YouSaid · the spoken record

Sandy Lerner

lines on the record: 102
first: 2018-10-01
most recent: 2018-10-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We didn't have the money to build the damn things. We were having to buy parts on credit. We had every credit card maxed out. Kirk Lahed, who was one of the founders, gave us $10,000, Lyn's parents gave us $10,000, Robert Michaels loaned us $10,000. He worked at HP Labs.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. I had to go get another job besides Cisco. I worked for Slumberger Computing Computer Systems Laboratory, running their computers. And we had only my income, and I didn't have a car. And we had seven people that were working. We mortgaged the house to the hilt, which we might have lost at any particular time. And we had creditors up the Wazoo, and I had people calling me at 2 in the morning complaining because they didn't have their router or their terminal server. And yeah, it was stressful.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had nothing to do essentially with a hardware, but Len is a superb hardware engineer, and that's how Cisco made its money because of Len and his hardware engineering. Len also happens to be Unparalleled systems programmer lends just really good.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“iPhone size. It was the size of a microwave. Yeah. Can I ask you a dump? I'm going to ask you a dumb question because you and Len were programmers. You guys could sit at a terminal and figure out how to create these programs that would then do things.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our first customer was Hewlett Packard Laboratories. Second was Rutgers University. Third one was Boeing. And by that time, the internet community had matured and it was no longer just the bleeding edge that were ordering these internetworks, which were networks of networks. So it had kind of moved into the keeping up with the Joneses in the sense that if you didn't have an internet, it was kind of you were backwards, so the style had changed.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Credit cards. A friend of mine that used to work for me at Stanford would send on the telephone and tell our vendors that the check was in the mail.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it's the deal they should have made to begin with. You know, if they'd have said, here, pay us a modest royalty that you can handle from a cash flow point of view and maintain our network. We'd have gone, okay”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, when Lennon and I left when Len left Stanford a great deal of the engineering team behind the internet at Stanford left and so Stanford was left with a network it didn't have any ability to run and certainly nothing to maintain. So within that very fortunate confluence of events, a very serendipitous confluence of events, we actually did have some bargaining power and we ended up paying them, I think, a very fair royalty for the first I want to say $3 million a product or something, a very fair royalty. And we had to fix the network for three years.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So it was starting to creak, and I was getting a little bit bored. And, you know, the microcomputers were starting to come in, and I really didn't have a lot of interest in that. So I would say that I was ready for something else, but it's a complete misunderstanding of the times to think that Lennon and I had huge dollar signs in our eyes and knew that this company was going to go public and make a bazillion dollars.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And, you know, when the faculty would meet at the beginning of the year to plan the curriculum, even though I was ahead of all of the computing facilities, both administrative and the curriculum computing, I went and had lunch with the faculty wives because where they had their annual meeting didn't allow women.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By this time, this was 1984, and there were starting to be creeks. I mean, I was paid half of what my predecessor made, and I was paid a third of what my successor was paid.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely, and it was a part of Sound Frown and Cisco. And so we just, with tears on our eyes, basically said, well, I guess we've got to go do this. I had no idea what we were getting into.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and I designed, it was my name, and I came out because remember at that point our router is a gateway. So I came out with a little logo of the Golden Gate Bridge.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that came later. Cisco was actually the 36th name that we tried to get. Anything having to do with computers, we couldn't have.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At that point, I believe that Len knew a whole lot more about business than I did. And at some point, he looked at me and he says, well, we're just going to have to go and build this stuff on our own money because we can't do it. The university won't allow us to do it within university. So one day I drove up to San Francisco with a $5 bill and started the company.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We didn't care. You didn't care. We didn't care. You just wanted it to be out there. Stanford could have taken 100% of it as long as you know they paid the bill for the parts. I see. We had good jobs.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you didn't care. You weren't saying, hey, we're going to take the money for this. No, the money would go to Stanford. We didn't care. You didn't care. We didn't care. You just wanted it to be out in the world.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We took harpoon money. This is United States money. We don't have a right to this stuff. We didn't develop it, but we didn't invent it. It was a community of people who were very smart, very committed in all of these different places. And in Stanford, all of these different departments, there was a huge community at that point. And Stanford was saying, just know.