Scott McNealy | Co-Founder and Former CEO of Sun Microsystems

This episode delves into the personal and professional life of Scott McNealy, exploring his entrepreneurial journey and the lessons learned from sports and business.

1. Sports can significantly influence business acumen, particularly in terms of discipline, strategy, and resilience.
2. Entrepreneurial success often requires a blend of competitive spirit and innovative thinking, as demonstrated by McNealy's approach with Sun Microsystems.
3. Effective leadership is characterized by a mix of individual responsibility and teamwork, mirroring many competitive sports.
4. Educational and professional backgrounds deeply impact one's business strategies and outlook.
5. The cultural and operational dynamics within a company, such as Sun Microsystems, can significantly affect its success and employee satisfaction.

1: Introduction

Overview of Scott McNealy’s background and the episode focus. Brief discussion on the impact of sports on leadership and business. Scott McNealy: "There are a lot of parallels between golf and business—both require discipline and mental toughness."

2: Early Life and Education

McNealy discusses his childhood, educational path, and early influences that shaped his character and professional outlook. Scott McNealy: "I got good grades because I was scared of not knowing answers in class."

3: Founding Sun Microsystems

In-depth look at the origins of Sun Microsystems, its culture, and the technological innovations it pioneered. Scott McNealy: "We couldn't out-market the big players, so we had to out-innovate them."

4: Leadership and Culture

McNealy shares insights on his leadership style, company culture at Sun Microsystems, and his views on corporate and personal responsibility. Scott McNealy: "Personal responsibility and competitiveness are crucial in business."

5: Reflections and Advice

McNealy reflects on his career, offers advice to aspiring entrepreneurs, and discusses the future of technology and business. Scott McNealy: "Innovate continuously and maintain the agility to adapt to new challenges."

1. Embrace the lessons from personal interests and hobbies as they can offer valuable insights into professional endeavors.
2. Cultivate a competitive spirit not just to excel but to bring innovation and resilience into your work.
3. Foster a team-oriented environment while encouraging individual responsibility among team members.
4. Remain adaptive and open to learning, leveraging both successes and failures for growth.
5. Engage with your work and your team genuinely to build a fulfilling and impactful career.

Scott McNealy stands as a prominent figure in the tech industry, celebrated for his role as the co-founder and former CEO of Sun Microsystems. Established in 1982, Sun Microsystems quickly rose to prominence in Silicon Valley, renowned for its groundbreaking computer hardware, software, and network computing solutions. Its transformative contributions, such as Unix workstations and the Java programming language, left an indelible mark on the tech landscape before its acquisition by Oracle in 2010.

After 22 years as CEO of Sun Microsystems, Scott stepped down and co-founded WayIn, a social intelligence and visualization company, and played a crucial role in shaping its direction.

Beyond his corporate ventures, Scott has been deeply involved in philanthropic and educational initiatives. He co-founded Curriki, an online platform providing free educational resources to students and educators worldwide.

As Chairman Emeritus of LittleHorse, Scott continues to be engaged in the tech ecosystem, offering guidance and support to emerging companies. Additionally, his role as an Operating Partner at Flume Ventures underscores his dedication to fostering innovation and supporting startups in their journey to success.

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Scott McNealy

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Pat

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Posh

That way you get notified when new episodes drop. You can also follow us on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn at the founderour let's get into it.

Scott McNealy, welcome to the podcast. We're excited to have you here. You know, before we get into your story and obviously your entrepreneurial journey, you've mentioned before that you were a golf major back in college more than anything else. And I know your son is a professional golfer, PGA Tour he finished top ten in the Players championship this past weekend. So congrats to him and congrats to you.

And just wanted to kind of talk about that for a second because I think there are a lot of parallels with golf and business and entrepreneurship and leadership. So I'm just curious, your experience with golf and how that has impacted your personal life and professional life. Well, I started golfing because my dad, who was vice chairman of American Motors, president of AMF, ran an ad agency. He was a weekend golfer, and he worked a million hours during the week and even on Saturdays. And if I wanted to be with him, I would get up and go with him and I'd pull his pull cart and watch him play golf.

Scott McNealy

And I literally remember having to jump up to grab the handle on the pole cart. To give you an idea of how old I was, there were a couple of elevated tees that had a little creek down at the bottom, and if I could just grab his driver and top the ball about 6ft it would roll off the front and down into the creek, and he'd go, oh, no, you lost my golf ball. And I would just giggle. And I just sort of fell in love with the game, losing my dad's golf balls. And it was a way to spend time with him.

And so obviously, when I had my family and had four boys, you know, I hit him in the shins with a baseball bat anytime they picked up a baseball glove. And I popped all the soccer balls and said, boys, you're going to play hockey and golf, because that's what I do. Love it. How did they take that? They didn't know any better.

I mean, sometimes, you know, we'd go to the driving range for brunch on the weekends, and invariably, every now and then, one of the four was, I don't want to hit golf balls. So we'd all get out of the car and we say, just stay in the car. We're gonna go hit golf balls. And we'd all have fun aiming at the ball picker upper. And I'd bring out food for all the boys that were hitting balls and stuff.

And after a while, the fourth one would come out and start hitting balls and laugh and have a good time. I never made them do it. I just said, sure, stay in the car. And sometimes they'd go, I don't want to play hockey tonight. I don't want to go out.

