 From Sand Hill Road in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE covering People First Network, brought to you by Mayfield. Hello, I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto for Exclusive Conversation, CUBE Conversation, part of the People First Network with theCUBE and Mayfield Fund. I'm here with John Chambers at his house in Palo Alto. John Chambers is the former CEO Chairman of Cisco Systems, now running J2C. JC2 Ventures, great to see you. Thanks for spending the time. It's a pleasure to be together again. I'm here for two reasons. One, I'm going to have a conversation about People First and technology ways. But also, I want to talk about your new book, which is exciting, called Connecting the Dots. And it's not your standard business book where, hey, rah, rah, it's like a medium post these days on the internet. It's a personal stories weaved in with the lessons you've learned through the interactions that you've had with many people over the years. So it's an exciting book, and I'm looking forward to talking about that. Thank you. Again, John Chambers, legend, Cisco in 1991 when you joined the company from Wang before that. 400 employees, one product, 70 million in revenue. And when you retired in 2015, not so much retired because you got some- Oh, no, my next chapter. You got your next chapter. 180 acquisitions, 47 billion in revenue. You made 10,000 people millionaires. You created a lot of value. Probably one of the biggest inflection points in computer history, the evolution of internet working and tying systems together. It was probably one of the biggest waves. Someone before the wave we're on now. So an amazing journey. Now you're running JC2 Ventures, investing in game changing startups. So you're not retired. No, I was on to my next chapter. I made my decision almost 10 years before I left Cisco first to make for a very smooth transition because it's my family and out of the 75,000 people I hired, a whole but 23 of them. And in terms of what I wanted to do next, I really want to both give back, create more jobs, get our startup engine going to get into this country and it's currently broken. And I want to do that on a global basis in places like France and India as well. So I'm on to my next chapter but the fun part in this chapter is only do the things that I love. And you got a great team behind you but also you have a great personal network. And I want to get into that, your personal story as well as your social network and in business and the community. But one of the things I want to get up front because I think this is important for this conversation is you've been very strong. I've seen you present many times over the years going way back into the 90s. You're eloquent, you're people-oriented but you have a knack for finding the waves, seeing transitions. You've been through many waves. Yes, I have. Good and bad. But one of the big ones. How do you spot those transitions? And what wave are we in now? I mean, talk about the wave that's happening now. It's unprecedented at many levels but different but it's still a wave. It is and I call them market transitions and often combined with either economic changes or business model changes with technology. And part of the reason that I've been fortunate to be able to identify many of them is I listen to customers very carefully but also you're often a product of your prior experiences. Having experienced West Virginia, one of the top states in the US in terms of the chemical industry during the 40s and 50s and 60s when I was growing up there and literally more millionaires in West Virginia that were in the entire Great Britain. We were on top of the world in the chemical industry and the coal industry and yet because we missed transitions and we should have seen them coming, the state fell a long ways. Now we're trying to correct that with some of the startup activity we'll talk about later. As you see this and then I went to Boston 128, we were talking earlier, Wang Laboratories, the mini computer air but I was in IBM first out of the central part of the nation. So I watched IBM and mainframes and then I watched them miss on going to the mini computer and then miss in terms of the internet. So I was able to see the transitions that occurred in Boston Route 128 where we were the Silicon Valley of the world and we knew it. And this unusual area out in California called Silicon Valley we paid almost no attention to and we didn't realize we failed to make a transition from the mini computer air to the PC and the internet air. Then I joined Cisco and saw the internet air. So part of it is you're a product of your experiences and know the tremendous pain that occurs because Boston 128 is nowhere near what it used to be. So there's no entitlement to this new world out of the thousand high tech companies that are associated with up there including four or five giants and mini computers. None of them really are in existence today. So it shows you if you don't identify the transitions, number one, you don't have an opportunity to benefit from but number two, you sure have an opportunity to get hurt by them. And these ways also create a lot of wealth and value not just personal wealth but community wealth. And Cisco in particular had a good thing going for them. TCP IP was a defect, not even a standard it was a de facto standard. At that time IBM and these companies like Digital Equipment Corporation dominated the network protocol. Even today people are still trying to take out Cisco competitively and they can't because they connected the world. Now the world's connected with digital. It's connected with mobile. So we're kind of seeing this connected wave globally. How do you think about