 From Sand Hill Road in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, presenting the People First Network, insights from entrepreneurs and tech leaders. Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE, founder of SiliconANGLE Media. We are here at Sand Hill Road at Mayfield for the 50th anniversary celebration and content series called The People First Network. This is a co-developed program where we're going to bring thought leaders, inspirational entrepreneurs and tech executives to talk about their experience and their journey around a People First society. This is the focus of entrepreneurship these days. I'm here at Navin Chhada, who's the managing director of Mayfield. Navin, you were kicking off the program. Tell us why the program, why People First Network, is this a cultural thing? Is this part of a program? What's the rationale? What's the message? Yeah, first of all, I want to thank John, you and your team and theCUBE for co-hosting the People First Network with us. It's been a real delight working with you. Shifting to People First, Mayfield has had a long standing philosophy that people build companies and it's not the other way around. We believe in betting on great people because even if their initial idea doesn't pan out, they'll quickly pivot to find the right market opportunity. Similarly, we believe when the times get tough, it's our responsibility to stand behind people. And the purpose of this People First Network is, people like me were extremely lucky to have mentors along the way when I was an entrepreneur and now as a venture capitalist who are helping me achieve my dreams and Mayfield and me want to give back to other entrepreneurs by bringing in people who are luminaries in their own fields to share their learnings with other entrepreneurs. This is a really great opportunity and I want to thank you guys for helping us put this together with you guys. It's a great co-creation. The observation that we're seeing in Silicon Valley and certainly in talking to some of the guests we've already interviewed and they'll be coming up on the program is the spirit of community and the culture of innovation is around the ecosystem of Silicon Valley. This has been the bedrock of Silicon Valley, Mayfield, one of the earliest, if not the first handful of venture firms hanging around Stanford, doing entrepreneurship. This is a people culture in Silicon Valley and this is now going global. So great opportunity. What can we expect to see from some of the interviews? What are you looking for and what's the hope? Yeah, so I think what you're going to see from the interviews is we are trying to bring around 20 plus people and there'll be many Johns on the interview besides you. So there'll be John Chambers, ex-chairman and CEO of Cisco. There'll be John Zimmer, president and co-founder of Lyft and they also will be John Hennessy who will be our first interview with him from Stanford University and jokes apart, there'll be like 20 plus other people who will be part of this network. So I think what you're going to see is goings always don't go great. There's a lot of learnings that happen when things don't work out and our hope is when these luminaries from their professions share their learnings, the entrepreneurs will benefit from it. As we all know, being an entrepreneur is hard but sometimes and many times actually it's also a lonely road and our belief is and I strongly personally also believe in it that great entrepreneurs believe in continuous learning and are continuously adapting themselves to succeed. So our hope is this people first network serves as a learning opportunity from entrepreneurs to learn from great leaders. You said a few things I really admire about Mayfield and I want to get your reaction so I think this is fundamental for society. Building durable companies is about the long game and because people fail and people succeed but they always move on. They move on to another opportunity. They move on to another pursuit and this pay it forward culture has been a key thing for Silicon Valley. It absolutely has been. What's the inspiration behind it from your perspective? You mentioned your experiences. Tell us a story and an experience you've had. Yeah, so I would say, first of all right since we strongly believe people make products and products don't make people we believe venture capital and entrepreneurship is about like running a marathon. It's not a sprint. So if you take a long term view have a strong vision and mission which is supported with great beliefs and values you can do wonders and our whole aim not only as Mayfield but other venture capitalists is to build iconic companies which are built to last, which beyond creating jobs and economic wealth can give back to the society and make the world a better place to work, live and play. You know one of the things that we are passionate about at theCUBE and on SiliconANGLE Media is standing by our community because people do move around and I think one of the things that is key in venture capital now than ever before is not looking for the quick hit. It's standing by your companies in good times and in bad because this is about people and you don't know how things might turn out, how a company might end up in a different place. We've heard some of your entrepreneurs talk about that that the outcome was not how they envisioned it when