Legendary Entrepreneur and Author Judy Estrin (Part 7)

SM: Really strong people do not tolerate that kind of dynamic. JE: The way to lead innovation is to bring out the leadership in each individual.

Legendary Entrepreneur and Author Judy Estrin (Part 6)

SM: What knowledge and experience did you gain from your time at Packet Design? JE: For the first time I realized how hard it is to hire CEOs. One of the problems with an incubator is that if you try to turn the idea over to someone else and it was not their idea, they

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Legendary Entrepreneur and Author Judy Estrin (Part 4)

SM: You merged with 3Com, which has a completely different dynamic and culture. JE: The biggest mistake is that we merged with the notion there was going to be an office of the president. Bill Carrico and Bill Krause were sharing the key roles. Bill Carrico was chairman and president and Bill Krause was CEO, or

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Legendary Entrepreneur and Author Judy Estrin (Part 3)

SM: Tell me some about how VCs received your concept when you were starting Bridge. JE: Bridge started in 1981 and we spent six months trying to raise money. We raised $1.8 million, and I remember one VC asking why we needed $1.8 million for a modem. I looked at Bill and said, “He doesn’t get it”. We

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Legendary Entrepreneur and Author Judy Estrin (Part 2)

SM: I have never even thought of myself as a woman. I have thought of myself first as an entrepreneur and a professional. JE: I thought of myself as a technologist first. When I became a leader and manager I thought of myself as a business person first and a woman second. Now when I

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Legendary Entrepreneur and Author Judy Estrin (Part 1)

Estrin has been named three times to Fortune Magazine’s list of the 50 most powerful women in American business. She sits on the boards of directors of The Walt Disney Company and FedEx Corporation as well as two private company boards – Packet Design, Inc. and Arch Rock. For more background review her bio. SM:

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Enabling Ecological Data Centers: Rackable Systems CEO Mark Barrenchea (Part 7)

SM: Based on your core market where you are selling into the $350 million install base, how far can you go? Can you double that? MB: Assuming a $1 billion business, I would like to see the Internet as 40%-50% of my business. The remainder should come from a mixture of other businesses.

Enabling Ecological Data Centers: Rackable Systems CEO Mark Barrenchea (Part 6)

SM: Are you going to take it to the enterprise data center? MB: Actually we won’t. We do not focus on running SAP, Oracle or databases. We are trying to take all the redundancy out of hardware that we can. We know servers are going to fail. Our view is that you should let them

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