Guess who this guy is? Hint: the photo was taken 24 years ago. Answer after the jump.
I’m not one to butter up multimillionaires, but this story about the history of Sun and cofounder Vinod Khosla is notable for breaking stereotype. Rather than being the technical brains behind the startup, Khosla was the hard-charging dealmaker cajoling his future cofounders to join the company.
Khosla said the McDonald’s meal took place just after he and McNealy met with venture capitalists and got Sun’s first funding commitment. “We went out and sat in the parking lot. Scott said to me, ‘I don’t know if I really want to do it.’ So I took him to an upscale dinner at McDonald’s on Page Mill Road” in Palo Alto, Calif., he said, where he put the screws on McNealy to resign from his $40,000-a-year job at Onyx Systems.
“Vinod asked me, ‘When are you quitting?’” McNealy recounted. When McNealy balked, Khosla countered, saying: “‘You can’t back out on me now. You’re a founder.’ “I said, ‘Oh, OK.’ It was that quick,” McNealy said…
Khosla had to convince Bechtolsheim that he was more interested in the computer engineer than the software he was licensing from him. However, Bechtolsheim was reluctant because his licensing business brought in $500,000 a year and Bechtolsheim had a year to go before finishing his doctorate, Khosla and Bechtolsheim said.
Convincing Joy wasn’t easy either. McNealy said he and others piled into a rattletrap of a car to visit the Unix wizard across the San Francisco Bay in Berkeley, Calif., but they got the cold shoulder. Later, he asked Joy, “Why didn’t you talk to us?” and was told, “I was waiting for top management to show up,” McNealy said. [Link]
The respected technologist in this case wasn’t the desi guy:
Customer: “Is Bill (Joy) onboard?”
McNealy: “Yeah.”
Customer: “I want two of whatever you got. What are you selling?” [Link]
Khosla was legendary for his sales aggressiveness in the early days of Sun:
Sun bid with its new Sun-2 workstations, which were lauded by Computervision’s engineers, but Apollo landed the contract. Khosla got the bad news in a phone call from a Computervision purchasing agent. In a move that has achieved legendary status among Sun old-timers, Khosla and McNealy grabbed a red-eye flight from San Francisco to Boston and showed up uninvited at Computervision…The two young Sun cofounders “planted themselves in the plush lobby of Computervision’s headquarters. From there they called everyone they knew inside Computervision, asking for another chance, demanding an opportunity to revise their bid.” It was a classic example of the win-at-all-costs West Coast approach versus the more polished, mannerly East Coast mentality. Apollo and Computervision figured they had a deal; Computervision staff members tried to shoo Khosla and McNealy out of the lobby. Nothing doing. Finally, a Computervision vice president cut a deal with Khosla and McNealy: Get out of the lobby and Computervision President James Barret will call you at the local sales office.
According to Sunburst: “When the call came, Khosla knew it was his last opportunity to sell Sun. So he sold hard. Winning Computervision … would prove to industry watchers that Sun was real …” Sun virtually gave the machines away at cost…
“I remember being in Apollo meetings where people would laugh at Sun and say, ‘It’s a bunch of kids at Stanford,’ ” he recalls. After Computervision, “they changed their tune.” He adds, “Basically, Sun sold its soul to get the deal. But we didn’t laugh at Sun anymore…” Apollo’s traditional management team was unprepared for Sun’s aggressive, unruly approach, and didn’t know how to react when Sun snatched the deal away. Apollo’s executives could only fume that their rival hadn’t played fair. [Link]