they started. This is a key mindset for innovation. It absolutely is right. Like let's look at a few examples. One of our most successful companies is Left. When we backed it at series A it was called ZimRight. They weren't doing what they were doing but the company had a strong vision and mission of changing the way people transport and given that they were A plus people as I mentioned earlier, that initial idea wasn't going to be a massive opportunity. They quickly pivoted to go after the right market opportunity and hence again and again like to me it's all about the people. Navigating those boards is sometimes challenging and we hope that this content will help people, inspire people, help them discover their passion, discover people that they might want to work with. Really appreciate your support and thank you for contributing your network and your brand and your team in supporting our mission. It's been an absolute pleasure and we hope the viewers and especially entrepreneurs can learn from the journeys of many iconic people who have built great things in their careers. We're here at San Jose Hill Road, Mayfield's venture capital headquarters in Sunning and Silicon Valley, California. Stanford, California, Palo Alto, California. All one big melting pot of innovation. We're John Hennessey who's the Stanford president emeritus. Also the director of the Knight Hennessey Scholarship. Thanks for joining me today for this conversation. Delighted to be here John. So I want to get your thoughts on the history of the Valley. Obviously Mayfield celebrating their 50th anniversary and Mayfield was one of those early venture capital firms that kind of hung around the barber shop looking for a haircut. Stanford University was that place. Early on this was the innovation spark that created the Valley. A lot of other early VCs as well, but not that many in the early days. And now 50 years later, so much has changed. What's your thoughts on the arc of entrepreneurship around Stanford, around Silicon Valley? Well, you're right. It's been an explosive force. I mean, I think there were a few companies out here on San Hill Road at that time. Not nearly the number of venture firms there are today. But I think the biggest change has been the kinds of technologies we build. You know, in those days we build technologies that were primarily for other engineers or perhaps they were tandem computers being built for business interests. Now we build technologies that change people's lives every single day. And the impact on the world is so much larger than it was. And these companies have grown incredibly fast. I mean, you look at the growth rate. We had the stars of the earlier compared to the Googles and Facebooks of today. It's small growth rates. So those are big changes. I'm excited to talk with you because you're one of the only people that I can think of that has seen so many different waves of innovation. You've been involved in many of them yourselves, the founder of MIPS, one co-founders of MIPS and the chairman of the board of Alphabet, which is Google, Google's holding company, the large holdings they have. And just Stanford in general has been, you know, now with Cal, kind of the catalyst for a lot of the change. And what's interesting is, you know, the Yulet Packards, the birthplace of Silicon Valley, that durable company view of how to build a company and the people that are involved. It's really still a central part of it, certainly happening faster, differently. When you look at the waves of innovation, is there anything that you could look at and say, hey, this is the consistent pattern that we see emerging of these waves? Is it a classic formula of engineers getting together, trying to solve problems? Is it the Stanford dropout PhD program? Is there a playbook? Is there a pattern that you see in entrepreneurship over the years? You know, I think there are these waves that are often induced by big technology changes, right? The beginning of the personal computer, the beginning of the internet, the worldwide web, social media, the other observation is that it's very hard to predict what the next one will be. If it was easier to predict, there would be one big company rather than lots of companies riding each one of these waves. The other thing I think that's fascinating about them is these waves don't create just one company. They create a whole new microcosm of companies around that technology, which exploited and bring it to the people and change people's logic. And the other thing that is interesting about that point is that even the failures have DNA. So you see people, a big venture-back company, I think Go is a great example. You think about those kinds of companies, the early work on mobile computing, early work on processors that you were involved in MIPS, they become successful and or may or may not have the outcomes, but the people move on to other companies to either start companies. This is a nice flywheel. This is one of the things that Silicon Valley has enjoyed over the years. Yeah, and just look at the history of risk technology that I was involved in. We initially thought it would take over the general-purpose computing industry. And I think Intel responded in an incredible way and eventually reduced the advantage. Now here we are 30 years later and 95, 98% of the processors in the world are risk because of the rise