I go, okay, well, just go in and tell your coach you don't want to play hockey, no problem. And they go. They grab their bag and go inside. I never made them do anything. Yeah, but, you know, in terms of, like, parallels with business, do you see any, like, you know, there's obviously the patience aspect, you know, like, I mean, just, you have to have incredible patience, I feel like, to be a good golfer, but I'm just curious, in your perspective.

Well, I think those two sports teach you a lot of disciplines that you need. But my, my dad always said, you know, show me a b student who's a really competitive athlete, and I'll take that over the a student any time, just because of the ability to compete. And golf is an interesting sport. It's very individual. It's very.

You need mental courage. It's proactive. So you have to pull the trigger. It's a round ball. It's not moving.

So it's very process oriented, very disciplined, meticulous, repetitive, and you're all alone. You can't blame anybody because you're the only one hitting the ball, and everybody else is on the same golf course with the same rolls, same equipment, same day. Hockey, on the other hand, is physically courageous. You got to go in the corner and get crunched by some canadian who wants to knock your american brains out. And it is very reactive.

Puck is not round. It bounces funny, and it's a team thing. And so you sort of have plays, but you sort of don't. You got to improvise, but you better be good in the locker room or nobody's going to pass you the puck. So they're very, very different sports, but they teach you a lot of skills, a lot of mental and physical courage.

And by the way, being a CEO of a global company, you better be in good shape or you're going to get worn out. It is a grueling, grueling thing. Sort of like anybody who's had four boys knows that raising four boys is physical exercise. If you're going to raise boys and run a company, you better be in pretty darn good shape. So I think sports and competitiveness and teamwork and personal responsibility are all huge traits that I look for in anybody at any level in a business situation.

Pat

Scott, you obviously, you know, when somebody googles you, and they could obviously read a lot about you, so, you know, we try our best to ask questions beyond a Google search. You know, they'll see that you attended Harvard, you attended Stanford. But tell anybody I attended Harvard. I. Sorry, you went to school back east.

Scott McNealy

All I do is write, defund Harvard about every third day. Okay, well, I. Maybe, Pat, we could bleep out what I just said and what. The H word is an ugly word. Just kidding.

Pat

But what were you like as a younger kid? Right? Like, were you. I mean, clearly you had good grades. You clearly were able to get into these top institutions.

But talk to us a little bit about what you were like as a child. Well, I actually got good grades because I was scared to death of getting called on and not knowing the answer and being embarrassed. So it was a huge insecurity. Only the most secure can do nothing people. I mean, I couldn't hang out on a beach because if I spend all day on the beach, I say, what did I get done today?

Scott McNealy

Did I move the ball forward? And that's an insecurity that I'm stuck with. And I think most of my four boys inherited. And so I actually had a teacher in my senior year who said, you know, why did you choose to get an a and do A's amount of work and then not do it and then get a c? What do you do?

Why are you working hard? And just screamed at me. And I had never really thought about it, and I thought, well, mainly because I don't want to be embarrassed. And I'd already gotten into the h word by then, and.

Yeah, right. He said, don't do it unless you want to do it. Don't do it because somebody else wants you to do it or you're worried you'll embarrass yourself. Don't live life that way. Huge breakthrough for me.

And all of a sudden, I went to college, and I slept in through most of my classes because they were boring, they were stupid, and I didn't need to get a's, and I wasn't learning stuff, and I couldn't wait to get out. I worked summers for Roger Penske, starting off at a buck 75 an hour, washing cars in his Southfield, Michigan, Chevy dealership. Working for Harold. It took me two weeks to understand his accent, and he thought I was the dumbest kid he'd ever seen. Until finally I started to understand what he was saying.

And by the end of it, we were best friends. I opened the car dealership in the morning and closed it every night. I was working 70, 80, 90 hours a week and loving it. Working in the races on the weekend, changing tires to wheels in the back of the pits, driving with all these guys, and they're all older than me. I'm a teenager.

They overfed me and over drank me. I mean, it was just, like, the most unbelievable. I just loved, loved, loved working. And if you read my high school yearbook, and it's out there in 1972, I'm referred to. Scott McNeely's shy and unassuming manner won him a wealth of friends.

And most people now, I mean, those who know me well know I'm shy, but those who see me in the business contact would not say I'm shy and unassuming. Brash was kind of my middle name, and I only did that because we were a tiny company and we couldn't afford to out market Intel, Microsoft, IBM, HP. So I had to out sound bite them to get the people to write about us and feature us and let me get on stage and do my rant. So it's a little bit like politics today. Yeah, only we didn't lie like that.

Pat

It's a whole different problem. And we were actually giving the customer something of value in return for taking their money. And they took our money. They gave us their money voluntarily. It wasn't absconded as.

Scott McNealy

I mean, I don't have any choice. I don't even own my homes, because if I don't pay the government, they'll take it away. We'll talk about that later down. Because I know there's a lot of. My shy and unassuming manner, I guess, isn't always there.

Posh

You talk about loving to work and not really being interested in the classes you were taking besides sports. What were some other interests or things that fired you up that maybe you thought this could be a good career for me down the line? I was in the band. I was most valuable member of the band. But I sat next to this guy who played the saxophone, and he made it sing, and I made it honk.