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, absolutely. But Stanford said, No, you cannot license this technology. They would not entertain any licensing. We had done our part and we had taken the government's money. This is all public domain. We had invented all of these wonderful things, but the Office of Technology Licensing didn't let anything out. And Stanford was not even letting us sell it to the universities.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we married in 1980. We both graduated from Stanford, same department, same platform in June of 1981 with master's degrees, and Len had walked into a job as the head of computing systems for the Department of Computer Science, and I had gotten a job running computers for the business school. So we were looking at Long, happy, nerdy careers in that environment.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you are in your 20s at this time, and ARPA, this government agency, is funding all these cool projects that eventually would help to create the internet. You are part of this team that creates a network that Stanford then adopts as its protocol. And at that point, these 5,000 computers are able to talk to each other? So, at that point, you and Len, were you married at that point?”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't do it for Stanford. I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about those early ARPA years. We did it because it was the right thing to do. ARPA was giving money. It was all public domain. Nobody had a financial motive. And the thing that ARPA did that was so amazing even today was it gave the right people the right money. It wasn't political. It wasn't there wasn't any religion involved in it. It was just this collection of these incredibly smart, dedicated people who made things. And I was really, really lucky to get to be a part of that. I mean, everything that you could do every day and you could hook something new up or you could, you know, you could get a message someplace or you could get these milestones. And I guess if you're a nerd, it was just a tremendous adrenaline rush.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you created a system that would allow these computers to communicate. Well, today we would, I guess, call a router. You build a network at Stanford. What was the thing that was motivating you guys? Why did you want to do this for Stanford?”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were definitely under the radar and we kept it under the radar, and it wasn't until one day, I think it was 1981, our timesharing Ethernet became the Stanford University Network. Just one day it just benediction went in our direction and then we were the Stanford University Network.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and that's what ARPA was for. It was a network to foster the interaction and inner sharing of ideas and information among the different people who were taking ARPA money. And that's what we were doing.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, whatever they felt matched their research or their pedagogical requirements. They were alone to themselves and they bought what they wanted.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it wasn't. That is true, but the reason was that it was so new you entered into this unholy alliance with the vendor and they would help you”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it used to be that you either bought DEC computers, you bought IBM, or you bought HP, or you bought Data General, or you bought Wang, or you bought whatever”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was very quiet because the dynamics of the group were that you weren't supposed to have favorites. That would have been very destructive to kind of the collegial kind of group dynamics there. And so it was really nobody even knew we were seeing each other until we decided that we wanted to get married.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, he was thinking about getting a master's degree and he was kicking around thinking he needed something to do. And on that day I remember we went to Chinese food. And remember these guys are all largely overweight and they're not the people who were picked on the baseball team and we're all sitting around there and these guys are flaming themselves out with hot oil on the Chinese food. And they're like all red and they're like perspiring and everything. And Len sat there and they were all like being very noisy and you know of questionable hygiene. And Len sat there and his clothes were ironed and his clothes matched and he had this beautiful blonde hair and this very soft voice and he could eat with a knife and fork and when they would get all done arguing with each other they would look at Len and they would say well you know basically essentially what is what is the answer and Len didn't join in until they invited him and then he would tell them the answer and then they would have another topic and argue and argue and then they would come back and say well Len, what”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I met Len the first time when he was interviewing Stanford, and I mean that. Stanford was not interviewing Len, Len was interviewing Stanford.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When the people had written the first spell checker and typed in the entire dictionary himself, one of us had a triple major at Stanford and a master's degree in 40 years. And we were all computer addicts in love with this particular architecture. We built our own internet. We maintained our own internet. We built our own printer interfaces. We built our own computer terminals. It was just one of those times in life where what you gave you got back.