Bob Metcalfe, the godfather of ethernet and namesake of Metcalfe’s Law, knows a bit about networking. His perspective on how connected nodes come together to form a whole greater than the sum of its parts is well-earned after a 50+ year career stretching back to the salad days of Xerox PARC. Hear Bob offer timeless advice on building relationships, making connections, and the value of helping others succeed.
Bob Metcalfe, the godfather of ethernet and namesake of Metcalfe’s Law, knows a bit about networking. His perspective on how connected nodes come together to form a whole greater than the sum of its parts is well-earned after a 50+ year career stretching back to the salad days of Xerox PARC. Hear Bob offer timeless advice on building relationships, making connections, and the value of helping others succeed.
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“I was late to this, but you got to learn how to sell. In the course of learning how to sell you have to learn how to communicate, and the way you communicate is to listen. Listening is the secret to communication, which is the secret to selling.”- Bob Metcalfe
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Episode Timestamps:
*(02:13) - Bob’s accidental visit to David Rockefeller’s office, and discovering the Rolodex
*(05:18) - Bob’s connection to his most famous mentor Steve Jobs
*(06:49) - Turing a no in to a long term relationship with Steve Jobs
*(08:34) - The importance of providing value to people
*(09:20) - Listening is the secret to communication
*(11:23) - The secret of happiness is enthusiasm
*(13:02) - Bob’s time mentoring as a professor of innovation at the University of Texas
*16:27) - How Bob’s conference Agenda helpled him secure relationships with Bill Gates and others in the personal computing industry
*(20:53) - Sincerity is a key ingredient to success
Annie Riley (00:32):
Today I am joined by Bob Metcalfe, internet pioneer and the father of the Ethernet. Today Ethernet is the internet standard plumbing and billions of ports are added each year. Bob remains a champion of Ethernet and connectivity in general. For the last 11 years Bob has been a professor of innovation at the University of Texas at Austin, and we're excited to have him on the show today.
Bob, thank you so much for joining us today. It's such a pleasure to be here with you. We're going to spend the next little bit talking about all things networking. So I'd love to kick it off by just hearing when I say the word networking what comes to mind for you? How do you define that and think about that?
Bob Metcalfe (01:13):
Well, there's two kinds. There's the kind at parties where you bump into people that you've met before and exchange business cards with them. That's called networking. But then there's my kind, and I'm not above doing the other kind, but the other kind I think you mean is networking like the internet is networking.
Annie Riley (01:31):
Tell me more.
Bob Metcalfe (01:32):
An important part of what the internet does now is, it connects people. The internet is 52 years old. Was born on, it started switching its packets on October 29th, 1969. And suddenly, in 52 years, we have 75% of the human race is now on the internet.
Annie Riley (01:51):
And when you look back on your career and think about how you have connected to people, how has that shifted for you as the internet has evolved and become more prevalent?
Bob Metcalfe (02:02):
Well, there was no internet when I started, so I used the old fashioned. I have a Rolodex, I still have the Rolodex. But when I started getting serious about starting a company in Silicon Valley, I made an accidental visit to a guy named David Rockefeller, to his office on an unrelated matter. And I noticed these two big things he had in his office. Two of them like three feet in diameter. They were Rolodexes, two of them. I said, "I'm going to have a Rolodex too," so I went out and bought one and started putting Steve Jobs in it, and Bill Gates in it, and everybody I knew. It became an important factor in starting my company and then growing it.
Annie Riley (02:42):
Then over time how has that shifted for you? What does today's version of that look like?
Bob Metcalfe (02:47):
Email was the big breakthrough, believe it or not, in 1970. The internet was not built to carry email, but suddenly it was. And the sharing of resources, which had been its original purpose, fell by the wayside. The email then became the killer app for the internet for the next 20 or 30 years. You could argue that email still is the killer app. It's debatable. Then along came Facebook and Twitter, and they changed things in a dramatic way by adding tools. When I gave Facebook my firstborn, my daughter went off to work at Facebook. She's not there anymore, but she spent eight years there. She was my instructor in how to use this tool, an advertising tool, but also a social networking tool.
Annie Riley (03:37):
I'd love to talk a little bit more about your career and the role that networking and relationships played in your personal story. As you think back on your career, what was a turning point that you had where a particular person played an influential role in helping you make that transition?
