Yesterday I spent 17 hours on-the-job... A 4am alarm to catch a 6am flight out of Orlando to *Virginia* for a customer meeting. I pull back into the driveway just before 9pm. Whew. I'm in the bathroom getting cleaned up, the kids are asking questions (eg: "did you get me anything?", "was it snowing?"). The *dog* is jumping. And my cell phone rings.

My cell reception isn't the best from home. Some guy is asking me questions about *Oracle* performance characteristics across our various *server* offerings w.r.t. competitive systems. Given the cell quality and the context in which I took the call, I didn't catch his name. But these are technical questions with possibly sensitive details, so I challenge the guy: "Who do you work for?". It was a 510 area code and he said Sun Microsystems, so we continue the conversation. A few minutes later the conversations gets a little more into the details, so I challenge him again: "What did you say your name is?".

It's Andy Bechtolsheim!  http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/bios/bios_bechtolsheim.html

Just Employee #1 and Founder of Sun Microsystems. He probably made the "hiring" decision to bring Scott McNealy on board (employee #3).

Sun Microsystems was founded in 1982 by Andreas Bechtolsheim, an electrical engineering PhD student in the Computer Systems Laboratory (CSL), Scott McNealy and Vinod Khosla, roommates at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, and Bill Joy, a PhD student in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.

And I'm asking him who he works for! I wouldn't have blamed him if he then asked me who I *used* to work for :-) Anyway, he's a great guy to have fighting on our side. The systems and designs and ideas he brought back to Sun with him are going to shake up the industry.

January 14, 2005 09:40 AM EST Permalink