that? Now that you've seen the movie at the plumbing level Cisco, you've now been traveling the world but we're all connected. We are and it's important to understand that I'm completely arm's length with Cisco. It's their company to run now and I'm excited about their future. But I'm focused on the next chapter of my life and while I think about the people at Cisco every day I'm into the startup world now. So how do I think about it now? I think most of the innovation over the next decade will come from startups. The majority of the top engineering students for example at a Stanford or an MIT or Polytechnique in France which is the top engineering school I think in Europe or at the IITs in India they are all thinking about going to startups which means this is where innovation's gonna come from. And as you think about a digital world going from the time you and I we almost recruited you to Cisco and then we finally did. There's only a thousand devices connected to the internet when Cisco was founded. Today there are about 20 billion devices connected to the internet. In the future it's gonna be 500 billion in a decade. And so this concept of digitization combined with artificial intelligence all of a sudden we'll get the right information at the right time to the right person or machine to make the right decision. Sounds complex and it is. And its ability to do that I think startups are well positioned to play a key role in especially innovation. So while the first stage of the internet and before that we're all dominated by the very large companies I think you're gonna see this next phase of digitization you're gonna see a number of startups re-emerge in terms of the innovation leaders. That's what I'm trying to do with my 16 investments I've made but also coaching probably another 50 startups around the world on a regular basis. And the impact of outside Silicon Valley globally how do you see that ecosystem developing with the entrepreneurship models that are now globally connected in with these connection points like Silicon Valley. And it will partially in parallel partially it's a new phenomena. I saw the movie of Boston 128 as I said earlier and on top of the world and then there is no entitlement. The same things to a Cisco, I'm sorry of Silicon Valley today there's no entitlement for the future and just because we've led up to this point in time doesn't mean we will in 10 years. So you can't take anything for granted. What you are seeing since almost all job creation will be from startups and small companies getting bigger the large companies in total will probably not add any headcount over this next decade because of artificial intelligence and digitization. And so you're now gonna see job growth come from the smaller companies. If these small companies don't get informed at all 50 states, if they don't have a chance to grow their headcount there and the economic benefits of that then we're gonna leave whole states behind. So I think it's very important that we look at the next wave of innovation. I think there's a very good probability that it will be more inclusive both by geography, by gender and all diversity measures. And I'm optimistic about the future but there are no guarantees and we'll see how it plays out. Let's talk about your next chapter. I was gonna wait but I wanna jump while we're on the entrepreneurship topic. JC2 is a global startup, game-changing startup focus that you have. What's the thesis? What are you looking for and talk about your mission? Well our mission is very simple. I had a chance to change the world one time with Cisco and many people when I said Cisco's gonna change the way the world works, it's learned some place by enabling the internet. Everybody said nice marketing but you're a router company and yet I think most people would agree probably more than any other company we had the leadership role in changing the internet and the direction going on. And now a chance to do it again because I think the next wave of innovation will come from startups and it doesn't come easy. They need coaches, they need strategic partners, they need mentors as much as they need the venture capitalist. So I would think of as this focusing on disruptive startups that get very excited in these new areas of technology ranging from physical and virtual worlds coming together to artificial intelligence and automation everywhere to the major capabilities on cybersecurity across that to the internet of things. And so we're trying to say how do we help these companies grow in scale? But if I were just after financial returns I'd stay right here in the valley. I could back channel anybody, the VCs here I trust and they trust me and it would be a better financial return. But I'm after how do you do this across a number of states already in seven states and how do you do it in France and India as role models? It's got a lot of purpose. It's not just a financial purpose. I mean entrepreneurs want to make money too but you've made some good money over the years but this is a mission for you. It is. It is, but you referred to it in your opening comments. We were at Cisco. I've always believed that the most successful owe and obligation to give back and we did. We won almost every corporate response social responsibility award there was. We won it from the Democrats and the Republicans from Condi Rice and George Bush and from Hillary Clinton and President Obama. We also, as you said, made 10,000 Cisco employees millionaires just in the first decade and we tried to give back to society with training programs like Network Academies and train seven million students. And I think it's very important for the next generation of leaders here in the valley to be