Bob Metcalfe (03:59):
Well, I have a million of those. But my favorite one, which is not what you asked about, is the biggest turning point in my life was the day I got the letter admitting me to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964. And as a result of going ... I thought they had made an administrative error by admitting me. But I went and it changed everything. Whole new networks of people suddenly I got connected to at my fraternity, at the various classes, at the sporting events, and so on. So getting admitted to MIT is the number one turning point event that I can think of.
Incidentally, the reason that happened is kind of interesting. In fourth grade, I needed a book report the next day. I hadn't read any books. You know the problem. I went down into my dad's basement, and he had a bunch of books on the shelf. One of them was a textbook in electrical engineering from MIT. So on my typewriter typing, my little book report ended by saying, "And I plan to go to MIT and get a degree in electrical engineering." But then I did it, which is pretty amazing. A fourth grade premonition.
I'm not the kind of person who has one mentor. I think it's best to have a lot of them, and I have a lot of them. My most famous mentor is Steve Jobs. Steve called me on a dark night in June of 1979 and proposed that I come meet him about working at Apple, which then had 20 people. I met him in Cupertino, California, and I told him I had just founded my own company and so I was not going to join his. Then for the next 10 years he helped me. The oddity there is, I'm 10 years older than Steve and I graduated from college. He didn't.
So why does that make sense? He was just so brilliant and generous. I mean he could be really a jerk sometimes, but he was generous with his time and insights and so he's high on my list of mentors. But he's by far not the only one. You don't want to put your mentoring eggs in one basket. And when we have startups we like them to have three mentors. Then the students come back and say, "The three mentors all gave us the opposite advice. What should we do?" I say, "This is where you come in. You have to figure out who to believe in this case." So you need to add up all the inputs of your many mentors, not just have one.
Annie Riley (06:27):
That's great advice. When you think about that relationship with Steve Jobs, I'm really curious about how you turned a no into a long-term yes. No, I'm not going to join your company, but you were able to build what sounds like a really great relationship out of that no. How did you make that a positive thing that moment of no and turn that into a longer-term relationship?
Bob Metcalfe (06:50):
That's a great question. So I had this appointment with a guy I never heard of, working at a company I never heard of, in a city I never heard of. I used to hang out in Palo Alto, which is considerably far north above Cupertino. So here I am on Stevens Creek Boulevard in Cupertino, not knowing who he is, what the company is. So he starts his pitch, amazingly persuasive fellow. But I had a presentation for him, and it was a presentation in which I was going to sell him a network that my new company was going to make for his PCs. I called my network Orchard. Get it? Apples-Orchard. This was my idea of marketing.
I think maybe he saw how pathetic I was that he gave me some help. The first person he introduced me to, speaking of mentors, was a band named Regis McKenna. Steve did not put high priority on me meeting engineers. Regis McKenna was the king of marketing in Silicon Valley in those days. He represented Apple, and Intel, and everybody else. Steve asked him to represent me. So for the next two years, for free thanks to Steve, I had the advice of the number one marketing guy in Silicon Valley. That's how a network works. Regis would never have done that except Steve asked him to.
Annie Riley (08:09):
That's amazing. One thing I'd love to talk about is how you make your own luck out of those opportunities. When a door opens into a new relationship, how do you take full advantage of that and really make the most out of that opportunity?
Bob Metcalfe (08:25):
Well, you don't start there. The first question is, "How can I be of value to this person?" That's how you start a relationship. You got to be of value to people, and largely that means being yourself, but also sharing your network. Steve shared his network with me. He gave me Regis McKenna. How can you be of value to someone, and then sound relationships evolve from that beginning.
Annie Riley (08:50):
That's really great advice. Are there any particular steps that you took along the way that you would encourage others to replicate when they think about managing and building relationships in their career in particular?
Bob Metcalfe (09:05):
Now I'm going to tell you one of my deep dark secrets.
Annie Riley (09:08):
Okay, I'm ready.
Bob Metcalfe (09:10):
I was late to this, but you got to learn how to sell. In the course of learning how to sell you have to learn how to communicate, and the way you communicate is to listen. Listening is the secret to communication, which is the secret to selling. You've perhaps heard the old joke, how God gave us two ears and one mouth.
Annie Riley (09:29):
I love it. So if step one is stop talking and start listening, how can folks improve their listening skills and listen more deeply and more effectively?
