Time for a change

"We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In October 1996, I moved from a very comfortable and sunny Southern California bachelor lifestyle to cold and dreary San Jose to work with Cisco.  In the nearly 12 years there, I have personally worked on remote access servers (the ISDN and 56k modem varieties, if you recall those, dear reader), router encryption modules, packet voice gateways of a practically infinite variety, IP telephony for the enterprise, home gateways (routers), broadband over powerlines, grid computing, spam, data loss prevention, autonomic networking, intelligent power grid systems, and networked virtual environments (avatar mediated communication).  I long ago lost track of how many products and technologies I helped create over those  many years. 

One consistent thread during all of those years was that we were Inventing and Creating.  Sometimes they were completely new businesses or technologies, sometimes they were simple (albeit lucrative) adjacencies to existing businesses.  There was an entire portion of the technology map that said 'here lie dragons' that we charged headfirst into to be first to market with each new innovation.

It is time to Invent and Create again, however this time outside of the comfortable embrace of a large corporate sovereign.  Today is  my last day at Cisco.  I am both starting a new company (more on this soon)  as well as working with two other startups on helping them with their technology strategy and go-to-market. 

Cisco is an excellent company, the best I have ever worked for.  John Chambers and his executive staff are some of the most brilliant people I have come into contact with, bar none.  As is the case at good universities and working with top researchers from MIT, Stanford, and the Santa Fe Insitute, working at Cisco is an addiction for mental adrenaline junkies.  You are always pushing yourself to do better, think faster, be smarter than the Mensa co-workers of yours.  It will be a form of withdrawl to wean myself from the daily interactions with that group of such amazing people as well as the access that the 'Cisco' business card could grant me to some of the best 'outside' thinkers on the planet.  I hope I am able to stay in touch with them.

Moving forward, look for more detailed updates on the new businesses and how I manage to balance work and actually being physically present for my wife and daughters. 

Comments

[Oliver]

All the best for your new 'projects'. Hope our path will cross again.

[francois]

I wish you the best

[Rick Sauter]

Christian: Very exciting news! It was great to briefly work with you & the great team there at Cisco on last year's conference with my old company, BPCC. I know you will have great success in your new venture and look forward to hearing more as you move forward.

Best wishes,
Rick Sauter

[Eric Tully]

Christian: I'm very interested to hear about the new company. Note to self: call broker, dump Cisco.

[epredator]

Good luck, I really look forward to seeing what you are up to. I guess us corporate (and ex-corporate) metaverse evangelists will bump into one another.
Take care there, now you can drop that SL Cisco surname ;-)