8 ms·

Cisco's Feud with Former Star Executive Turns Personal and Costly

80 points by kjw 9y ago

ChuckMcM 9y ago
It is often interesting at the C level how things work. Ambitious people work their way up until they get to "the point" where they are either going in or going on. I got to watch this at Sun with Ed Zander as he made his way toward the CEO spot at Sun. When Scott "chose a different way" (which is what people seem to say when they mean "You are not getting the executive position you seek.") Ed left Sun and went off to become the CEO of Motorola. Marissa Meyer trying to become more senior at Google until it was clear she never would, and then on to Yahoo!. Sometimes they work out, sometimes they don't.
- ben_jones 9y ago
  Sometimes they work out, sometimes they don't. But they become rich either way.
- jedberg 9y ago
  It's a matter of math. The average public company CEO has 7-10 C level reports. When that CEO leaves, they can't all get promoted. I mean it happens at all levels, it's just more news at the C level. If you want to be the VP of sales for example, and you're currently a regional director, there are probably a few other regional directors who want to replace your VP. Not everyone can do it.
  - yuhong 9y ago
    I have been thinking of "Yishan-style CEOs" for a while now, and part of point is to deal with things like this better (including board of directors doing CEO searches publicly). Anil Dash once had a joke about it: https://twitter.com/anildash/status/893153626247626752 https://twitter.com/anildash/status/893153626247626752
- hkmurakami 9y ago
  You also saw this with HP (defections after the Meg Whitman hire) and Disney (senior execs leaving after Iger extended his tenure)
whipoodle 9y ago
It's strange to me that someone can be a good enough businessperson to get all the way to the executive level of a huge company, and still feel emotionally hurt that someone left to work at a competitor. That strikes me as a rather childish reaction to business as usual.
- philipov 9y ago
  When you do it to them, it's business as usual. When they do it to you, they're rotten no good scoundrels.
- spike021 9y ago
  Even adults demonstrate jealousy. I'd say that's a human flaw, rather than a flaw of age.
  - whipoodle 9y ago
    I'll agree that people evince childishness regardless of age.
    - spike021 9y ago
      But I didn't say that "people evince childishness regardless of age". I specifically said _jealousy_ is a trait attributed to humans as a flaw. That has nothing to do with it being childishness or not. Otherwise it would be a trait somehow eliminated after childhood for a majority of adults, which it isn't since all of us (adults) experience it.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
  - charred_toast 9y ago
    Furthermore, it elicits a sense of flight or flight, and causes a reaction, good or bad, I think. Again, it's a reaction; people in general aren't good at controlling those, nor do they last. A person can react as much as they want, but after a night's sleep, everything takes a different tone. Our subconscious minds play a role that is probably undervalued. The jealous boss might wake up feeling relieved, invigorated. Context also is important.
losingthefight 9y ago
So, I totally read that title as "Cisco's feud with Former Star Trek Executive Turns Personal and Costly", thinking they misspelled Sisko from Deep Space 9. Been a long day...
- semperdark 9y ago
  I want to read that version of the article!
  - kylec 9y ago
    Or better yet, watch the episode! http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/For_the_Uniform_(episode) http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/For_the_Uniform_(episode)
exelius 9y ago
Cisco is circling the drain because their biggest customers finally realized they can build better products than Cisco using open source tools and commodity hardware. The big telecoms are all dramatically reducing spend and moving to proprietary in-house platforms. Companies like Arista are selling white-box network gear at low margins because they know the market is commoditizing. Cisco got addicted to fat margins, but they have almost no patent advantage in most of their biggest markets. It gets hard to justify those margins after a while.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  I'll go one further and say that the white-box gear is better than the Cisco gear at this point. Had to deal with a network gateway at work last year which a) did not correctly implement STP, which we needed to hound Cisco to eventually patch, and b) hideously mistreated TCP connections so that they would be stuck open. I dealt with that second issue every day until my last at the company, I suspect that it's still b0rked if they haven't replaced it.
- myrandomcomment 9y ago
  Accton and Detla and Quanta are whitebox. Arista uses off the shelf switch ASIC from originally Fulcrum then Dune, Broadcom and now Xpilant. The motherboards and all other hardware is in house. Not whitbox.
- tptacek 9y ago
