry.

We had the best business development team for seven generations of business development. The top person at Cisco was the top in the industry on M&A and business development. So we built a machine and a culture that loved to play together that we're culturally together. I would take the team up fishing with me to Alaska most of the time, but sometimes the Bahamas at my expense, integrity, and we'd build a culture of collaboration and caring. And you learn a lot about people when they're out in the middle of nowhere and come around the corner and there's ten.

Grizzly bear that that could destroy you and it wasn't used to seeing people and how they respond to it, and now you adjust, one of the people you mentioned was perhaps one of the more talented sales leaders you mentioned, Steve Jobs.

Everyone always thinks about product and obviously product is critical. What gets less attention, far less sexy, is distribution. But I think a lot of the story of Cisco is an incredible distribution story that you largely helped architect along with your team. Can you talk about the lessons you learned there about building a great channel and distribution and force?

One of my toughest competitors was a company called Juniper. It was one of the very few and I can say this now that we weren't able to knock out, we always competed like we'd like to be competed against and and we were tough competitors would never do something. Somebody else would have a problem if they did to us. Juniper had a really good product and so did Wellfleet. But what none of them had was a sales machine. We combine great products with a unbelievable, great sales machine and distribution and the Juniper leadership, several of them literally as recently as five or six years ago, said John.

We just never understood, as you did, the importance of great products, not just selling themselves, but the importance of a sales machine that brings value to customers and outcome based and the distribution that goes with it. So we delivered 80 percent of our product, even though we were a direct touch with our salespeople through our distribution channels and our distribution channels, was one of the secret sources that many people did not understand. It was one of the key secrets when while we came at us, they offered unbelievable financial incentives, some direct, probably some not as direct as that to the companies to switch over.

How many of them did we lose the while way? None. You treat people like you like to be treated yourself. You focus on how they win and achieve their objectives, and you're there for them, the good times and bad times. So that's the fabric that we bought our company on. We made mistakes along the way and as I said, sometimes far from perfect. But we enjoy competing and we try to compete with the rules that we'd like to be competed against the same way.

Can you tell me what you've learned from Shimon Perez? I was fascinated by some of the lessons you shared with me before about your relationship with him.

He was obviously known in Israel. Is canley them a lot of the real creative brains behind developing a very effective defense organization with a population of only about six or seven million could take on countries that had in total hundreds of millions of people. He then switched to peace and focused on how do you focus on peace and peace in the Middle East? And peace is the only way economically as well as the benefit of his citizens and others for this to occur.

And I literally would go with him into the country even during the toughest of times. We'd go into the streets of Upper Nazareth and Lower Nazareth and into the Christian communities, into the Jewish community, in their community. He would just be crushed by people wanting to see him.

But if somebody wanted to shot him, they clearly could and was right society that fearlessness and that trying to do the right thing and the love of the people, regardless of their religion, learned a lot. He was inclusive of everyone. He taught me to be more patient with people that perhaps I disagree with. He taught me leadership was lonely. I said, What do you mean it's lonely? I've got forty thousand people around me at this time. We're part of a team.

And he said, John, when things get really tough, you need to know you will be by yourself. Doesn't mean the people won't want to support you, but you will be by yourself. And boy, he was right when I made my tough decisions, real tough decisions. All the people supported me. If they hadn't where they would have changed me. And thousand one was the worst. I mean, you sit up on the roof of your house and you look at are you the right person to do this?

Your stomach churning, you know, you can lay off people. You're going to do this quicker than anybody else has ever done it. You're telling people ahead of time that this is one hundred year flood, which it may not be, but you believe that it is. You can get beat up for that. You're going to lay off what ended up being seven thousand people. You're going to announce it and implement it in fifty one days. It is lonely, really lonely.

That's just something leaders have to know. The fun thing is now get to teach these young CEO start ups about leadership. And I go, here are the four characteristics of the CEO in terms of vision and strategy for the company. Build, develop, recruit the right leadership team to implement their vision and strategy communication skills, which are extremely important, especially now in the role of social media and culture. And those are the only four jobs you have and I teach them.