good at giving back and it's something that I think they were an obligation to do and I think we're in danger now of not doing it as well as we should. And for my startups, I try to pick young CEOs who understand they want to make a financial return. They want to get great product acceptance but they also want to be fair in giving back to society and make it a win-win if you will. You know, I think that's key mission driven companies are attracting the best talent to these days because people are more cognizant of that. I want to get into your personal story because you mentioned giving back and in reading the book, your parents have had a big role in your life and being in West Virginia has had a big role in your life. You mentioned it having a prosperity environment and then not missing that transition. Talk about the story of West Virginia and the role your parents played because they were doctors or they were in medical field. The combination of those two things, the culture where you were brought up and your family impacted your career. Well, I'm very proud of being from West Virginia and very proud of the people in West Virginia and you see it as you travel around the world. All of us who, whether we're in West Virginia, came out of it, care about the state a great deal. The people are just playing good people and they care about treating people with respect. If I were ever run off a road at night in the middle of the night, I'd want to be in West Virginia when I go up to knock on that door. And I think it carries through. But also the image of our state is one that people tend to identify in terms of a area that you like the people. Now what I'm trying to do in West Virginia and what we just announced this last week was to take the same model we did on doing acquisitions, 180 of them will and say, here's the playbook, the innovation playbook for doing acquisitions, better than anyone else and take the model that we did on country digitization, which we did in Israel and France and India with the very top leaders with Netanyahu and Shemun Perez in Israel with Macron in France and with Modi in India and drove it through and then do the same thing in terms of how do we take the tremendous prosperity and growth you see in Silicon Valley and make it more uniform across the country, especially as traditional business won't be adding headcount. And while I'd like to tell you the chemical industry come back to West Virginia and mining industry will come back in terms of job creation, they probably won't. A lot of that will be automated in the future. And so it is the ability to get a generation of startups and then do it in a unique way. At the hub of this has to be the university. They have to set the pace. Gordon Gee, the president there gets this. He's created a startup mentality across the university. The dean of the business school, Javier Reyes is going across all of the university in terms of how do you do startups together with business school, with engineering, with computer science, with med school, et cetera. And then how do you attract students who want to really be a part of this? How do you bring in venture capital? How do you get the governor and the president of the Senate and the speaker of the house on board? How do you get our two national senators, Charlene Moore Capito and also Joe Manchin, a Democratic Republican working together on common goals? And then how do you say here's what's possible? Write the press release, be the model for how a country or a state comes from behind and let it one time, then a slow fall or, now how do we leapfrog? And before you say it can't be done, that was exactly what people said first about India. When I said India will be the strongest growing economy in the world and it is today, probably gonna grow at seven to 10%. That means you double the per capita income of everyone in India, done right every seven to 10 years. And France being the innovation engine for Europe, the place to do business, you and I would have said, John, no way just five years ago, yet it has become the startup engine for Europe. It's interesting, you mentioned playbook and I always see people try to replicate Silicon Valley. I moved out here from the East Coast in 1999 and it's almost magical here. It's hard to replicate, but you can reproduce some things. One of the common threads though is education. The role of education in the ecosystem of these new environments seems to be a key ingredient. Your thoughts about how education is gonna play a role in these ecosystems because education and grit and entrepreneurial zeal are kind of the magic formula. Well, they are in many ways. It's about leadership. It's about the education foundations, it's about getting the best and brightest into your companies and then having the ability to dream and role models you can learn from. We were talking about Peter Packard earlier, a great role model of a company that did the original garage startup and Lou Platt when I came to was the president of HP when I came out here. I called him up and I said, you don't know me, Lou. I'm with the company. You probably never heard of only 400 people, but I don't know the Valley. Could you teach me? And he did and he met with me every quarter for three years. And then when I said, what can I do to pay you back? Because by that time Cisco was on a roll. He said, John, do it for the next generation. And so that's what I'm trying to do in terms of you've got to have role models that you can learn from and can help you through this. The education is a huge part at the core of almost all great startup engine is a really world-class university. Not just with really smart students, but also with an entrepreneurial skill and