  I'd love it if someone could expand on this a bit. My infrastructure knowledge sort of dies around 2005-2006, when I left Arbor Networks, at a job where we had to know the details of the various TCAMs in different line cards for Cisco Cat6k switches. From '05-'06 I did a fair bit of experimenting with network processors (oddball embedded CPUs with fast packet processing mechanisms). Then I got sucked up into application security. The thing is, I've spent a career writing C code to parse, break up, and route packets for every conceivable protocol, in userland and several different kernels. What I can't tell is: is my skillset here totally outmoded because of the new network infrastructure model, or are we in a new golden age for it? (I am fine with either answer! I just want to know.)
1024core 9y ago
But isn't this the Valley Way? Where did Cisco's founders come from? Where did Juniper's founders come from? This is why the Silicon Valley thrives: people leave ossified old companies and start new ones where they can bring their ideas to fruition more quickly.
- hkmurakami 9y ago
  Cisco's founders came from Stanford. >Cisco Systems was founded in December 1984 by Leonard Bosack, who was in charge of the Stanford University computer science department's computers, and his wife Sandy Lerner, who managed the Graduate School of Business' computers. (wikipedia) (from what I understand, Sandy was the driving force behind Cisco throughout)
  - Angostura 9y ago
    And it shares its DNA with Sun (Stanford University Network)
  - cybernytrix 9y ago
    Until Sequoia's Don Valentine gets the VPs to rebel and have Sandy fired. Who ended up selling all his founder stocks for pennies, while the rest became billionaires...
  - mrexroad 9y ago
    IIRC Sandy then started a popular cosmetics company (Urban Decay) in the late 90's
- ruleabidinguser 9y ago
  I don't think 'the valley way' effects discos view here lol
hkmurakami 9y ago
If you're interested in this, look into the feud between David Cheriton and Andy Bechtolshiem regarding Arista. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2014/06/05/on-the-verge-of-ipo-arista-networks-faces-lawusit-from-a-billionaire-cofounder/#795fe2905d95 https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2014/06/05/on-the-verge... Valley feuds at its finest hour.
- myrandomcomment 9y ago
  The key is neither took it personally and they still work together.
babesh 9y ago
Cisco has been circling the drain for a long, long time (far longer than Arista). They are close in mold to IBM with declining revenue offset by managed profits from periodic layoffs and outsourcing. Cisco would continually find ways to cut employee perks. They thought their thing was software consulting but they couldn't/wouldn't compete for talent with the Googles and Facebooks of the world. Note that Google really hit its stride in the early 2000s. That is a good 13 years ago. People at Cisco knew even then. People would game the system by starting companies to be bought by Cisco and then quiting and repeating the process. A long time employee I knew set his price target at $30 and I think sold at least a large chunk when it temporarily hit that. My impression was that there were many slackers at the company. A company mostly concerned with internal politics... much like IBM... presentations with org charts reminding me of my co-op time at IBM where people talked mostly about whom was the boss of whom... especially important since for Cisco, layoffs sometimes seemed to hit whole groups.
mpnagle 9y ago
This feels very Hooli vs Pied Piper to me...
- navbaker 9y ago
  I've never seen a picture of the Cisco CEO, so every time he was mentioned in the article I kept picturing a very put-out Gavin Belson.
macspoofing 9y ago
>Mr. Chambers felt betrayed by Ms. Ullal, a former Cisco executive said. "To John, it was a relationship question -- 'Why would you do such a thing?' " WTF. This guy is insane. If you're in switches, you're going after Cisco. There is no other way to build a company in that market.
jstandard 9y ago
I can't help but wonder if this is a well-disguised PR piece from Arista. While the feud itself seems likely, the whole article, down to the details, is heavily reliant on David vs. Goliath themes to paint Arista and Ms. Ullal in a positive light. Given Arista's strategy of directly attacking Cisco's market share and "keeping quiet about it" you can bet they had similar sentiments about Cisco. Those details are missing.
- osbjmg 9y ago
  Rachel King's job involves covering cisco. https://www.wsj.com/news/author/8500 https://www.wsj.com/news/author/8500 I don't think it would be ethical of her to accept direction from a company involved with them on what the subject of her piece should be.
  - jstandard 9y ago
    Agreed, I hope that isn't the case here. Thanks for pointing out Cisco is part of her beat. In the past several years I've become increasingly skeptical of news, particularly personal stories where the evidence seems slanted in a certain direction. There's usually another untold side to the story that remains untold as soon as the general narrative is established.