Scott McNealy

And that's, you know, as hard as I tried, I would love to. I still think I'm, you know, I can sing like Willie Nelson, but I can't hear it. And I realized that, and I made a good choice washing cars. So there's not really. My dad was a businessman.

I used to sit at his seat, sit by his chair at night when he was having his cocktail and reading his briefcase. And that was back in the days. Most people don't know what BCC means. It's blind carbon copy. And I would read the BCC memos, the CC memos, and I would see what he wrote down.

I would read what he threw away. And I just loved it. And I would go in on Saturdays when he'd work, I'd sit by and listen to the phone calls he made. And, I don't know, it was kind of weird. I just loved it.

And I loved my first. I just loved everything about him. The first thing I do when I got to Penske Chevrolet is I'd get the hand pusher out, and I'd push the sweeper all across the entire multi acre lot. And Roger would come in an hour later, and never did he ever come in and find a cigarette butt. That was our.

That was our game. And he'd go, look around. I'd say, find one, roger. And he goes, nope. And that interesting loop on that story.

I walked into the GE board as a board member many, many years later, and Roger and I are on the same GE board. So it's kind of a fun circle of life there. That's awesome. You know, growing up where you grew. Up, I think I saw Indiana and then Michigan and sort of that area.

Posh

What was, like, the state of computers and technology? Was this something that you, like, fell into, or did it come later? Later in life? We didn't have to. I'm an old guy.

Scott McNealy

I'm 69 years old right now. We didn't have answering machines. We didn't have e bikes. We didn't have. I mean, alarm clocks were wind up.

So you had facts. I didn't. I didn't use it. And somebody had it. Somebody had fax, we had rotary phones.

I remember getting our first tv, and it was round, it had no clicker, and we had a degaussing coil, and it had bunny ears on the top that you had to move around to get one of the three stations. So that's the kind of electronics that we had when I grew up. So we all had bikes. We all had Schwinn bikes. And we'd get up in the morning.

I'm giving you summer. Or when we get up and ride to school and come back, or on the summers, we take off on our bike with a gang of the local kids, and we go from house to house getting food or something to drink, or we go out into the woods, and heaven forbid, we played cops and robbers and army war and fake shooting at each other all day long. And as far as I know, all those kids turned out pretty good doing all that stuff. We drank out of garden hoses and all those things that you don't do now. So just.

I really, really loved the fact that we made up our own games our own day. We were totally self directed. And mom said, if you don't get home by dark, you know, your butts in a sling. That was her. That was her comment.

Were your parents. Were your parents strictly. My dad worked so hard. I never really saw him, hardly, except, you know, that's why I wanted to do golf. My mom tried to be strict, and she said, where's my yardstick?

And we always knew where it was. So we'd run and get it and break it in four pieces, throw it on the floor and run away. She'd be screaming at us. She was great. She hollered at us.

She loved us. She cracked down on us when we deserved it. But it was, you know, it wasn't. There was. It was three boys, and then four years later, a daughter.

So while she was raising and taking care of the daughter, we were hellions. I mean, just hellions. I mean, it was so fun. And we did things that you just shouldn't do. Nobody knows this, but we took my dad's twelve gauge and got Johnny, who lived down the street, who claimed his daddy killed Hitler.

Anyhow, that's just a little lore. And we got shotgun shells from there because my dad was smart not to leave any shotgun shells in. We went out and there was this beehive about the size of five big watermelons hanging in the tree. And we were all eight to twelve. And my brother put the shotgun on his chest, really, not even his shoulder.

And my brother staring down the thing and I'm lookout and we have the gang there. And he goes, blaming shotgun. Does cartwheels over and he does cartwheels backwards. My younger brother can't hear. He's going, what?

What, what? And everybody else starts running. And then the bees come out. And it was just wild. We left the gun out there for about two weeks and we.

Cause we were so scared to go even near it. And we come back and the gunmetal black shotgun is now a brilliant orange rust. We snuck it back into my dad's case and in the fall when he came to go hunting, he thought, oh, I didn't oil it enough. But we told him seven years later when the statute of limitations, how much. Of what you were like as a kid just kind of like free.

Pat

I don't want to call it fully free, but just like, you know, what you just described, how much of that personality and character applied to and applies to who you were like in business. You know, I don't know. I raised four boys, and it's hard to say how much is nature and how much is nurture. My four boys are all very different, but yet they're all very similar. I'd say they're all more similar than they are different.

Scott McNealy

And if they grow up with you, you can spot the differences.

I just think it's mostly nature. I mean, my grandfather was one of the top surgeons in the world in an open heart surgery. He was named Cook county chief of surgery. And if you go to the northwestern hospital on the second floor, they still have a little museum area in honor of Raymond William McNeely senior, who was one of the great surgeons. I was jogging in Chicago early after business school, and I'm talking to a doctor and he goes, we started talking and I go, have you heard of my grandfather?

He goes, oh, yeah, there's a tool named after him that I still use in surgery. And so, you know, and then my father was, you know, an amazing executive. Did you aspire to be like him when you grew up, like head of a big company? No, I actually saw how hard he worked. And this is a true story.