the ability to really create startups. John Hennessey Stanford did an amazing thing over the last 17 years on how to create that here at Stanford. The best in the world, probably 40% of the companies when I was with Cisco we bought were director and direct outgrowth of Stanford. Draw a parallel. Berkeley just across the way and this isn't a Stanford Cal issue. Equities rate students, very good focus on interdisciplinary activities, but I didn't buy a single company out of there. You did not see the startups grow with anywhere near the speed, even though it was four times the number of students. So this goes back to the educational institution has to have a focus on startups, has to say how they drive it through. This is what MIT did in Boston and then lost it when 128 lost its opportunity. And this is what we're trying to do at West Virginia. Make it up the startup engine where you've got a president Gordon Gee who really wants to drive this through, bring the political leaders in the state and bring the mountaineers, global mountaineers to bear and then bring financial resources and then do it differently. So to your point, people try to mimic Silicon Valley but they do it in silos. What made Silicon Valley go was an ecosystem, an education system, a environment for risk-taking, role models that you could still be. And unwritten rules too, they had these unwritten rules like pay it forward, your experience with LuPlat, Steve Jobs talked about his relationship with David Packard and this on and on. This is an important part because I want to just take it. That for good is a big, big issue. Last comment on education, how important for this country to know our K through 12 system is broken. We're non-competitive. People talk about STEM, that's important but if I were only educating people on three things, entrepreneurship, how to use technology and artificial intelligence. I would build that into the curriculum where we lose a lot of our diversity especially among females in the third, fourth, fifth grade. So you have to really, I think, get people excited about this as a much earlier age if we can become an innovation engine again in this country. We are not today. We're not number one in innovation, we're number 11. Can you mention that for America? I totally agree with you and I don't want to rant and waste a lot of time because my rants are all on Facebook and Twitter. Education is a problem, it's like linear, it's like a slow linear train wreck in my opinion but now you have the skills gaps. So you mentioned AI. So AI and community are two hot trends right now. We'll stay with community for a minute. I mentioned paying it forward. Open source software, there's new forms of operational scale now. Cloud computing, open source software that all have this ethos of pay it forward in community. And now the community is more important than ever, not just in the tech world but you're talking about in West Virginia and now on a global scale. How does the tech industry, how can the tech industry in your opinion nurture community at local, regional, global scale? This is the tough one, John and I'd probably answer it more carefully if I were still involved directly with Cisco but the fun thing is now I represent myself and Dave Ventura first. And your own opinion, not Cisco, just like, there's a cultural thing, this is a Silicon Valley has magic here and a community's part of it. Yes, well, it's more basic than that. I think basically we were known for two decades not just Cisco but all of the valley is tech for good and we gave back to the communities and we played it forward all the time and I use the example of Cisco winning the awards but so do many of our peers and we go into Palestine and help rebuild Palestine in terms of creating jobs, et cetera. We went in with the intels of the world and the oracles and the other players and the HP together even though at times we might compete. I think today it's not a given. I think there's a tug of war going on here in terms of what is the underlying purpose of the valley is it primarily to have major economic benefits and a little bit of arms length from the average citizen and from government or is it do well financially but also do very well in giving back and make it inclusive. That tug of war is not a given. When you travel throughout the US today or around the world, there are almost as many people that view tech for bad as they do tech for good. So I think it's gonna be interesting to watch how this plays out and I do think there are almost competing forces here in the valley about which way should that go and why. The good news is I think we'll eventually get it right. The bad news is it's 50-50 right now. Let's talk about the skill gap. A lot of leaders and companies right now are looking at a workforce that needs to be leveled up and this new jobs are coming online that haven't been trained for this. Openings that don't have skills for because they haven't been taught. Yes, AI is one example. IoT, you mentioned a few others. How do great leaders proactively and reactively too get the skills gaps closed? What strategies can they, what's the playbook there? Well, two separate issues. How do they get it closed in terms of their employees and then second issue, how do we train dramatically better than we've done before? Let's go to the first one. In terms of the companies, I think your ability to track the millennials and the young people is based upon your vision of doing more than quote just making a profit and you wanna be an exciting place to work with a great culture and part of that culture should be giving back. Having said that, however, the majority of the young people today and I'm talking about the tops out of the