John Chambers, former chairman & CEO of Cisco and CEO of JC2 Ventures, talks with John Furrier @furrier from his home in Palo Alto, CA. #JohnChambers #JC2Ventures #Mayfield #SiliconValley #theCUBE https://siliconangle.com/2018/12/06/lessons-ibm-wang-labs-startups-will-write-next-chapter-john-chambers-cisco-guestoftheweek/ Lessons from IBM and Wang: Startups will write next chapter for John Chambers after Cisco Clutching his fishing pole, the six-year-old boy was swept along the rapids of a raging West Virginia river. Only fate and the calming words of his own father nearby would coalesce to save Cisco Systems Inc.’s future leader. It was a near-death experience that John Chambers (pictured) would not soon forget. A perilous day on the river would prepare Cisco’s chief executive for the dot-com bust in 2001, when a quarter of the company’s customers simply disappeared and the firm’s market capitalization lost nearly $400 billion. “When disaster strikes, how you handle that determines who you are in the future,” said Chambers, who described how his father finally fished him out of the cold water. “Then you know what he did? He put me right back in the rapids and let me do it myself.” From a near-death experience on a raging river in West Virginia to navigating the treacherous waters of the technology industry, John Chambers’ story is one of a life in full. A great deal of his career’s lessons and views on the tech industry are chronicled in the Cisco chairman emeritus’ latest book, “Connecting the Dots: Lessons for Leadership in a Startup World.” Chambers discussed his latest venture, past experiences with two major tech firms before joining Cisco, the value of mentorship, and the state of Silicon Valley with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at Chambers’ home in Palo Alto, California, as part of the Mayfield People First series. (* Disclosure below.) This week, theCUBE features John Chambers as its Guest of the Week. Commitment to startups At the age of 69, Chambers insists he has not retired, preferring instead to describe his current endeavor as “the next chapter.” He is the founder and chief executive officer of JC2 Ventures, an investment firm devoted to capitalizing on new technologies incubated by fledgling entrepreneurs. JC2 has already made a series of investments in startup companies, ranging from Aspire Food Group, a firm that farms palm weevil larvae and raises food-grade crickets on a commercial scale, to Rubrik Inc., a cloud data management company. “I’m into the startup world now,” Chambers said. “This is where the innovation is going to come from.” In addition to his investment role, Chambers has also returned to his boyhood roots and recently funded a startup engine in the College of Business and Economics at West Virginia University. The gift will form a philanthropic venture capital fund to support startup innovation and create a new Center for Artificial Intelligence Management. Having seen the significant role in fostering startups and innovation played by universities within the Silicon Valley community, Chambers is seeking to duplicate that model in his home state. “How do we take the tremendous prosperity and growth in Silicon Valley and make it more uniform across the country?” Chambers asked. “At the core of almost every great startup engine is a really world-class university. They have to set the pace.” Missed opportunities Chambers’ interest in the startup community stems from personal experience and the lessons he learned while working inside major technology firms before taking the helm at Cisco. What he saw was that the window for true innovation opens and closes rapidly and some of the biggest firms in the world can be blinded by success. In the 1970s, IBM Corp. was riding high. Mainframes had emerged as the powerhouse tool for running the enterprise, and “Big Blue” was widely viewed as the gold standard. But when a fledgling company named Microsoft Inc. came calling for an operating system to run microcomputers, IBM’s management made the fateful decision to cede control of the software to the Seattle-based company run by a young engineer named Bill Gates. Chambers worked at IBM as a salesman from the mid-1970s until 1982. “I watched IBM and mainframes, and then I watched them miss on going to the minicomputer and then miss in terms of the internet,” Chambers said. History would repeat itself at Chambers’ next company, Wang Laboratories. The Boston-based firm had risen to become a major player in the office minicomputer market by the early 1980s. At one point more than 80 percent of the 2,000 largest companies in the U.S. used Wang equipment. ... Here’s the complete video interview, another in a series of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Mayfield People First event. (Disclosure: TheCUBE’s coverage of the Mayfield People First event is presented by Mayfield Fund LLC.)