So when it came time for Vinod and myself to decide who became CEO, I said, I want to be number two in the organ. I work for people really well. I take orders. I get it done. I can build teamwork with everybody.

And I saw how hard my dad worked and he didn't spend any time with his kids. And I don't want to be there. I don't want to be that responsibility. And if I'm going to be the boss, I got to outwork everybody in the company. So I don't want to do it.

Vinod took over. He left after two years. They asked me to take over temporarily. And I said, all right, go find somebody. They found somebody.

And then they had a vote of my staff and it was eleven to nothing. They wanted to keep me, not the new guy they were going to bring in. And so I said, let me go. I went and I talked to my mom and I said, what do you think I should do? She said, you just do it for a year or two.

And 20 some years later I said, I'm not here. That was mainly because my boys were two, four, six and eight. And I didn't want to leave my wife home alone with four boys while I'm traveling around the world and coming home exhausted. And I didn't think that it was fair for me. I wish I could have been as smart as, say, Larry Ellison and hire a Safra Katz and delegate and win America's cups while I'm being us.

I'm just not that good. I'm an okay CEO. I'm a good CEO. Those guys are great CEO's that are doing what they ever doing. And Larry is my hero for, you know, what he's been able to do.

Posh

Well, you were CEO for a long time, 22 years, I believe, which is a very long time for anyone to be CEO. Must have been pretty good. And I basically, you know, I gave them my resignation letter the day I became CEO and they never turned it in. So finally I just said, hey, guys, I'm out. I'll do chairman.

Scott McNealy

And then Oracle came in and bought us. Scott, I'm curious, you know, you sound like someone that had a pretty normal upbringing and you weren't someone that was like a computer geek or anything like that. And so to have started such a formative business in the sort of tech industry in Silicon Valley and all that, I'm just curious, the inception of it, right. You mentioned Vinod Khosla, who's your co founder. When you guys came together, what was the idea?

Posh

Like, what did, what was the opportunity you saw and why did you think, you know, this is something I want to spend my days doing. I don't get credit for, for doing that. Vinod gets credit for the idea. He and I were best friends in business school, mainly because we kept running into each other at the end of the parties and, and by running in, you mean like, we were the last two at the party. So that's.

Pat

You guys had a good. You. So you guys knew how to have a good time. Yeah, so we had fun. And anyhow, after we started microsystems, we started two companies.

Scott McNealy

One was called the data dump, and it didn't do very well. And the other one was called Sun Microsystems. But it was his idea. He came from Daisy systems, which had built engineering workstations for CAD. And he said, why don't we.

We met Andy Bechtlesheim. He met him, we went over to visit him at Stanford, and he had invented the Stanford University network and sun workstation. We said, let's go start a company. And I said, no, I got a job. I'm making $40,000 a year.

And they said, vinod says, you can't back out on me now. And I go, all right. So I went in and quit the next day, and the three of us started, and then we got Bill Joy on board as the other co founder. And, you know, it just took off. But it wasn't, I was just, I did manufacturing and sales, and I built the storeroom and assembled the racks, and I labeled and came up with a numbering system because I had manufacturing, a little manufacturing background.

Pat

What was the, what was the idea? Like day one when Vinod approached you? I mean, what was Sun Microsystems going to be? So the sun workstation, which Andy had invented at Stanford, was because he wanted to do computer work, but everybody had to share vaxs, VAX 1011 or tens or whatever. I can't remember what they are anymore.

Scott McNealy

There are many computers, and the phrase at that time was go in at 04:00 a.m. And they're still slow. So microprocessors were just coming on the scene. TCP IP was a brand new protocol. In fact, we're the first company to ever put IP, TCP IP on every computer we shipped.

It was just in the days of the new bitmap displays and Unix was of a big deal and in the first open operating system, so a lot of really good things were coming together. Andy was just brilliant. I mean, most what Steve Jobs was to consumer electronics, Andy is to industrial electronics. Everything runs through some sort of Andy designed, whether it's Cisco or. I can't remember all the names of the companies he started.

Granite and Juniper, I think it is, and son and all these. He's just a genius. And he put all the right things together on a single motherboard. Now, it didn't work. He had race conditions everywhere and all the rest of it, because he just pushed the edges and the boundaries of everything.

But anyhow, we took this board, and Vinod and I sketched out a metal box that we put it in, and we ordered all the parts. And I assembled the first 15 myself. And I didn't know what a disk drive did or I knew nothing about computers, except ten months before, I'd gotten placed into a company called Onyx, and I was manufacturing manager for the first company to put Unix on a microprocessor. So I had a ten month Runway of learning, and I was actually going to the local.

What's it called, the mini college, or the local college there. And I was taking AC DC electricity lessons at night, trying to learn, you know, so I didn't electrocute myself and I could talk to the engineers and all the rest of it. And I've never really programmed anything except I used Vi for those people in the Unix world to create our bill of materials. And our first ERP was. Was basically a word editor that I used.

Pat

So, Scott, what I'm wondering is, you know, you're. You're obviously, you know, you're friends with Vinod. He approaches you with this idea. It sounds like, you know, some stuff, but not, like, enough, as much as Vinod or Andy to, you know, make. I mean, like, it just sounds like you weren't in a place that you knew what they were building.