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, there were probably about eight, ten, or 12 of us people had sort of dripped in and drift out. But remember, we had two meals a day together. We spent the weekends. In lots together. I mean, I would leave these people at two in the morning.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were very few. I was the only graduate level female, but it was also a very welcoming group and they didn't care really if you were three foot high green and stink as long as you had the technical chops and you kept up. And I could do that.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, not technology of smart people. I wasn't a freak anymore. They were very welcoming and I had great friends the computer science and at lots the time sharing system and we would have two meals a day together and”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two things won the money, and two, the independence that it offered was hugely attractive to me, you know, not being tied to hours, not being tied to a desk. You know, I've always been kind of an anarchist. And the idea that you could come and go, and as long as you got the work done, nobody cared about your day.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely not. I work my butt off. When I was in high school, girls didn't get to take fourth year calculus. When I was in high school, girls didn't get to take physics. So I had to learn all that stuff in graduate school.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I was really lucky at Claremont. We had a DEC system 10, and that's what I learned to program on, and I learned a number of the programming languages and did a little bit of systems programming. But when I got to Stanford, they had deck 10s and deck 20s, which was great because it's a huge time-sharing system that would have 200 simultaneous users. And since I'd been running the math and statistical software on the timesharing computing at Claremont, they had the lots volunteers. And so I became a lots volunteer.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At this point, I still thought I wanted to be an academic. And so I picked up my little self and applied to Stanford. And because the political science department there needed programmers because, of course, they were getting to the point where you couldn't publish anything if it didn't have some numbers in it. They let me in. And I got in and immediately segued into the statistics and computer science department.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I went to Claremont Graduate School because I had a full scholarship. And the first quarter I ended up being an advisor in the computer room. And you know, in 1975, I was making 25 bucks an hour computer programming. And, you know, to me, it was easy and it was something that I thought would pave the way to being able to enter the job market in a good place.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it was a lot of work. It was a tough two years, but on the other hand, I was so convinced I was never going back to that bank. Never Never, ever, ever going back to that bank and having to put up with that. And I ended up getting an absolutely first rate education.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, absolutely. I went through college in two years, and I wanted to be, I had it all mapped out. I would have my PhD by the time I was 22.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My undergraduate degrees are in international relations with an IVIS signed comparative communist theory and a minor in Marxist economics.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know it was the first time I'd ever experienced any sort of sexism. I mean, on the farm, Was the kid, you know, so you did the boy jobs, you did the girl jobs, you did, you know, I loaded the gas trucks, I drove a truck for a summer. You just got on with it. And it was the first time I hit sexism, and it just completely rattled my world, and I needed to get out. I just needed to get out.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“1970, 1971, 1972. We were all Louise because he knew Louise and she'd been there a while and we didn't really rate our own names.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, my uncle, he was a very small town. My uncle went to Kiyawanas with a bank manager, and I think my uncle was kind of watching out for me and making sure that I had a safe place to work. But it was a terrible job. The bank owner made all of the tellers kneel so he could check that our skirts were long enough. And he called us all Louise.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It started out at 108 acres and they were farming pairs and my grandpa lived up there also and raising some cattle and I just fell in love with farming.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Until I was six, and then there came a day when my aunt's sister said, If you come and live with me, I'll give you a pony. And my other aunt, Beverly Hill, said, Well, if you live with me, when you're 16, you can have a car. But you know, when you're six, you're thinking, my God, I might not even live that long. Maybe there won't be cars. So I took the pony.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I thought it was a wonderful thing to go and stay with my aunt. She was very cool. And she had a very elegant world. We would go to the Merry Company tea room and sit in that gorgeous blue dining room, and I didn't think life got any better.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A fairy tale. Her mom and dad split up when she was just four years old, and there was so much turmoil in the family that Sandy was sent off to live with one of her aunts, which sounds like it could have been pretty traumatic, except her aunt lived in Beverly Hills and made Sandy the center of her life.”
2018-10-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT