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 meet young women I will go out of my way to help them, but that was never my cause. Some of that is because my mother was a very strong feminist. When I went into the workplace I probably downplayed that part because I watched my mother so actively. In her generation she had to be in order to get where she was. We three sisters have come to realize we are all the same way, which is that we have an incredible drive and a continual commitment to learning.

SM: Where did you business acumen come from?

JE: That is the part that was a surprise. There was nothing in my upbringing that intersected with the business world. Both of my parents were academics. When I ended up getting more interested in entrepreneurship and the business side, I found that I really loved technology but what I really loved doing was solving problems in general. The reason I love managing, developing people and creating companies is that it is all about problem solving.

I am not a nerd. My definition of a nerd is someone who likes computers more than people. Although I have a strong technology background and like technology, I love interacting with people more. I view technology as a way to solve problems people have. I had that mindset when I was an engineer as well as when I was involved in the marketing and sales.

When Bill and I co-founded all of these different companies, in the first couple he was CEO and I was executive vice president. At the second company I became CEO partway through and at the third company I was CEO. That was the company that Cisco bought. We pretty much ran the companies together.

SM: Let’s talk about the founding situation of Bridge and what was going on in your environment that got you to the idea for Bridge.

JE: At Zilog I was involved with the first commercial local area network. At the time we had not standardized on Ethernet. People did not understand the power of hooking computers together. We were starting to see companies popping up with different, incompatible technologies and the idea behind Bridge was to interconnect those disparate networks. When Bill and I first conceived of the idea, it was based on the need to interconnect those different technologies, but as we started to flesh out the business plan and talk about it, we realized there was not enough of an install base of networks to have enough of a business to interconnect those networks. We adjusted the business plan and even though we kept the name Bridge and products that were bridges and routers, we decided our first part of the business would be to sell communication servers that actually created the networks themselves. It was critical.

This is something entrepreneurs need to think about in the business planning phase. We were very passionate about this idea of interconnecting networks and nobody was focusing on it. However, we were not so passionate and so fixated on it that we were not willing to realize it would take longer to develop and that it was too ahead of its time. We kept that as our vision, but managed to add some products in and managed to build a product that could easily do both from a hardware perspective by changing the software and interfaces, which was a critical part of what ended up being Bridge’s success. Cisco talks about shipping the first router, but in fact Bridge shipped the first router.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Legendary Entrepreneur and Author Judy Estrin
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