Is that fair to say? I mean, did you know? No. I knew PCs were a thing, so this was a pc for engineers. I get that.

Scott McNealy

And it was way more powerful, way more expensive. I just grew up in the car business, and I remember the cars were selling for seven, $8,000. And you had to put all this money in. And I asked them, what is this little pizza box sell for? And they go, $20,000.

I go, what are the bills of materials cost? I go, about $2,500. I said, that's stealing. I knew there was money there to be made. So that got me excited, and so I quit my nice job at Onyx.

Pat

Did you think it was going to. Be a successful product? Well, we found out pretty quickly that as soon as they found out that we had bill, Joy, and Andy, we had professors from around the world calling us saying, can you send me three? How much? Are they okay?

Scott McNealy

I'll take two. And we were just like, booking orders over the phone without any outbound whatever. Now, we knew when we put this together, Andy wanted to do the company because he couldn't make him himself fast enough in his dorm room. And when I came over saying, hey, I'm building 200 onyx boxes a month, he said, all right, I'm in. The note had been at an engineering workstation company, so it was all sort of magical.

And then we got Bill Joy on as the Unix guru of all time, and it just took off from there. We were founded in February 24, 1982, and in May we went profitable. That will never be done by a hardware company ever again. That's insane. Yeah.

Posh

And the fact that you guys all came together at this time, each of you had your own really interesting skillset to apply to. This is pretty fascinating. And I always think about this era of 1982 and on in these early years of Silicon Valley, and you have Apple and Microsoft and Silicon graphics and all these companies. And I'm just curious, you know, being there at the time, it seems like it was probably like a really fun, like, competitive place to be. Was it like that?

Or how did you. I do a lot of advisory work. And I just look at these folks who are trying to be CEO in this world today, and the constraints and the rules and the. I don't even know.

Scott McNealy

It's weird. It's not even like regulations. It's just the way you have to act and be and think. We had so much fun. We had, I mean, this is.

This would be. We had beer bus. I'd stand on a chair every Friday, tell them all the great things. They're going, what we're going to go do. And we had beer and people were drinking.

And one of my favorite moments is we knew the guy in shipping was with the secretary in the closet. And I said, everybody be quiet. I'm going to announce that the beer bust is closed. I'm going to turn off all the lights and I'm going to say really loudly over the PA beer bus. So we did it.

And sure enough, about 40 seconds later, these guys come out buttoning their clothes up and the whole place went nuts. It was like, nobody got fired. Nobody was offended, nobody was, you know, it built. And if you talk to former sun employees, I think you will find more than any other place, they say that was just absolute fun.

We rented the Marriott Desert Springs down in Palm Springs, because this was when the company was really big and we had 4000 people there or something. And I, as CEO, these were all the best sales and marketing people in the company there. They're there with their spouses or significant others to have fun. So I stayed away, and I would stay up in my room and let them enjoy the event. Well, I'm checking out, and the lady behind the counter is going, are you Scott McIlie?

I go, yeah. And her screen is flashing. I can see it flashing. She goes, don't move. And she brings her manager out, and her manager comes stomping around the corner, and she goes, are you Scott McLean, CEO?

I go, yes. What seems to be the problem? She says, I don't ever want you to come back to my place. You are forbidden. This company is done.

I go, I'm sort of smiling. Was it like a public enemy number one, like, thing flashing on her screen? Yeah. Do not let this guy check out without letting me yell at him. So I said, what was the problem?

They were drunk the whole time. They were loud. They were throwing things. They threw all those neon bracelets and necklaces up in the trees so it looked like Christmas. All the other guests were complaining that they didn't sleep.

Then you had a arabian nights party by the pool that we set up, and it turned into a food fight. Apparently, there were about 50 cornish game hens in air at any moment in time. And I'm trying not to laugh, and she says, but the straw that really broke the camel's back was when you pushed the live camel into the pool. And at that point, I just said, oh, I'm so sorry. I had to just walk away.

And I just said, at that moment, we're going to make our numbers next year, because every significant other is going to tell their mate, you're not coming home till you've made club for next year, because I'm not missing it next year. And that was just the way it was. It was just a very, very different era. Proud dad moment. Oh, my God.

I was shocked. It's exactly what, this is exactly what. I wanted my kids to do. Cornish game, hands in the air. I would always tell my employees when I would do one on ones or radio shows or whatever.

I said, listen, you're going to spend more hours here working than any other activity you do, including sleep, hobbies, family, whatever. Just add it up. If you're working 40, 50, 60 hours a week, and if you're not having fun at sun, you're blowing your life. You're messing it up. I said, so if you're not having fun, write down the five reasons you're not having fun.

The five solutions, go sit down with your boss and say, scott says I'm supposed to have fun. Here's my solutions to it. You got to take responsibility for having fun. And I never. I mean, we had our 1st April Fool's Day pranks where they put somebody's car in the bottom of a shark tank because we had the spark station one, so we called it the shark station one.

And they put Bill Joy's car, Ferrari, out on the pond, and they put a golf course in my office with traps and, you know, with a flag. And then they gave me a golf cart. So I'm driving a golf cart down the aisles of the cubes, and you can't turn. So I was taking. I was taking cubes out.