of mobile, Internet of Things, dramatically changing where the processors were. They're not on the desktop anymore. They're scattered around in very different ways. It's interesting, I was having a conversation with Andy Kessler. He used to be an analyst back at the time for Morgan Stanley, then became an investor. And he was talking about with me the DRAM days when the Japanese were dumping DRAMs. And then that was low-margin business. And then Intel said, hey, no problem. We'll let go of the DRAM business when they created Pentium and then the microprocessor, right? That spawned a whole other wave. So you see the global economy today. You see China, you see people manufacturing, things at very low cost. Apple does work out there. What's your view and reaction to the global landscape? Because certainly things are changed a bit, but it seems to be some of the same. What's your thoughts on the global landscape and the impact of entrepreneurs? It certainly is global. I mean, I think in two ways. First of all, supply chains have become completely global. Look at how many companies in the valley rely on TSMC as their primary source is silicon. It's a giant engine for the valley. But we also see increasingly, even in young companies, a kind of global distributed engineering scheme where they'll have a group in Taiwan or in China or in India that'll be doing part of the engineering work. And they're basically outsourcing some of that and balancing their costs and bringing in other talent that might be very hard to hire right now in the valley or very expensive in the valley. And I think that's exciting to see. The future Silicon Valley is interesting because you have a lot of the fast pace. It seems like ventures have shrink down in terms of the acceleration of the classic building block of how to get a company started. You get some funding. Engineers build a product. They get a prototype. They get it out. Now it seems to be condensed. You see valuations of about a billion dollars. Can Silicon Valley survive the current pace given the real estate prices and some of the transportation challenges? What's your view on the future of Silicon Valley? Well, my view is there is no place like the valley. The interaction between great universities, Stanford and Cal, UCSF, if you're interested in biomedical innovation and the companies makes it just a microcosm of innovation and excellence. It's challenge is if it doesn't solve its problems on housing and transportation, it will eventually cause a second Silicon Valley to rise and challenge it. And I think that's really up to us to solve. And I think we're going to have to, the great leaders, the great companies in the valley are going to have to take a leadership role working with the local governments to solve that problem. On the Silicon Valley vision of replicating it, I've seen many people try other regions, try over the years and over the past 20 years. My observation is they kind of get it right on paper but kind of fail in the execution. It's complicated, but it's nuanced in a lot of ways. But now we're seeing with remote working and the future of work changing a little bit differently and all kinds of new signals from blockchain to you name it remote work. That it might be a perfect storm now to actually have a formula left to replicate Silicon Valley. If you were advising folks to say, hey, if you want to replicate Silicon Valley, what would be your advice to people? Well, you got to start with the weather. Always a challenge to replicate that. But then the other pieces, right? Some great universities, an ecosystem that supports risk-taking and smart failure. One of the great things about the Valley is you're a young engineer, computer scientist graduating. You come here. So you go to startup companies, sort of fails. There's 10 other companies you can get a job with. So there's a sense of this is a really exciting place to be, that kind of innovation. Creating that, replicating that ecosystem, I think, and getting all the pieces together is going to be the challenge. And I think the area that does that will have a chance at building something that could eventually be a real contestant for the second Silicon Valley. I think the ecosystem and community is the key word. And community, absolutely. So I'll get your thoughts on your journey. So take us through your journey. MIPS co-founder, life at Stanford. Now with the Knights Scholarship program that you're involved in, the Knight Hennessey Scholarship, what lessons have you learned from each kind of big sequence of your life? I'll see it in the startup days. Take us through some of the learnings, whether it's the scar tissue or success. Well, no, the time I spent starting MIPS, and I took a leave for about 18 months full-time from the university, but I stayed involved after that on a part-time basis. But that 18 months was an intensive learning experience because I was an engineer. I knew a lot about the technology we're building. I didn't know anything about starting a company. And I had to go through all kinds of things, determining who to hire for CEO, whether or not the CEO would be able to scale with the company. We had to do a layoff when we almost ran out of cash. And that was a grueling experience, but I learned how to get through that. And that was a lesson when I came back to start a return to the university to really use those