Bob Metcalfe (09:41):
We recruited into my little company, which had 12 people at the time, a guy named Bill Krause, who was an experienced executive from the Hewlett-Packard company. We appointed him president of my company. So a Monday came around, and we used to have Monday, and I was curious. I'm always curious. What does Bill know that I don't know? Why is he running this meeting? Why am I not running this meeting? So I noticed that Bill had a pad of paper, and as the meeting progressed he was writing things down on this piece of paper.
So I was desperately curious as to, "What's he writing down?" I walked behind him and looked at his pad. All over his pad it said, "DNT. DNT. DNT." When the meeting broke I took Bill aside. I said, "I'm awestruck by how well you ran that meeting. Why did you write DNT on this pad?" And he said, "Bob, I talk too much, and the way I remind myself is I write, "Do not talk, and it slows me down and lets other people talk." So Bill knew about listening and he had this crutch, this little crutch that he would write DNT on a pad. He had many other crutches. He was very successful.
Annie Riley (11:02):
I love that. Such a simple reminder, but so impactful for building a new habit and actually pausing and listening more. You mentioned curiosity, and I'm feeling curious about the role that that quality of curiosity has played in your ability to build relationships and leverage those relationships in your career.
Bob Metcalfe (11:23):
The secret of happiness is enthusiasm, and the way you find those things is by being curious. That is the way you feed your enthusiasm, is wanting to know more about everything.
Annie Riley (11:34):
I love that, enthusiasm as the key to happiness, and that curiosity seems like such a great lesson for folks to take away when they're looking to build relationships and build their career.
Bob Metcalfe (11:46):
Enthusiasm is very attractive when you see it. It draws you. A lot of people think that they can be attractive by being interesting. The secret is to be interested. That's attractive. That's the enthusiasm thing. So being interested in things is much more interesting than being interesting. Your enthusiasm for topics, for example my Orchard network, to tie those Apples together in 1979, perhaps that was the secret. Maybe that's what attracted Steve's favorable reaction was that I was just so enthusiastic. Having been working on the internet for a few years by then maybe I was more enthusiastic than he expected about networking per se. Yeah, so the trick is not to be interesting, the trick is to be interested.
Annie Riley (12:45):
You mentioned adding value as a really important first step, to ask yourself, "How can I help others? How can I add value to these folks in order to build relationships?" How have you paid it forward, and how have you helped others get ahead in their career?
Bob Metcalfe (13:02):
Well, for the last 11 years I've been Professor of Innovation at the University of Texas. My job there was to help build out the startup ecosystem at the University of Texas in Austin in Texas. To answer your question, the way I helped was to share what little I know about how you start companies and grow them. There's a lot of people who know how to do that. I'm one of them. But that's what I did for 11 years. I'm now done with that. This is a joke. My job here is done. The start-up ecosystem in Austin is booming, and I take full credit for it.
Annie Riley (13:41):
That's great to hear. Who have you met in your career who you'd say is really great at networking, and what lessons have you learned from that person?
Bob Metcalfe (13:52):
Well you'd have to say, although I didn't know him very well that Rockefeller, the guy who taught me about the Rolodex, had to be the best networker on Earth. I'm not exaggerating, he had two secretaries each of which had a Rolodex that was three feet in diameter. So to look things up they would spin it and get to the right place. So David Rockefeller had to be on the list, although I didn't know him that well. Let's see, somebody closer. So John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, big time VC firm in Silicon Valley. John knows everybody. If you need to know somebody, John knows them, and if he likes you, put a good word in.
But that's part of being a good VC because the needle and haystack situation requires that you have a network so that you can get some surface area in your exploration of people and who's good at what. I have a friend, he was my fraternity brother at MIT, Kevin Kinsella. He started, I don't know, 55 companies, almost all successful. His modus operandi was to read The New York Times, and then he would see an article about science. He would write down the names of the scientists in the article, and then he would call them and interview them about the science. But then he would ask them, "By the way, who are the other people who are really good at this science that you're good at?"
They would give him names, and then he would call those people and interview them. Then at the end of that call he would say, "And by the way, who are the best people in this field," and that list of people would grow, and grow, and grow, and then it would stop. Right? Because he would've reached all the good ones, so the list stopped. Then he would go and choose three or four of them and make a company out of it. He did that 50 some times with some considerable success. So that's a networking technique that he used, starting with The New York Times, and then asking people to reveal their networks as he grew his.