How do you deal with crisis management here that will work you do to, in economic downturns, political challenges, a real problem with the media, etc.. And here's how you manage through that. And then I'll remind them that it will be lonely during this time period when you hit the tough times and that while your friends and. We want to help you, some people would turn on you, you never anticipated the media who could sing your praises one day we'll come right at you the next day, usually a different reporter, but the same publication will do it on it.

This is just part of leadership and you're about to enter and depending on the situation, a quarter or perhaps even year three, four or five quarters of really tough times. And I'm going to tell you, it's going to be hard on you and you will be very lonely and teach them how to do that. And then to add a little bit of humor, you remind them that I've seen this and I've done this. And I know you're going to go through a tough weekend based on what I just shared with you and planning for what's going to occur.

And I'm going to go have a bourbon and ginger and think about you and the point that I'm making and a little bit of humor. But it also is fun for me now, crisis management and having seen so many of them and some of them right. Some wrong is so helpful to others that reminding them like Shimon Peres did me leadership is so lonely. Other things like a teenager, always think out of a box. We had him over here how he wanted to come to Silicon Valley.

He was constantly benchmarking and he said, John, I want to come to your home. And this is at the time there was huge friction between Israel and Iran. And there were strong rumors, probably more than rumors, that there may be a defensive strike by Israel against Iran. And so he was a target. I shared with my wife that she had asked to do this. And she said, of course, we knew that probably do the best to protect him and us while he's here.

As it turned out, there are eight different security groups from Israel, the US local cyber cruise, people with rifles on the house, people in the woods. It looked like a scene from E.T. with lights and everything going on. And yet he when he came to the house that evening, he was meeting with a number of start ups, some voices and some friends of the biggest companies here in the valley. He was the most relaxed man around.

He immediately started to talk. And as he did so well, within five minutes, all of us had stop eating. We're trying to find a piece of paper and pencil to take notes. And he was teaching all of us about leadership, about dealing with problems. He was sitting in the safest seat in the dining room that would require the hardest shot for a sniper from way far off to hit him. He didn't even sweat. He always had a great sense of humor about calmness during the tough times.

And he said, John, I understand you got electric car. And I said, Yes, sir, I do a hybrid. He said, I want to go see it and maybe drive it. I said, Mr. President, your security team told me I could only have you in the dining room area here and only in the seat and only in the living room area. And that was to make sure you didn't leave this area. He left.

He said, John, I'm the president. Yes, sir. I look over at the security team and they were already scrambling. So we went down to the elevator. And as we get out there, he looks at this car and he really gets fascinated by it. And he said, John, I want to drive it. Let's go. All of a sudden, you see people scramble every which way. How do they get ahead of this?

And his chief of staff came over and she said, John, I don't know how to tell you this. He does not have a driver's license and he hasn't driven in over a decade. Pass it. This is really going to be interesting. So we got into the driver's seat. I got into the passenger seat. We're sitting there and he's asking questions. He's going through a race car and went outside with what's going to happen next. And they said, OK, I just want to get a feel for it.

Let's go back upstairs and finish the roundtable with your friends.

He had a element of making everybody feel comfortable around him. He taught you. He said, I'm ninety seven years old, but you've got to think and dream like you were a teenager again to really do innovation. And that's why so much of innovation come from the 20 year olds. They still are thinking like a teenager, but have the education to really take the risk and changes. But you said age is not your issue on innovation. It's thinking like a teenager, that is.

And it's an important category for all of us to have as we move forward.

I'd love to play off that with your relationship with the squadron of young founders that you now work with and spend a lot of your time with. You mentioned the four areas are the key responsibilities of any CEO. And I think the first you said was mission and vision, which I think if you think like a teenager, maybe you do a better job of that first one. What in those four dimensions do you find your role to be the most effective at helping younger entrepreneurs?

Originally, I thought the first two would be most important. How do you combine ambition and vision was sustainable differentiation in the market because that's how you get your financing, that's how you get the economic results, etc.. And when people write about great startups and great leaders of startups, they always write about mission innovation. The second element which the leaders either already understand or learn quickly. It's about having the leadership team that can implement that vision. And mission and work with you effectively and changing part of that leadership team as you grow, because it's almost never when you can take your top seven leaders from the start up all the way through.