lessons from the Valley. They were invaluable. I also became a much better teacher because here I had actually built something in industry and after all, most of our students are going to build things. They're not going to become future academics. So I went back and re-engaged with the university and started taking on a variety of leadership roles there, which was a wonderful experience. I never thought I'd be university president, not in a million years, what I've told you that was. And it wasn't my goal. It was sort of the proverbial frog in the pot of water and the temperature keeps going up and then you're cooking before you know it. Well, one of the things you did I thought was interesting during your time in the 90s as the head of the computer science department is a lot of that Stanford innovation started to come out with the internet. And you had Yahoo, you had Google, you had PhDs and you guys were okay with people dropping out, coming back in, you had this culture of building. Tell us some of the stories there. I mean, Yahoo was a server under the desk and the web exploded. It was a server under the desk. In fact, Dave and Jerry's office was in a trailer and you go into their room and they'd have pizza boxes and Coke cans stacked around because Yahoo use was exploding and they were trying to build this portal out to serve this growing community of users. And their machine was called Aki Bono because they were both big sumo wrestling fans. And then eventually the university had to say you guys need to move this off campus because it's generating three quarters of the internet traffic of the university and we can't afford it. So they moved off campus and of course figured out how to use advertising as a modernization model. And that changed a lot of things on the internet because that made it possible for Google to come along years later, redo search in a way that lots of us thought there's nothing left to do in search. There's just not a lot there. But Larry and Sergey came up with a much better search algorithm. Talk about the culture that you guys fostered there because this is I think is notable in my mind as well as some of the things I want to get into about the interdisciplinary. But at that time you guys fostered a culture of creating and taking things out and there was an investment group of folks around Stanford. Was it a policy? Was it more laid back? I mean, take us through some of the cultural issues. It was a notion of what really matters in the world. How do you get impact? Because in the end, that's what the university really wants to do. Some people will do impact by publishing a paper or a book, but some technologies, the real impact will occur when you take it out into the real world. And that was a vision that a lot of us had dating back to Yulet Packard of course, but Jim Clark at Silicon Graphics, the Cisco work, MIPS, and then of course Yahoo and Google years later. So that was something that was supported by both the leadership of the university. And that made it much easier for people to go out and take their work and take it out to the world. Well, thank you for doing that because I think the impact has been amazing and it's transcended a lot of society. Today you've seen some challenges now with society. So now we have our own problems now. So the impact has been massive, but now lives are being changed. You're seeing technology better lives. This is changing the educational systems, also changing how people are doing work. Talk about your current role right now with the Knight-Hennessy Scholarship. What is that structured like and how are you shaping that? What's the vision? Well, our vision, I became concerned as I was getting ready to leave the president's office that we as a human society were failing to develop the kinds of leaders that we needed. And it seemed to me it was true in government. It was true in the corporate world. It was even true in some parts of the nonprofit world. And we needed to step back and say, how do we generate a new community of young leaders who are going to go out, determined to do the right thing, who see their role as service to society and they are success aligned with the success of others. So we put together a small program. We put together a vision of this. I got support from the trustees. I went to ask my good friend Phil Knight to talk to him about it. And I said, Phil, I have this great idea. I explained it to him. He said, that's terrific. So I said, Phil, I need $400 million. So a month later he said, yes. And we were off and running. Now we've got 50 truly extraordinary scholars from around the world, 21 different birth countries. Really some of them have already started nonprofits that are making a big difference in their home communities. Others will do it in the future. And what are some of the things they're working on? How did you guys roll this out? Because obviously getting the funding is key, but now you got to execute. What are some of the things that you went through? How did you recruit? How did you deploy? How did you get it up and running? So we recruited by going out to universities around the world and meeting with them and of course using social media as well. If you want to get 21 year and 22 year olds to apply, go to social media. So that gave us a feed on some students. And then we thought a lot. Our goal is to educate people