I mean, they're just like demolishing them and having a ball, and they're videotaping this. And it was always on the front page of the San Jose Mercury News, and everybody wanted to work there. We had an epic water fight. Water balloon fight. Yeah.

Posh

You know, this kind of really paints a picture of. I was going to ask, like, what your leadership style was, but, you know, it really paints a picture of what kind of culture you're building. And I feel like that's super important to note because you obviously attracted a lot of brilliant people and had a lot of great, obviously, like, inventions that were built within sun microsystems throughout the years, one being Java and some of these other like things. And I'm just. Solaris NFS.

Yeah. You know, and so speaking of all these innovations that we're done. I'm just curious, in the simplest way possible for those listening who might not be as technologically savvy, just give us a bit of a high level of how these things play a role in our world today. Well, Twitter is basically almost all written in Java, the Unix Linux operating systems. So many of the features were started by Bill Joy, who brought that to the VAX world while he was at Berkeley, and then he brought it to the microprocessor.

Scott McNealy

Sun was a pioneer in RISC architectures, which is a huge architecture. And we did multi threading, which is now kind of standard process very early or earlier. The TCP IP protocol is still how every. It's the lower level communication level for basically every computer device out there, wireless and wireless. So it's, you know, just.

I'll be a little snarky or whatever, but we had Facebook move into our headquarters, and they kept a little emblazoned etched sun logo there, which I think is way cooler than the Facebook logo on the windows. And they. And definitely cooler than the meta logo. Yeah. So they asked Zuckerberg, so why.

Why do you leave that on there? Why don't you take that down? He goes, because I want everybody to understand what can happen when you don't pay attention. And I'm like, oh, and there's not one son employee who just doesn't grind. Like, like, what are you doing?

So great getting people to waste time and feel bad about being on Facebook. So did you just want to drive. That golf cart through his office? No, you know, he's done well. I'm a capitalist, and good for him.

I just wish he hadn't spent $400 million in Georgia. But I digress. So my leadership style was very participative, not consensus. It was, let's have fun. I don't care where you come from.

Some people call me and want to nail me as a frat boy, but, you know, I had no lawsuits, no discrimination lawsuits. We got one about a year into it, and the department asked me to send a list of all our employees names. 90% of them were unique, pronounceable to a normal person back in that day. And they just said, case closed. And sun has.

They did a survey, and sun is significantly higher than any other company in the last 2030 years of generating or spawning a. What do you call unicorn? CEO. More than HP deck, IBM, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, any of them. So we just had a culture that scaled and, yeah, call me frat boy.

I don't care. I didn't belong to a frat, but we didn't care. We brought a guy in from Dec, and he didn't like the fact that John Gilmore, who's very famous, very accomplished, very. I mean, he'd be another good guy for you to have on your show. Just one of my favorite humans.

He would wear a skirt to program in the back. And this guy from Dex, we would bring customers around, and I knew that when I brought a customer and there was a guy with a skirt with long hair and a scraggly beard programming. They'd look. I go, yeah. He programs the new Motorola 16 bit microprocessor.

And they would go, whoa. And so that's what they look like. He's smart, and he wanted him to take a. And we had. He changed our dress code because our dress code was, you must.

If you didn't wear clothes, we'd send you home to get dressed and you come back. But I didn't care. Which just cover up a little bit. But I told I don't care. I said, john, why are you wearing a skirt?

He goes, well, it gets hot back here. Your machine's under the desk, and it just stays cooler when I'm wearing a desk. Okay, I won't ask any more questions, John. So anyhow, they, we brought this guy in to be president, to kind of be the adult in the room, and he changed the dress code. And so a couple weeks later, we had Halloween party, and John Gilmore came in in a beautiful old lame spaghetti strap dress.

And the poor president couldn't do anything about it because it was Halloween. But he, he didn't last long. And then we went back to the you must dress dress code. And it's just the way we were. And, yeah.

Posh

So you're having all this fun. Why, why did you eventually step down in, I think, 2006? Well, you know, when you get bigger and you have socks 404, and you go to the business council and this is. Legislation is on there because Enron happened, and Enron broke all kinds of rules. And so then they want to put a whole bunch more new rules in to put sand in the gears of capitalism.

Scott McNealy

And I'm a young kid among all these business council senior CEO's, and I stand up and I say, guys, we can't do this. There's no reason to. He broke rules that existed. Why put new rules in it? They'll break the next time when, you know, if somebody's going to break rules, they're going to break rules.

I said. And they said, scott, sit down. This is the time to turtle. And everybody in the room said, yes, this is the time to turtle. And we ended up with socks 404, which hasn't done anything except make the accountants and the lawyers, and I don't know who else happy, but it certainly hasn't made the investor happy or made the employee happy.

I went from having about three page, five pages in my board meetings that I would bring into my board meeting to review with my board, and I'd tell them everything that I'm doing wrong, because that's what I did at board meetings. And I tell them, you want to fire me? No, no, you're doing great. Go get them. Well, I was taking in stacks that were three, four inches high into board meetings, and I was signing these socks 404 documents that it would take me weeks to read.

And I had to sign them, and I would go to jail if it was wrong. So I was basically trusting my guys not to set me up. And it's just, you know, life got life just got less fun in the pinata. And then I had four amazing boys at home and a beautiful wife who was doing her best. And I said to myself, I never.