And making those changes is hard to do, especially for people you love and you care about on the direction. So I thought that would be where I'd add the most value, teaching them how to scale organizational evolution, when to change people. How do you do acquisitions? Is your vision really tight? Is this sustainable? How does it compare to others compete on market transitions in that vision, not against competitors, et cetera? But actually the most important elements in that approach is the third and fourth point.

It is communications and it is culture, and especially during the tough times. What gets you through is how will you communicate to the press, to your employees, to your shareholders, to your customers, etc., and your culture. What a lot of people really never grasp the reason Cisco is so hard to beat. It was culture. I mean, we were one family. We took care of each other like family. We played together as a family.

If you didn't fit into that, we moved you outside the company. And mistakes were often that I let somebody who was not a cultural match stay in the company too long. Now I remind people of the start ups. The minute you get somebody who is not a cultural match, first, don't hire them. But secondly, if it if they're in the company, you've got to phase them out of it because the damage they do, the culture and communications is actually where I often add the most benefit to these young CEO's, even though at first most of them really are not interested as much in communications.

And if it is, communication is more how do I get people to invest in the company and then culture something often you get to spend time on? One of my best examples of that was the CEO of a company called ASEP in New York just recently came out of stealth mode, amazing artificial intelligence, customer experience company that understood business strategy remarkably well. Their average order was like ten million dollars when they were still in stealth, first time order, etc.

But culturally, we're not sure with Gustavo, their CEO is just brilliant and really good. He didn't seem interested in the culture. And I finally said, well, you'll learn that over time. And about the time I quit talking to him about it, he said, John, I've got a presentation business meeting this next week to my employee group. Would you mind reviewing it with you? And I said, of course. And it turned out when he did that with me, it wasn't a business review at all.

It was a culture review on who they are, how they were going to get there based upon review and everybody else. And he got it. He understood culture has to be owned by the CEO, not by human resources, owned by the CEO. Human Resources is the one that implements it for you. Don't kid about your culture. Don't put things on your culture that you really don't consider really important. Really important. If you are saying family first, then you treat people that way.

If you are seeing customers first, then you treat people that way. If it's just do the right thing, then you always make your decision on what's the right thing, regardless of the financial implication of it.

I believe that every year you take a small group up to Alaska to be outside together a group of the leaders you backed or other young leaders. What sorts of transformations happen on a trip like that?

They're magical. I did it originally purely as team building. What I didn't realize is how much each of us would learn from each other, how much that would cause the team to stay together long after other teams did not. Out of the group that I did this were at Cisco for twenty years. It was mainly Cisco plus a few outside friends that we did the trip with. And then over the last four years, it's with about ten experienced leaders who have seen the movies from different angles, from a supply chain angle, from a sales angle, from an engineering perspective, from a financial perspective, from a human resources cultural perspective, and combine it with twelve startups and then having them each go out and in a boat.

So with two people and you're with that person for either half day or full day, you go into remote locations, you really get to know each other well, except for you fly in on the pontoon plane and they come and pick you up. At the end of the day, you get to know each other real well in the evenings. We have to stuck on different leaders at different times to say, what was your day like? What was your takeaways?

What was your culture aspect that you learned as factors in their communications, dyspraxia, and then getting put on the spot? It's reminding them that you don't want to have more than one drink. Before I call on you, I want to make a misstep there, even though your team will still love you. If you do make missteps, it's building culture. Well, some of the lessons learned on how do you build great engineering organizations or great sales channel organizations.

And the mix is about 60 percent male, 40 percent female. But one of my favorite sessions is when I had a young CEO back out of bed drop in Atlanta and he was learning about diversity, but he was trying to understand more the importance of diversity and why diverse teams, how to execute teams that look alike and the importance of. Gender and that diversity, and not from a negative perspective, but he's just saying teach me and teach me how to do it dramatically better than others.

And so we'd had a full day of fishing and there were five of us there on it and we waiting for the boat to come and pick us up. And we were on the issue of inclusion. And how do lead people and how do you create an environment where you're going to be one of the most attractive places for females to work and part of the culture they want to be a part of? And what are the mistakes that you're going to make as a leader and part of the trade off?