key engineering schools, et cetera, they wanna go to startups. And so what you're going to see is how well established companies work with startups in a unique partnership is going to be one of the textbook opportunities for the future because most companies just like they didn't know how to acquire tech companies and most of all tech acquisitions filled even do today, we wrote the textbook on how to do it differently. I think how these companies work with startups and how they create a strategic relationship with a company they know has at least a 50-50 probability of going out of business and how do you create that working relationship so you can tap into these young innovative ideas in partnerships and so what you see with the spark cognition 200 people out of Texas, brilliant, brilliant CEO here in terms of what he is focused on, partnering with Boeing in a 50-50 joint venture, 50-50 joint venture to do the next FAA architecture for unmanned aircraft in this country. So you're gonna see these companies relate to these startups in ways they haven't done before. Partnership and collaboration and acquisitions are still rampant here on the horizon. Certainly it's successful. Recently in the tech industry we're seeing big acquisitions, Dell, EMC, IBM bought Red Hat and then some software ones out there, one just was going to public just got bought just recently by SAP. How do you do the, actually you did 180 of them. How do you do them successfully without losing the innovation and losing the people before they vest and then leave and this is a key dynamic. How do companies maintain innovation in an era of collaboration partnerships and M&A? I had that discussion this morning at a Techonomy with David Kirkpatrick and David said how do you do this and then as I walked out of the room I had a chance to talk with about 700 other people and one of them from one of the very largest technology companies said John we watched you do this again and again. We assumed when we acquired a company we'd get them to adjust to our culture and it almost never worked and we lost the people at a tremendously fast pace especially after their lockup of 18 to 24 months came out. We did the reverse. What we did was develop a replicable innovation playbook and I talk about it in that book but we did this for almost everything we did at Cisco and I would originally call that bureaucracy John. I would have said that's what slow companies do. It actually if done right allows you to move to tremendous speed and agility and so we'd outline what did we look for in terms of strategy and vision. If our cultures weren't the same we didn't acquire them and if we couldn't keep the people to generate the next generation product that was a bad financial decision for us as well. So our attrition rate averaged probably about 5% or her over while as a Cisco for 20 years. Our voluntary attrition rate of our acquired companies which normally runs 20% in these companies ran about four. So we kept the people we got the next generation product out and we went in with that attitude in terms of your acquiring to be able to keep the people and make them part of your family and culture and I realize that might sound corny today but I disagree. I think to attract people to get them to stay at your company it is like a family. It is like how do you succeed and occasionally lose together and how do you build that family attitude? I knew every owner survey employee spouse or their children was life threatening and we were there for them in ways that others were not so you're there when your employees have a crisis your customer does and that's how you form trust and relationships. I have a question. What does the word people first mean to you? Well people first is like customer first. It means your action and everything you do but your customers and your people first. That's what we did at Cisco. Any customer you would talk to almost every customer I've ever met in my life would do business with us again or with me again because your currency in today's world is trust, track record and relationships and we build that very deep. Same thing with the employees. I still get many, many notes from people we helped 10 or 15 years ago. Here's the picture of my child that you all helped make a difference in Cisco and John and you were there for us when we needed you most and then in customers it surprised you when you help them through a crisis they remember that more than when you helped them be successful and they're there for you. Talk about failure and successes. This is, you talk about this in the book. This is part of entrepreneurship. You can't succeed without failures. Handling failures is just as important as handling successes. Your thoughts and how people should think about that from a mindset standpoint. Well you know what's fun is for those of you who are parents or will be parents in the future when your child scores a goal in soccer or makes a grade on a test, you're proud for them but that isn't what worries you. What worries you is when they have their inevitable setbacks and everybody has that in life how do you learn to deal with them? How do you understand how much was self-inflicted and how much of it was done by other causes and how they navigate through that determine who they are. Part back to the West Virginia roots. I'm dyslexic, which means that I read backwards. Some people in early grade school thought I might not even graduate from high school much less go to college. My parents were doctors, they got it but how I handled that was key and while writing the book about our successes I spent as much time on when disaster strikes how you handle that determines who you are in the future. Jack Welch told