80 points by kjw 9y ago

It is often interesting at the C level how things work. Ambitious people work their way up until they get to "the point" where they are either going in or going on. I got to watch this at Sun with Ed Zander as he made his way toward the CEO spot at Sun. When Scott "chose a different way" (which is what people seem to say when they mean "You are not getting the executive position you seek.") Ed left Sun and went off to become the CEO of Motorola. Marissa Meyer trying to become more senior at Google until it was clear she never would, and then on to Yahoo!. Sometimes they work out, sometimes they don't.

ben_jones 9y ago
Sometimes they work out, sometimes they don't. But they become rich either way.
jedberg 9y ago
It's a matter of math. The average public company CEO has 7-10 C level reports. When that CEO leaves, they can't all get promoted. I mean it happens at all levels, it's just more news at the C level. If you want to be the VP of sales for example, and you're currently a regional director, there are probably a few other regional directors who want to replace your VP. Not everyone can do it.
- yuhong 9y ago
  I have been thinking of "Yishan-style CEOs" for a while now, and part of point is to deal with things like this better (including board of directors doing CEO searches publicly). Anil Dash once had a joke about it: https://twitter.com/anildash/status/893153626247626752 https://twitter.com/anildash/status/893153626247626752
hkmurakami 9y ago
You also saw this with HP (defections after the Meg Whitman hire) and Disney (senior execs leaving after Iger extended his tenure)

whipoodle 9y ago

It's strange to me that someone can be a good enough businessperson to get all the way to the executive level of a huge company, and still feel emotionally hurt that someone left to work at a competitor. That strikes me as a rather childish reaction to business as usual.

philipov 9y ago
When you do it to them, it's business as usual. When they do it to you, they're rotten no good scoundrels.
spike021 9y ago
Even adults demonstrate jealousy. I'd say that's a human flaw, rather than a flaw of age.
- whipoodle 9y ago
  I'll agree that people evince childishness regardless of age.
  - spike021 9y ago
    But I didn't say that "people evince childishness regardless of age". I specifically said _jealousy_ is a trait attributed to humans as a flaw. That has nothing to do with it being childishness or not. Otherwise it would be a trait somehow eliminated after childhood for a majority of adults, which it isn't since all of us (adults) experience it.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- charred_toast 9y ago
  Furthermore, it elicits a sense of flight or flight, and causes a reaction, good or bad, I think. Again, it's a reaction; people in general aren't good at controlling those, nor do they last. A person can react as much as they want, but after a night's sleep, everything takes a different tone. Our subconscious minds play a role that is probably undervalued. The jealous boss might wake up feeling relieved, invigorated. Context also is important.

losingthefight 9y ago

So, I totally read that title as "Cisco's feud with Former Star Trek Executive Turns Personal and Costly", thinking they misspelled Sisko from Deep Space 9. Been a long day...

semperdark 9y ago
I want to read that version of the article!
- kylec 9y ago
  Or better yet, watch the episode! http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/For_the_Uniform_(episode) http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/For_the_Uniform_(episode)

exelius 9y ago

Cisco is circling the drain because their biggest customers finally realized they can build better products than Cisco using open source tools and commodity hardware. The big telecoms are all dramatically reducing spend and moving to proprietary in-house platforms. Companies like Arista are selling white-box network gear at low margins because they know the market is commoditizing. Cisco got addicted to fat margins, but they have almost no patent advantage in most of their biggest markets. It gets hard to justify those margins after a while.

microcolonel 9y ago
I'll go one further and say that the white-box gear is better than the Cisco gear at this point. Had to deal with a network gateway at work last year which a) did not correctly implement STP, which we needed to hound Cisco to eventually patch, and b) hideously mistreated TCP connections so that they would be stuck open. I dealt with that second issue every day until my last at the company, I suspect that it's still b0rked if they haven't replaced it.
myrandomcomment 9y ago
Accton and Detla and Quanta are whitebox. Arista uses off the shelf switch ASIC from originally Fulcrum then Dune, Broadcom and now Xpilant. The motherboards and all other hardware is in house. Not whitbox.
tptacek 9y ago
I'd love it if someone could expand on this a bit. My infrastructure knowledge sort of dies around 2005-2006, when I left Arbor Networks, at a job where we had to know the details of the various TCAMs in different line cards for Cisco Cat6k switches. From '05-'06 I did a fair bit of experimenting with network processors (oddball embedded CPUs with fast packet processing mechanisms). Then I got sucked up into application security. The thing is, I've spent a career writing C code to parse, break up, and route packets for every conceivable protocol, in userland and several different kernels. What I can't tell is: is my skillset here totally outmoded because of the new network infrastructure model, or are we in a new golden age for it? (I am fine with either answer! I just want to know.)