And we're sitting in the water that's only about a foot deep and we're waiting for the plane to come up and talk with us. And I have three of the top women in the world in their industries ranging from pharmaceutical to supply chain, operational leadership, etc., through channels. And they're teaching him also. They would teach me a little bit as a reminder and the conversation was so good, I just got up and gradually walk quietly away from the group.

And I went back and I took a picture with B.J. with three of the top women executives in the world in their categories, sitting there completely engaged in the middle of Alaska, birds in the background. I don't know if there was a bear in the background or rule-based way or not. And we just finished fishing. We caught our limit. And that was the picture I valued the most. The three women with their backs to it, vey soaking it up and learning.

So is that ability to bring together teams and cultures and really make it happen and build relationships for life. So when these 12 CEOs go back, they can call up any one of the more senior people who have been through the movies before and said, how do you handle this? You know, this person here, what would you suggest, etc.? And it's also what any good sports teams understand. You are so much more powerful when you build your own company with a team that is completely united with diversity and differences of opinions.

But when you build an ecosystem like the channels around you, consultants around you that others do not have, that makes you near unbeatable. What's that worth? Financial return, almost priceless cultural return. Unbelievable. And when people talk about what I do, quote as ABC, I'm not a VC in the traditional sense of the word at all. I'm a strategic partner. The person that helps them grow in scale, I will provide them tough love won't always be right.

But I'll tell you what I think the trade offs are, and I'll form friendships for life and I will only back you as long as your culture and what you represent is in the areas that I believe that it should be. It doesn't mean my views are right, but I don't advise companies that have a different culture than I believe that I try to represent and I try to teach people how important it is.

John, you've made a career of pattern recognition, seeing transitions happen over and over again. You mentioned earlier this change that will disrupt the number of jobs available and sort of right now not keeping up with that pace to replace those jobs being lost to automation, et cetera. What are the other major transitions that you are watching in the world right now?

I think the biggest transitions is every company and every employee of every organization will be a digital company, a digital employee, regardless of age and a tech company. Doesn't matter if you're manufacturing government, defense, retail, technology companies understanding that is the core foundation and will completely transform. Secondly, the biggest transition is the speed of change. I alluded earlier to the speed of job destruction and automation that actually is accelerated through the downturn and the pandemic ways that people might not have thought would occur.

Other elements is 50 percent of the large companies exist today would not exist in a decade in a meaningful way. And understanding back to the point that we both talked about earlier, the importance of a lot more startups that scale, and yet how many government leaders, regardless of your politics, are focusing on startups as the key economic engine for their future, creating a regulatory environment that is very friendly to startups and very much conducive to the implications of that.

Use the US as an example, learning to work remotely. I think Silicon Valley has a wake up call coming. So does New York City and Seattle, where eighty one percent of the employees of the high tech companies are saying to think about should I either live somewhere else? I ought to think about being somewhere else, understanding them. When these transitions occur, they wait for no one. Just because you led in one generation or for one decade, there's no entitlement.

You must change.

John, I'm so sad to be at the end of our time together, but I'm forced to turn to my traditional closing question, which is to ask you for the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you, the kindest thing that's ever done to me when my parents, my dad taught me how to dream, make dreams come true and how to deal with. The toughness that life inevitably deals to you with the illness, etc., my mom taught me the emotional IQ side of the house, how she never, as a young person, never let me go to bed mad pass, very disturbed or others who absolutely deserved it, by the way, regularly about you don't go to sleep angry.

You learn how to forgive. So probably the kindest thing was how this balance balance balance to me and my two sisters and taught us the trade off in life that has been so unique to partially my success and also how I've been able to deal with the challenges.

Well, John, this has been so much fun. I'm going to have to listen a few times to be able to extract all the lessons you share with us through great stories. So appreciative of your time.

Thanks for doing this, Patrick. My pleasure. You are an amazing interviewer and several questions I've not heard before, which is unusual. There's a lot of hope. Your listeners enjoyed it. And I understand that if you agree with everything I said, I failed. I want to make you uncomfortable. I want you to to learn about leadership and mistakes made. And it's fine to disagree. I think that makes you stronger as a leader and as a nation by having healthy give and take on issues.

Well, thanks so much.

Again, this has been a real pleasure. Lots to learn. I really appreciate it. My pleasure.

This episode was brought to you by Microsoft for startups. Microsoft for Startups is a global program dedicated to helping enterprise ready B2B startups successfully scale their companies.