who'll be leaders in all walks of life. So we have MBAs. We have MDs. We have PhDs. We have JDs. So broadly, a broad cohort of people build a community, build a community that will last far beyond their time at Stanford. So they have a connection to a community of like-minded individuals long after they graduate. And then try to build their leadership skills, bring in people who they can meet with and hear from. George Schultz is coming in on Thursday night to talk about his journey through government service in four different cabinet positions and how did he address some of the challenges that he encountered. Build up their speaking skills and their ability to collaborate with others. And hopefully these are great people. We just hope to push their trajectory a little higher. One thing I want to ask you is that when Steve Jobs gave his commencement speech at Stanford, which is up on YouTube, he's got zillions, zillions of views before he passed away, that has become kind of a famous call to arms for a lot of young people. A lot of parents, I have four kids and the question always comes up, how do I get into Stanford? But the question I want to ask you is more of as you have the program and you look for these future leaders, what advice would you give? Because we're seeing a lot of people saying, hey, you know, people build their resume. They say what they think people want to hear to get into a school. You know, Steve Jobs points and follow your passion. Don't live other people's dogma. These are some of the themes that he shared during that famous commencement speech in Stanford. Your advice for the next generation leaders, how should they develop their skills? What are some of the things that they can acquire? Steve Jobs was famous to say in interviews, what have you built? Tell me something that you've built. It's kind of a qualifying question. So this brings up the question of how should young people develop? How should they think about not just applying and getting in, but being a candidate for some of these programs? Well, I think the first thing is you really want to challenge yourself. You really want to engage your intellectual passions. Find something you really like to do. Find something that you're also good at. Because that's the thing that'll get you out of bed on weekends early and you'll go do it. I mean, if you asked me about my career and asked me about my number one hobby for most of my career, it was my career. I loved being a professor. I loved research. I loved teaching. That made it very easy to do it with energy and excitement and passion. You know, there's a great quote in Steve Jobs' commencement speech where he says, I look in the mirror every morning and if too many days in a row I find out I don't like what I'm going to do that day, it's time for a change. Well, I think it's that commitment to something. It's that belief in something that's bigger than yourself. That's about a journey that you're going to go on with others in that leadership role. I want to get your thoughts on the future for young people and society and business. It's very people-centric. Now you're seeing a lot of the younger generation look for mission-driven ventures. They want to make a difference. But there's a lot of skills out there that are not yet born yet. There's jobs that haven't been invented yet who handle autonomous vehicles. What's the policy? These are societal technology questions. What are some of the things that you see that are important to focus on for some of these new skills? There's a million new cybersecurity jobs open. For instance, I think there's thousands and thousands of openings for people that don't have those skills. Well, I think we're going to need two different types of people. The traditional techno experts that we've always had but we're also going to need people that have a deep understanding of technology but are deeply committed to understanding its impact on people. One of the problems we're going to have with the rise of artificial intelligence is we're going to have job displacements. In the long term, I'm a believer that the number of opportunities created will exceed those that get destroyed. But there'll be a lot of jobs that are de-skilled or actually eliminated. How are we going to help educate that cohort of people and minimize the disruption of this technology because that disruption is really people's lives that you're playing with? It's interesting, the old expression of ATMs will kill the bank branch but yet now there's more bank branches than ever before. I think you're right on that. I think there'll be new opportunities. Entrepreneurship certainly has changed and I want to get your thoughts and this is the number one question I get from young entrepreneurs is how should I raise money? How should I leverage my investors and my board as you build your early foundational successes whether you're an engineer or a team? Putting that E team together. The entrepreneurial team is critical and that's just not people around the table of the venture. Corrects the support service providers and advisors and board of directors. How should they leverage their investors and board? How should they leverage that resource and not make it contentious, make it positive? Make it positive, right? So the best boards are collaborative with the management team. They work together to try to move the