My dad never saw anything that I did. He never saw any of my sporting. He saw one hockey game only my entire life, and I hit the goal post and I didn't score. And I was not going to have my boys say, dad didn't see me score because I saw all of them. Yeah, this might be a good time.

Posh

I saw on your Twitter slash xbio that you say you love taxpayers, capitalism and personal responsibility. And I'm just curious, can you elaborate on that and what you mean? Well, yeah, I think our government, we have a $7.4 trillion ruler, r u l e r, if they're ruling us, and they'll. Everybody says, well, the next election will change that. I don't know any time a $7.4 billion behemoth has ever gotten voted out of power.

Scott McNealy

So, you know, I appreciate people are taxpayers, but holy mackerel, there's something. Do you know when I was born, the federal budget was $70 billion? It's now 7 trillion plus and divide 7 trillion divided by 330 million. I can't even fathom that much money. I don't trillion.

I know billions, but even then, I don't know billions. I'm not a billionaire, even though Google says I am, and I can't fix that. Why would you fix it? Because everybody wants me to donate, and they go, you cheap bastard, you didn't donate. Too bad.

Whatever. It doesn't seem like. It doesn't seem like you give a shit.

You know what's happened in my lifetime? Gas was 2019 nine when I was first starting to drive a car in Detroit. And with all the advances in exploration, extraction, refinement, and delivery of gas, gas should be a nickel gallon. For those of you who don't know what a nickel is, that's five pennies or a very small percentage of a dollar, right? It should be a nickel.

Now, why is it not a nickel? Taxes, regulation, and devaluing of the dollar through something they call inflation. I call that devaluing of the dollar and printing money so that you can wildly pad your own pocketbook, do things corruptly, buy votes, and just stay in power. That's why you print money. Because if you took 7.4 trillion divided by 330 million people, dollar million people.

I don't even know what that number is, but I think it starts with a two. But I'm not sure what the rest of it is. Yeah. And then you went to every citizen and said, do you feel like you're getting this amount of value from your federal government, not counting the state and local governments? And I guarantee you even the most well compensated non elected official would say, I'm not getting anywhere near that value.

So where's all that money going? The GAO has no idea. Two days before the. I read somewhere, I don't know if it's true that we lost a trillion or $2 out in the defense department two days before the 911, and nobody talks about that. Enron, they lost bucket like thimblefuls compared to what the US government loses every day and has no idea where it is.

I read the GAO didn't even know where 115 of the didn't even know there were 115 organizations in the administration because I would be doing a perp walker. If I ran my books like the government runs their books, I would be in jail. I'd be guillotined. I mean, it would be the double standard. And yet they have all the power to take all of the money from.

You can't do anything in life without paying the. Paying the government. You can drive it. Just to close the loop on that math, it's $22,121. Yeah.

Ask people if they think that's what they're getting from the government. I don't feel like I'm getting that. So, Scott, I want to take it back a little bit. So I think, obviously, an unbelievably impressive career. Sun Microsystems, you know, has done great things, great exit we could talk about.

Pat

But I feel like there's different, you know, thoughts as to who should start a company or who should lead a company as CEO. You know, some might say, you know, you need to be an expert in that given field. You have to have kind of worked through the ranks, you know, been in different positions, kind of seen it all. And then there's the other, you know, maybe thought process and philosophy of, you. Know, you need to be a good leader.

You need to know who are the best people in the best positions, who are the experts in that field, who can I bring onto my team and trust them to do the work? It sounds like you were kind of the latter person, but in a field that was obviously very innovative and, you know, doing things that were, again, like creating new companies. Right. New companies were started off of your company's innovations. Talk to us a little bit about your leadership ability.

Not even just style, but how you learned, how you innovated, what kept you up at night. I would really like to hear more about that.

Scott McNealy

There are so many different styles, and most of the really good CEO's started very young because I think humans are most productive from, from puberty through 25 because that was most of our life expectancy in the biological twinkle of an eye. I mean, so blink of an eye. So I think when you don't have all the other things in your way and you can focus, I think all of the real creativity, courageousness and energy comes from young people. And you look at Steve Jobs, you look at Michael Dell, you look at the Zuckerberg, you look at the Google boys, you look at all of the folks. Jeff was an old guy when he started.

Was he 30?

I think youth and testosterone or estrogen or whatever it takes that you have at that age and not as many constraints, makes you very, very more likely to be able to do that. It's true in art, it's true in athletics. It's true in math. It's true in so many different areas of creativity. Now, when you look at the different types, I'm not Steve Jobs, I'm not Elon Musk, I'm not Larry Ellison, and they aren't each other.

They're all very, very different, too. And so I don't think there's any formula, and there's no single thing. I think you could ask each one what drug. I saw Elon Musk's mom, and there's. She's amazing.

And may musk, Elon Musk's mom. Yeah, he was amazing. And so I think I have some good bloodlines in me. That helped. I think that I have a huge amount of insecurity.

I can't do nothing. Now, the good news, I think I have strong character. So if you have insecurity with strong character, it tends to do good things. Insecurity with bad characters. And you get, you know, people who break the rules or hurt people, you know?

