The Mentor I Never Met

In this series, professionals thank those who helped them reach where they are today. Read the posts here, then write your own. Use #ThankYourMentor and @mention your mentor when sharing.

In the early 1900s my grandparents immigrated from Eastern Europe to the United States. They went through Ellis Island and lived in the tenements of New York’s Lower East Side (you can look at life in the tenements on the Tenement Museum webpage).

They came to this country with a “trade,” but with little to no education: They did not attend high school in the old country. As is the immigrant tradition, they were a very close-knit family and very aspirational. They worked very hard all of their lives to make a better life for themselves and their children. They eventually settled down in apartments in the Bronx — a big step up from their tenement arrival.

My parents had a better life. They graduated from high school, and I grew up in a lower-middle-class household. We had a very modest house in a working-class neighborhood in Queens. This generation too was very aspirational for their children, and my brother and my sister and I all went to college, the first generation to do so.

When people from my generation graduated from college, there were very few choices: the women became teachers or nurses, and the men became doctors, lawyers or went into the family business. Since I did not want to be an attorney, and since there was no family business to go into, I enrolled in college as a pre-med student. About halfway through, while feeling great economic distress to pay for my education, I decided that pursuing the path to becoming a physician was simply not worth 10 years of penury (medical school + army + internship + residency) until I was able to actually start living my adult life.

I was lost in the wilderness! There was no model of what to do with my life.

In a stroke of great good fortune (and based on my knowledge of a cousin’s recent employment) I got a job at IBM: It was the one and only job I applied for. Who knew how great the future could be in the infancy of this burgeoning industry.  

My first job after graduation was as a software engineer. Two years later I moved to another computer company called Scientific Data Systems (SDS) and worked as a systems engineer and later as a sales representative.

At this time in my life, I knew that people could start a very small business, and maybe it could grow to a point where you could make a pretty good living. I had never really thought about it more deeply than that. So when I looked at a company like IBM I kind of believed that all the big companies existed before I was born, and would likely exist after I was dead!

About six months after starting with SDS I had an epiphany. It turns out that this company had a thousand employees, revenues of $100 million, and was listed on the NYSE and had a market cap of about $900 million (all of which were extremely impressive in those days). It had been started nine years earlier by a man named Max Palevsky.

So nine or 10 years earlier this guy named Max woke up one morning and said “I think I will go ahead a start a company to build big, complex $2 million computers and sell them B to B.  And to do so I think I will just go out and raise a few million dollars of venture capital” (from the legendary venture capitalist Arthur Rock as it turned out. Arthur Rock and Max Palevsky also went on to be the original venture funders of Intel…).

Well, Max Palevsky was the mentor that I never met. The company was headquartered in California, and I worked in NYC. And there were lots of layers of management between him and me — he was a very remote figure indeed.

But I could look at Max and see the possibilities. He was Jewish. He was of immigrant stock (his parents immigrated from Poland), and the first generation to be graduate college and enter the industry.

I was 23 at the time. This moment profoundly changed the course of my life. If Max could wake up one morning and build a major technology corporation, so could I. And I decided that day that this would be the path of my life.

Twelve years later I founded my first computer company. Unfortunately it was a failure. But 10 years later I founded Veritas Software, which was a great technology company, and it fulfilled all of the dreams of my youth.

I have carried that torch into the future. Many early employees of Veritas were inspired by its success to start their own companies. And as a teacher at Stanford Graduate School of Business, I have inspired many more to do the same.

As a postscript to this story, I was able to send a letter to Max about five years ago telling him this story. Even though we never met he was very gracious in his response, and offered great recognition for my accomplishments at Veritas. Max passed away in 2010 at the age of 86.