Annie Riley (15:49):
I'd love to hear more about anything that you have put together, hosted traditions, that you feel have really helped you to maintain relationships over the course of your career and your life.
Bob Metcalfe (16:00):
Well, I can think of two. One is, my wife and I own a camp on an island 10 miles out into the North Atlantic off the coast of Maine. For 25 years before that I would gather 30 or 40 people I knew to come enjoy themselves. It was fun for me to watch them meet each other, as they didn't always know each other, and build relationships on shared experiences. The other one is, I used to run a conference called Agenda. It was a conference that set the agenda for the personal computer industry.
It was typically held at the Phoenician in Phoenix. You had to be invited. 400 people, they had to pay $5,000 each to come to the conference. It had a waiting list as long as your arm because everybody wanted to be there because Steve was there, and Bill was there, and Larry was there, and all these names from the personal computer industry. We had a shared goal, which was the proliferation of the personal computer industry.
Annie Riley (17:04):
Yeah. Nowadays I hear many people say that they would love to host things, they would love to build an audience, but they feel often intimidated or maybe there's some imposter syndrome going on. Right? Who am I to organize this thing? What would be your advice to those folks who want to host something, want to build an audience, but are hesitant to get started?
Bob Metcalfe (17:27):
Well, advice number one is get started. I had a mentor named Bernie, Bernie Feshbach. May he rest in peace. He and I used to play tennis together. I was waiting to play, and while I was there I was working on a call I was going to make to somebody. I was listing my points and everything, and Bernie said, "What are you doing? Just call. Just pick up the phone and call." Meaning, get started. Don't overplan it.
And it's good to find a way to be of value to people. So one particular technique I use is, if a very famous or important person comes to town I'll throw a dinner in their honor. I just had Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, for dinner here. There were 20 of us. We all loved to meet him, and were starstruck to meet the inventor of the World Wide Web, so that's a little bit of value delivered to my 20 local people.
Annie Riley (18:26):
That's terrific. Just get started and add value in some way. Great lessons. I'd love to talk about a mistake that you've made in your career when it comes to networking or potentially the number one mistake that you see others make.
Bob Metcalfe (18:41):
Well, there's lots of those. There are competitors out there, and there are customers out there, and you're networking with both of them. You need both. You need to know what your competitors are doing so you can maneuver around them. You need to know what your customers want so you can provide it. A big mistake is to focus too much on your competitors, and I've made this mistake. The company was called Novell. It may even exist. But those bastards out-marketed us and they were really good.
And then the company all became infused with hatred toward Big Red, but they had an outsized marketing footprint. We started focusing and deciding what products to have based on what they had rather than what our customers wanted. So there's a mistake. You don't want to focus too much, if at all, on your competitors. You want to focus on your customers, or view your competitors through your customers, but don't get obsessed with your competitors. It's much better to spend your time with customers.
Annie Riley (19:48):
Great advice. Don't overly focus on the competition. Anything else you wanted to share in terms of mistakes that you've made or that you've seen others make?
Bob Metcalfe (19:56):
Here's a tip. Let's say you get lucky, I got lucky, and you become famous. They may even give you a publicist. I've had a publicist, but here's the error that she taught me about. So you, the newly famous new kid in town, are in a group of 10 people who are introducing themselves to each other. If when that's all done you notice that you have failed to mention your name, you have an ego problem. You assume that those people know who you are because you're so damn famous. So I make it a point to be sure that I say my name every time. I don't assume anyone knows it.
Annie Riley (20:39):
My last question is just reflecting on everything we've discussed today. What do you think is the single most important lesson for someone to incorporate when they're looking to build their own network?
Bob Metcalfe (20:53):
It's the importance of people. You have to like people. If you don't like people, you're not going very far. I learned this the hard way. I used to be a highly judgemental grouchy kind of guy. I learned over the years a little bit at a time that my father-in-law, may he rest in peace, was the kind of guy who when he said, "I'll meet you in the bar," by the time you got to the bar he knew everybody in the room.
He loved people and he was a super salesman, so I think I learned this mostly from him. It has to be sincere or it doesn't work. So if you don't like meeting new people, and learning about them, and trading stories with them, you should just stop for a minute and redirect your efforts, because people make the world go around.
Annie Riley (21:42):
It's been such a pleasure to hear about your experiences and your advice. I've really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you so much for sharing all this with us.