Well, I had a shot at being #8 or so at Microsoft, primarily through another friend (Bob Greenberg, who was #6 or 7), but due to other circumstances, didn't tak

Well, I had a shot at being #8 or so at Microsoft, primarily through another friend (Bob Greenberg, who was #6 or 7), but due to other circumstances, didn't take it seriously. I worked on extending Chuck Geschke's (founder of Adobe's) PhD thesis from CMU while an undergrad, and got to know him that way. He called me in to talk about starting Adobe while he was still at Xerox PARC, but, again, circumstances made it impossible. (Had just started at another Stanford (Knuth TeX project) spin-off that ultimately went nowhere. At least I got to hang around Knuth.) So, yes, in theory, those connections could have been useful. ;-)