1024core 9y ago

But isn't this the Valley Way? Where did Cisco's founders come from? Where did Juniper's founders come from? This is why the Silicon Valley thrives: people leave ossified old companies and start new ones where they can bring their ideas to fruition more quickly.

hkmurakami 9y ago
Cisco's founders came from Stanford. >Cisco Systems was founded in December 1984 by Leonard Bosack, who was in charge of the Stanford University computer science department's computers, and his wife Sandy Lerner, who managed the Graduate School of Business' computers. (wikipedia) (from what I understand, Sandy was the driving force behind Cisco throughout)
- Angostura 9y ago
  And it shares its DNA with Sun (Stanford University Network)
- cybernytrix 9y ago
  Until Sequoia's Don Valentine gets the VPs to rebel and have Sandy fired. Who ended up selling all his founder stocks for pennies, while the rest became billionaires...
- mrexroad 9y ago
  IIRC Sandy then started a popular cosmetics company (Urban Decay) in the late 90's
ruleabidinguser 9y ago
I don't think 'the valley way' effects discos view here lol

hkmurakami 9y ago

If you're interested in this, look into the feud between David Cheriton and Andy Bechtolshiem regarding Arista. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2014/06/05/on-the-verge-of-ipo-arista-networks-faces-lawusit-from-a-billionaire-cofounder/#795fe2905d95 https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2014/06/05/on-the-verge... Valley feuds at its finest hour.

myrandomcomment 9y ago
The key is neither took it personally and they still work together.

babesh 9y ago

Cisco has been circling the drain for a long, long time (far longer than Arista). They are close in mold to IBM with declining revenue offset by managed profits from periodic layoffs and outsourcing. Cisco would continually find ways to cut employee perks. They thought their thing was software consulting but they couldn't/wouldn't compete for talent with the Googles and Facebooks of the world. Note that Google really hit its stride in the early 2000s. That is a good 13 years ago. People at Cisco knew even then. People would game the system by starting companies to be bought by Cisco and then quiting and repeating the process. A long time employee I knew set his price target at $30 and I think sold at least a large chunk when it temporarily hit that. My impression was that there were many slackers at the company. A company mostly concerned with internal politics... much like IBM... presentations with org charts reminding me of my co-op time at IBM where people talked mostly about whom was the boss of whom... especially important since for Cisco, layoffs sometimes seemed to hit whole groups.

mpnagle 9y ago

This feels very Hooli vs Pied Piper to me...

navbaker 9y ago
I've never seen a picture of the Cisco CEO, so every time he was mentioned in the article I kept picturing a very put-out Gavin Belson.

macspoofing 9y ago

>Mr. Chambers felt betrayed by Ms. Ullal, a former Cisco executive said. "To John, it was a relationship question -- 'Why would you do such a thing?' " WTF. This guy is insane. If you're in switches, you're going after Cisco. There is no other way to build a company in that market.

jstandard 9y ago

I can't help but wonder if this is a well-disguised PR piece from Arista. While the feud itself seems likely, the whole article, down to the details, is heavily reliant on David vs. Goliath themes to paint Arista and Ms. Ullal in a positive light. Given Arista's strategy of directly attacking Cisco's market share and "keeping quiet about it" you can bet they had similar sentiments about Cisco. Those details are missing.

osbjmg 9y ago
Rachel King's job involves covering cisco. https://www.wsj.com/news/author/8500 https://www.wsj.com/news/author/8500 I don't think it would be ethical of her to accept direction from a company involved with them on what the subject of her piece should be.
- jstandard 9y ago
  Agreed, I hope that isn't the case here. Thanks for pointing out Cisco is part of her beat. In the past several years I've become increasingly skeptical of news, particularly personal stories where the evidence seems slanted in a certain direction. There's usually another untold side to the story that remains untold as soon as the general narrative is established.