me in the 90s he said John you have a very good company and I said Jack you're clearly teaching me something here we're about to become the most valuable company in the world we've won all the leadership awards and everything else what does it take to have a great company? He said a near-death experience and at the time I didn't understand it at the end of 2001 after the dot-com bubble he called me up and he said you now have a great company I said Jack it doesn't feel like it our stock price is down dramatically people are questioning can I even run the company now many of the people who were so positive turned very tough and they- How did you handle that? How do you personally handle that? It's part of leadership it's easy to be a leader when everything goes well it's how you handle when things are tough and leadership is lonely you're by yourself no matter how many friends you have around you it's about leadership and so you lead it through it so 2001 took a real hard look we made the mistake of focusing me on the numbers and my numbers in the first week of December we're growing at 70% year over year we'd never had anything negative to speak of much less below even 30% growth and by the middle of January we were minus 30% and so you have to be realistic how much was self-inflicted how much the market I felt the majority of it was market-inflected I said at that time it's a hundred year flood I said to the employees here's how we're gonna go forward we need to bring our head count back in line to a new reality and we did it in 51 days and then you paint the picture from the very beginning what you look like as you recover in the future and why your employees wanna stay here your customers stay with your shareholders wiped out most of our competitors Jack Welch said John this is probably your best leadership year ever and I said Jack you're the only one that's gonna say that he said probably and he has been and you got the scar teacher to prove it and I love the story but your product are your scars and do you learn how to deal with them yeah and how you and be proud of them it's what you who you are I don't know if proud's the right word but or badge of honor red badge of honor they're painful just don't do it again twice right I don't make the same mistake twice but the same time when I teach all these startups I expect you to make mistakes if you don't make mistakes you're not taking enough risk and while people might have might say John one of your criticisms you spread yourself a little bit too thin in the company too thin at times and you were too aggressive after thinking about it I respectfully disagree if I had to do over I would be even bolder and more aggressive and take more risk and I would dream bigger dreams with these startups that's what I'm teaching them that's what I'm doing myself and you know this is such a big point because the risk is key managing risk is actually you want to be as risky as possible just don't cut an artery don't do the right things but in your book you mentioned this about how you identified web transitions but also you make a reference to your parents again and this is I think important to bring up because we have an expression in our company let's put the patient on the table and let's look at the problem solving the problems and not going out of business at that time like your competitors do you had to look at this holistically in the book you mentioned that experience your parents taught you be it from West Virginia that it changed how you do problem solving can you share that with that? Well both parents were doctors and the good news is you got a lot of help the bad news you didn't get a lot of sympathy because they could fix you but they always taught me to focus on the real underlying issue to your point what is the real issue not what the symptom is the temperature or something else and then you want to determine how much of that was self-inflicted and how much of it was market and if your strategy is working before continue if your strategy was starting to get long in the tooth how do you change it and then you got to have the courage to reinvent yourself again and again and so they taught me how to deal with that I started off the book by talking about how I almost drowned at six years of age and as I got pulled down through the rapids I can still see my dad in my mind today running down the side of the river yelling hold on to the fishing pole it was an ugly fishing pole might have cost five dollars but he was concerned about the fishing pole so therefore obviously I couldn't be drowning so I focused both hands on the fishing pole and as I poked my head above water I could still see him running down he got way down river swam out pulled me in set me on the side and taught me about how you deal when you find yourself with major setbacks how do you not panic how do you not try to swim against the tide or the current how you be realistic the situation you're in work your way over the side and then you know what he did put me right back in the rapids and let me do it myself and taught me how to deal with it dad taught me the business picture and how you deal with challenges mom who is internal medicine psychiatry taught me the emotional the IQ side of the house in terms of how you connect with people and I believe in this whole 1-0 chapter I build relationships for life and I really mean it I think your currency is trust relationships and track record and then having that holistic picture to pull back and understand what to focus on and this is a challenge for entrepreneurs and you're now dealing with a lot of entrepreneurs and coaching them a lot of times they get caught in the forest and miss the trees right or