company forward. With so many angels now investing in these young companies there's an opportunity to bring in experience from somebody who's already had a successful entrepreneurial venture and looking for really deciding who do you want your investor to be? And it's not just about who gives you the highest valuation. It's also about who'll be there when things get tough when the cash squeeze occurs and you're about to run out of money and you're really in a difficult situation. Who'll help you build out the rest of your management team? Lots of young entrepreneurs they're excited about their technology. They don't have any management experience. They need help. They need help building that team and finding the right people for the company to be successful. I want to get your thoughts on Mayfield, the 50th anniversary. Obviously they've been around longer than me. I'm going to be 53 this year. I remember when I first pitched Yogan de Gaulle in 1990. He said my first venture, he passed. But Mayfield's been around for a while. I mean, Mayfield was the name of the town around here. And it has a lot of history. How do you see the relationship with the ventures and Stanford evolving? Are they still solid? They're doing well. Has it evolved? There's a new programs going on. I see much more integration. What's the future of venture? Well, I think that the university is still a source of many ideas. Obviously the notion of entrepreneurship has spread much more broadly than the university. And lots of creative startups are spun out of existing companies or a group of young entrepreneurs that were in Google or Facebook early and now decide they want to go do their own thing. And that certainly happens. But I think that ongoing innovation cycle is still alive. It's still dependent on the venture community and their experience having built companies, particularly when you're talking about new, first-time entrepreneurs who really don't have a lot of depth. My final question I want to ask you is obviously one related to my pure to my heart is computer science. I got my degree in the 80s during the systems revolution. Fun time, lots changed. Women in computer science, the surface area of what computer science is. It was interesting. There was a story in Bloomberg that was debunked but people were debating that the super micros being hacked by a chip right in the system. And most people don't even know what computer architecture. I was like, hey, no, that's a, the drivers might be able to inject malware. So you need computer architecture, a book you've written on academically to programming. So the range of computer science has changed. The diversity has changed. What's your thoughts on the current computer science curriculums, the global programs? Where's it going and what's your perspective on that? So I think computer science has changed dramatically. When I was a graduate student, you could arguably take a full set of breath courses across the discipline. Maybe only one course in AI or one course in database if you were a hardware or systems person, but you could do everything. I could go to basically any PhD defense and understand what was going on. No more, the field has just exploded and the impact. I mean, you have people who do biocomputation, for example, and you have to understand a lot of biology in order to understand how computer science applies to that. So that's the excitement. The excitement of having computer science had this broad impact. The other thing that's exciting is to see more women, more people of color coming into the field, really injecting new energy and new perspective into the field. And I think that that will stand the discipline well in the future. And open source has been growing. I mean, if you think about what it's like now to write software, all this goodness coming in with open source is just over the top, more goodness. I think today, even a young undergraduate writing in Python, using all these open libraries could write more code in two weeks than I could have written in a year when I was a graduate student. If we were 21 together sitting here, you and I, when we're today, we're 21 years old, what would we do? What would you do? Well, I think the opportunity created by the rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence is just unrivaled. This is a technology which we have invested in for 50 or 60 years that was disappointing us for 50 or 60 years in terms of not meeting its projections and then all of a sudden turning point. It was a radical breakthrough. And we're still at the very beginning of that radical breakthrough. So I think it's going to be a really exciting time. Diane Greene had a great quote at her last Google Cloud conference. It's like, butter you. Everything's great with it. AI is the future. Yeah, it's great with it. And of course, it can be overstated, but I think there really is a fundamental breakthrough in terms of how we use the technology. Driven, of course, by the amount of data available for training these neural networks and far more computational resources than we ever thought we'd have. John, it's been a great pleasure. Thanks for spending the time with us here for our People First interview. Appreciate it. It's been a pleasure, John. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We are here in Sand Hill Road for the People First program. Thanks for watching.