The Stanford Academic Who Wrote Google Its First Check (2012) | Hacker News Reader

The Stanford Academic Who Wrote Google Its First Check (2012)

forbes.com

109 pointsdsr1230 comments

I took a Distributed Systems class with Prof. Cheriton in 2007 for my Masters degree. In the first few classes, I remember being awed by the wealth and legacy of the man, and wanting to glean everything I could from him. It quickly became apparent though that he hadn't updated his course materials or lectures in over a decade, e.g. the pros and cons of distributed shared memory vs COBOL RPC. The core topics were there, it was just presented in such a dry manner.

Worse though, was that he would needlessly inject his very conservative politics as total non-sequiturs. Test questions like "Hillary Clinton wants to build [obviously unscalable system], explain why it won't work. I found it very unprofessional.

Stanford records a video of every lecture, and enrolled students can then watch them whenever. I remember sitting in my dorm room, watching one of his 75 minute lectures where there was literally 3 students in a 150 person auditorium. It just floored me that this was how a billionaire was spending his time. I do genuinely like the man, you could just tell he was capable of so much more.

wow, thanks for the realistic perspective. it is as if some journalists don't do any actual work while complaining that blogs are killing newspapers. it's great that I know he built his own wooden structure when he was young, but the fact he hasn't updated lectures in a decade or is poking fun of Hillary in class material is no ones business.*

EDIT: *Something we should have been told about by the article as it's a key part of character

It sounded like you started off by agreeing and ended in disagreeing, but I can't tell where the switch was, or if your opening line was just sarcasm... Surely those facts about him are the business of anyone who would potentially enroll in his classes.

I think Demiurge is just misusing the phrase "is no ones business". He probably meant "is behavior that doesn't belong in a professional academic environment".

>It sounded like you started off by agreeing and ended in disagreeing, but I can't tell where the switch was

It makes sense if you read the last sentence as describing (and sarcastically mocking) the opinion of the author of the Forbes article as to what is newsworthy.

I was being sarcastic at the end. I think the article was very uninformative and painted a completely incomplete picture there.

I've heard Stanford described as a venture capital group with a vestigial university attached. Unfortunately, course plans being updated this decade is something that falls by the wayside when your professors basically have full-time jobs elsewhere.

That wasn't my experience of Stanford's EE or CS profs at all. They sometimes take a sabbatical for a year to work on a startup, but when they're on campus it always felt like they're fully engaged, and presenting up-to-date material.

Cheriton in particular is more of an academic purist than anything. He probably just believes that the old material is the right way to learn distributed systems, and all these new things are "just a fad".

I was part of Kealia as a chip designer, and I remember having a fight with Cheriton over buying a waveform viewer for RTL simulation. It's a basic tool that any chip person needs, but he felt it was just some fluffy GUI thing that real engineers wouldn't need.

That argument was a bit nuts, but I came to really like him and appreciate the purity of his perspective, even when I disagreed with it.

Stanford is actually making a concerted effort to start a VC fund now officially, so they're admitting to the world that thus far their actions have been amateurish.

If I were a 61 year old billionaire academic with modest needs, I'd spend half my money to fund fundamental scientific research -- physics, biology, medicine; all the big ones. If this guy keeps investing his money without spending it, he's going to die a billionaires and his kids are going to go crazy with it.

> and his kids are going to go crazy with it

That's assuming that he leaves them any. Isn't Bill Gates the famous example of an uber-rich not leaving their kids much (%-wise)?

I had taken a course designed by him at stanford: object oriented programming from a modeling and simulation perspective. I also have the lecture notes for the follow-up course. It was mentioned that the course was based on his real world experience doing c++ programming in academia and startup that he sold to Cisco. It was very clear from the beginning that the course was radically different from any programming course I had seen. Highly opinionated in almost every page. There was rarely anything that he repeated from any standard c++ books. I enjoyed the course, though only about 5% still remains with me. I have worked in teams using c++ extensively to manage $Billion+ products, and can attest that the course definitely had some value. Also, I had interviewed with a C++ team in Cisco 4K catalyst group and they mentioned they were still building on the c++ platform laid by Cheriton's group ( a decade later).

Talking about any disadvantages, I can say that you need someone of Cheriton's ability to really guide you during the initial build-up of the project. His ideas of having the compiler do a lot of checking to avoid bugs in the code later are really cool. But the learning curve is pretty steep. Newer paradigms (since the course was originally designed) like STL, BOOST, and tips in Effective C++/STL etc can replace some of the concepts he espouses. But he is pretty clear that some of them are really inferior. It might be true for some cases, but I have usually used them in production just fine..

I met Andy Bechtolsheim a year or two ago when he dropped in on our small event at Arista's HQ's in jeans and sandals. Surprisingly, I thought that he was a very laid back, down to earth, guy.

Bechtolsheim also invested $100k in Google right about the same time that Cheriton did. I remember being told that Page and Brin couldn't even deposit the check as "Google" did not legally exist at the time (not sure if that's true or not). Together they founded Arastra -- which is now Arista -- c. 2005.)

The story goes that Page and Brin had intended to name the company "Googol" after the number but Andy wrote it "Google" on the check and they had to incorporate under that name to cash it.

That didn't happen.

Googol.com has been registered since 1995.

They took Google for that reason among several others.

Of course there's a bit of urban legend around it but "several others" doesn't make for a good anecdote. I actually heard the story from Andy himself.

Interesting thoughts. Social Networking is a "market whim" according to Cheriton.

> Cheriton says he avoids pursuing market whims—he considers social networking one of them—and stays focused on breakthroughs that make measurable improvements to human life

I wonder at what time does he think it would be out of fashion.

I don't think he's implying social networking will go out of fashion, but that social networking companies themselves can be fashionable. For instance the progression of "cool" social networking sites seems to progress pretty rapidly e.g. myspace -> facebook -> twitter -> instagram -> snapchat.

To put it in Steve Blank terminology he likes to invest in companies that face invention rather than market risk.

We've been social networking probably before Google or any search engines were created. I'm talking about messaging, email, etc.

If you're wondering why you've heard of him for non-entrepreneurial reasons, Cheriton has made major academic contributions in distributed systems; he's an author on the leases paper, the V operating system, and the "Understanding the Limitations of CATOCS" paper, among many others.

The school of Computer Science at Waterloo (his alma mater) is named after him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_R._Cheriton_School_of_Com...

That's the first thing that popped into my head. I've spent 5 years in that building. Never realized the man continued to be so successful. It's interesting how people who really change the world can be so low-ego.

* Renamed following a $25 000 000 donation

an interview where Cheriton expresses some opinion on future of US economy http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13936930

He's Albertan all right.

His latest start-up is Hicamp Systems (http://www.hicampsystems.com). According to this patent,(http://goo.gl/fDjEYn), Hicamp stands for Hierarchial Immutable Content Addressable Memory Architecture - looking forward to this coming out of stealth mode.

Now here is the bigger part of the problem: how does an inventor or an entrepreneur-with-such-a-karma reach such an investor (quickly)? Getting into Stanford is one way, of course, but that would be inefficient to do say a "Google" now.

It was "inefficient" when Google did it... Right person in the right place with the right contacts at the right time with a certain amount of luck on your side. You can game some of these, but the thing not to forget is that it takes time, and a quick connection is quickly forgotten.

This assumes that the "problem" has a solution. I think at the end of the day that this course of action is not something that can be done as anything other than an attempt, that it can't be done on purpose.

Spending money is as much a skill as making it, and I do not mean only investing or the pleasures of this world provides.

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