have board meetings or have worry about the wrong metrics or they got to get financing how should an entrepreneur or even a business lead let's say we're entrepreneurs first then business leader handle their advisors their investors how they manage that how they tap into that because a lot of people oh they're not really adding much but I just need the money this is important because this could save them this could be the poll for them it could or it could be also the poll that causes the tent to collapse so I think the first thing when you advise young entrepreneurs is realize you're an advisor not part of management and I only pick young entrepreneurs who want to be coached and as I advise them I say all I'm asking is you listen to my thoughts and then you make the decision and I'll support you either way you go once you've listened to the trade-offs and I think you want to very quickly realize where they are in vision and strategy and where they are on building the right team and candidly evolving the team and changing the team where they are in culture and where they are on their communication skills because communication skills were important to me they might not have been to Jack Welch the generation in front of me but they were extremely important to us but today your communication mismatch on social media can cost your company a billion dollars if you're not good at listening if you're not good at communicating with people and painting the picture you've got a problem so how do you teach that to the young players then most important regardless of whether you're in a big company a small company public or private sector know what you know and know what you don't many people especially if they're really good in one area assume that carries over to others and assume they'll be as equally as good in the others that's a huge mistake it's like an engineer hiring a good sales lead very rarely does it happen they recruit a business development people who appeals to an engineer not to the customer and so know what you know know what you don't for those things you don't know surround yourself with both people on your leadership team and with your advisors that help you navigate through that and I had during my career through three companies I always had a number of advisors both formal and informal that I went to and still go to today some of them were very notable players like a president Clinton or president Bush Shamone Perez Henry Kissinger or names that were just really technical leads within companies or people that really understood PR like Thomas Freeman out of the New York Times or things of that type you always love being in the trenches I noticed that at Cisco as an observer I really did but now that you're at startups it's even trencher or trenches deeper and you see in the playing field so I got to ask you the first question how'd you look back at the tech trends that's happening right now globally both political regulatory technology what advice would you give your 23 year old self if you were breaking into the business you were either at Wang and you were going to make your move in this world in this world today what's going on what would you be doing well the first thing on the tech trends don't get too short term focused picture the ones that are longer term what we refer to in digitization artificial intelligence et cetera if I were 23 years old or better yet 19 years old and we're two years through college and thinking what did I want to do for college and then on to MBA school and perhaps beyond that legal degree if I follow the prior path I would focus on entrepreneurship in really understanding in a lot more detail I learned it over 40 years in the business and I learned it from my dad and my mom but also from the companies I went into before I would focus on entrepreneurship I'd focus on how technology enables that entrepreneurship I would probably focus on what artificial intelligence can do for that and that's what we're doing at West Virginia back to a point earlier and then I would think about security across that if you want really job security and creativity for the future if you're really good entrepreneur with artificial intelligence capability and security capability you're going to be a very desired resource so if we saw you obviously networking is a big part you got to be networking with other people in the industry would you be hosting meetups young John Chambers right now tech meetups would you be at conferences would you be writing code would you be doing a startup well if you're talking about me advising them you're 23 years old right now Oh if I were 23 years right now I'd be an MBA school and I'd be forming my own company and I would be listening to customers I think it's important to meet with your peers but while I develop strong relationships in the high tech industry I spent the majority of time with my customers and with our own employees and so I think at that age my advice to people is there is only one Steve Jobs he just somehow knew what to build and how to build it and when you think about where they were still took him seven years I would say really get close to your customer don't get too far away if there's one golden rule that a startup ought to think about is learning and staying close to your customers there too understand your differentiation your strategy well John thanks so much and the book Connecting the Dots great read it's again not a business book in the sense of boring a lot of personal stories a lot of great lessons and thanks so much for taking the time John I'm not pleasure great to see you again I'm John Furrier here with the People First interview on the Cube co-created with Mayfield thanks for watching