In this five part mini series, we talk to Greylock Partners Sammo Tamati and Microsoft for Startups Jeff Má about why companies should partner with Microsoft for startups. And this week's episode we talk with some Mohammedi, a partner at Greylock, about his initial investment in Microsoft for startups customer abnormal security.

So perhaps you could begin by just giving the audience a bit of a brief background on yourself, what sort of investing you do and how you came across abnormal security.

I'm one of the general partners here at Greylock. I focus on the enterprise side of our practice. Greylock is a fifty five year old venture firm that primarily invests in consumer and enterprise software and what we invest across all stages.

I personally really focus on being the first capital partner to entrepreneurs, whether that's at the seed or series a stage and focus on new companies being started in SAS, AML and data infrastructure and security. Abnormal is is a very interesting story for us at Greylock. I think one of the things that's unique about Greylock is we've over the years spent time and been fortunate to actually help initiate new companies from scratch in our offices like Workday and Palo Alto Networks. Historically and more recently, companies like Sumell logic awake security and abnormal security.

So it has a little bit of an unusual story. My partner and I first met Evan and Sanjay, the founders of Abnormal. There were known to us like Relock because they previously worked at a company called Telapak, which was also initiated at Greylock by my now partner, Josh McFarland. That company was building high scale machine learning systems for ADTECH use cases, and that company ultimately went on to be acquired by Twitter. And Evan and Sanjay left that company with the ambition to go start a new company that would take that expertise around building high scale, highly performant machine learning systems to solve an important problem for the enterprise.

And so what they did over a multi month period before the company was started, before a line of code had been written and before we invested was speak with something like one hundred enterprise CIOs and CIOs to do customer discovery and problem discovery. And that ultimately led them to landing on the idea from mobile security. The basic premise being email continues to be the dominant channel for business communication and therefore the integrity and security of email is of paramount importance for enterprises.

What's happened over the last five to seven years is attackers have gotten more sophisticated and the threat landscape around email has shifted from spam and phishing to much more targeted spear fishing and business email compromise attacks. And what evidence, Sanjay, realize was they could take some of the techniques that they had used a TellApart to solve these more advanced attacks and use machine learning systems to build baselines of what normal employee communication looks like and then catch anomalies and deviations from that and take that approach to build a new email security solution.

So we have the chance to sort of ride shotgun with them during that multi month discovery process. And at the end, they had a 1.0 product document. They had an initial set of customers who are ready to try the product once it was delivered and and they started the company and we were lucky to to partner with them.

What are some of the things that when you're investing before a line of code is written, I find that quite an interesting stage to back a company that's then going to be selling into very large businesses. What was it about the discovery process or the conversations with CIOs and others that made you confident enough that there would be buyers once the thing was built? What are the signals that you need to see? As an investor, to gain that confidence, I think when we invest before a line of code has been written, we spent a lot of time thinking about the market dynamics and whether those dynamics can support the start of a new company.

And so either if you're starting a new company from scratch, you're either we think of it in three buckets, you're replacing an existing incumbent, you're exploiting a new market that's just begun to emerge, or you're going to create a new market from scratch. So I remember when it and Sanjay started this, they had mocked up what a prototype could look like. And as you showed this to different Sisco's, a very large percentage of them resonated with, hey, this is an important problem around these advanced spear fishing and business email compromise attacks.

It's not served well by the existing security providers. And if a new solution came out that had the characteristics you're summarizing, we'd have high interest in trying something like that out. So what evidence and you were able to do was take some of the customers who got the most excited and convert them into early design partners? And those people essentially signed up with something that I argue is even more valuable than dollars early on, which is, hey, if you guys start this, it's so important to us that we will figure out some cadence to sync with you and help drive your product roadmap.

So you end up building something that not only suits our needs, but suits the needs of other customers like us, and then when that product is delivered, will purchase our product. And that's it's rare to get that depth of signal early on. And I think it speaks to the importance of a problem. And so when we saw the combination of that breadth and depth, that actually it made it very obvious that this was an important market opportunity. To find more episodes or sign up for our weekly summary, visit, Investor Field Guide dot com.

Thanks for listening to Founders Felgate.