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I worked in the same building where Bechtolsheim's company Granite Systems was located (3450 Hillview Ave in Palo Alto). My company was on the 2nd floor and Gra
by drmpeg 4y ago
I worked in the same building where Bechtolsheim's company Granite Systems was located (3450 Hillview Ave in Palo Alto). My company was on the 2nd floor and Granite was on the 1st floor. We didn't even know he was there until they were sold to Cisco in 1996.
3450 Hillview was in horrible shape when we first moved in. But the owners refurbished it a floor at a time. When we moved to the second floor, there were four big corner offices. There was so much fighting as to who would get the 4th corner office that the CEO got pissed off and gave it to me and another engineer (we worked together as a team and designed all the products).
- lizknope 4y agoI worked at an semiconductor foundry that was doing chips with Cisco's Gigabit Switching Group which was the former Granite Systems team. I was 23 and all the guys there were millionaires and all under 30. All of our chip design software ran on Sun workstations which I had been using since high school in 1991. I wanted a Sun so badly in 1993 when I started college. Then I learned about Linux and got a PC just for Linux. Andy Bechtolsheim's office was just around the corner from the guys I was working with. I walked by a bunch of times just to see him inside his office talking on the phone. The first time I went on a business trip to Silicon Valley I literally searched for all the company's headquarters and drove around to see them and the signs out front on the weekend. It sounds super geeky and it was but I loved it.