Posh

You know, to be someone who is in a leadership position at such a young age, like you said in those prime years, you know, you almost have to start a business to be able to be in that position. I mean, if you want to climb the corporate ladder, forget it. You're going to be probably, like, in your sixties by the time. So, yeah. So I'm curious, given that, you know, today, for those who are wanting to pursue this, you know, maybe they have this leadership bug in them that they're good at it.

Maybe they, you know, show signs of leadership in school or different things that they're part of sports. What would, what advice would you give them? You know, it's. It's a different landscape these days. Building a business.

Right. I went to business school thinking I would learn how to be a good number two. And I took a leadership class, and the task was in groups of six or seven. Somebody was given an envelope and told, make this happen inside the envelope. And then people would evaluate your leadership style after.

Scott McNealy

I'll try to go through it quickly. But my leadership task was build a log cabin out of popsicle sticks. And I had 2 hours to get it done, so I went, oh, my God, this is going to be. This is going to be ugly. So we had to design it, and I had to send somebody out to get popsicle sticks, and somebody had to get some Elmer's glue, and we put this thing together, and it looked like a kindergarten project gone bad.

And. And so I left the room when they were going to evaluate me, and I thought, oh, they're going to tell me I can't manage my way out of a paper bag. I came back in the room, and the guy has the notes about what they're going to tell me, and these are peers, right? And they said, scott, you couldn't manage your way out of a paper bag. And I was crushed.

And I go, I knew that, you know, tell me, what can I work on? And they go, this is ridiculous. What are you taking this class for? This is stupid. You have, you're so automatically authoritative.

You take control. You manage everything. The only thing we would suggest to you is that be careful. You have no idea how much power you wield, that you can sometimes cut somebody off too quickly, and they feel bad. And I said, okay.

And I walked home, and I didn't talk for two days thinking about this. Literally, I was shocked. And the reason I went through that story is I don't think people know that they're leaders. And, in fact, I learned from that story. When you want to find a leader for a particular job, bring everybody who's capable into the room.

Explain to them how hard it is, how responsible you're going to have to be, how risky this job is, and ask anybody who wants to do job to please stand up. And then most of the people will stand up. And then I say, all right, you guys leave. I'm picking from the people who are smart enough to know that leadership is not something you choose to do. It's something you're chosen to do.

Yeah, that's a good. That's a great way of putting it. So being someone that was in this position for 22 years, a lot of people would just retire. But after that you've gone on and started multitude of other businesses. So share a little bit about what you're working on post.

Yeah, so I really, I'm upset with government schools and I think it's, it's practically child abuse to leave your children with the government for 8 hours a day and you should be reported to child protective services and that's how I feel about that. So anything we can do to open up education, self paced, online, open sourced, on demand, real time scored and custom common bore is the dumbest thing we've ever done. Because you know what, we're not all the same and we're not all the same aptitudes and we shouldn't try to make everybody an airline pilot. So I've been working with curricula for many, many years. My golfing son has www.berniesforeeducation.com.

Every time he gets a birdie, people pledge donations. And we've gone through three phases of opening education and I think it's been valuable. We did an open source library of open education resources. We did an authoring tool called curriculum. And we just now launched this week, actually, we're launching an open API for how to create content that can be shared and federated across the board.

And then we're going to keep going. And we got a couple ideas for phase four of what we want to go do to keep making homeschooling, lifelong learning, low cost learning and not government screwed up learning with government sector unions running the show. Um, that's a big deal to me. You know, I love, I love that. And just to talk about that for a second, because I think it's such an important thing.

Posh

Uh, obviously there's this whole system that's been created, our education system, that it has to be reformed, obviously top down. It just not sustainable, you know, in my opinion either. But I'm curious, you know, it seems like a lot of it also starts from the level of like employment and these companies and what they require and, you know, for these jobs. And I'm just curious how you see that working and, you know, people maybe not choosing to. And it sounds like you're talking about primary education more, more so than secondary education and higher education, right.

Scott McNealy

Well, even, even secondary education is tenured. It's woke, it's, it's got its own agenda. It's not diverse. My wife went to Stanford and she came out thinking that Stanford, um, told her both sides of the story. And after living with me for two years, she got really angry.

What are you angry about? She goes, Stanford didn't tell both sides of this. They only told one. And it makes me mad. And, you know, there's.

There they're too big to fail because they won't, because they got such huge endowments, not because they're valuable. Yeah, even. Even Colt said that Stanford. I said, you did Stanford Cs in three years. My second son, who started our third son who started little horse, and I said, how was you did it in three years?

Was it valuable? He goes, the first year of Stanford Cs is valuable. The second 3rd years. No, because they don't keep up. Tenured professors don't keep up with Kubernetes and Kafka and this, that and the other thing.

And all this stuff now is getting invented at Uber and Netflix and all these other. All of the great open source projects now aren't coming out of university like Berkeley Unix was. They're coming out of businesses. And so it ain't what it used to be. I don't think any need to be overhauled.

I think they just need to be shut down. I agree, and I feel like we could have a whole podcast about that, but I'll put a pin in that and maybe down the line sometime we could chat about it. But I'm all in because I'd love to talk about how we're wasting the four most unbelievably productive years of a human's life, 18 to 22. And we teach them how to drink tailgate, how to smoke dope, how to procreate, how to get penicillin at the, you know, it's just they're not learning life. I learned more a summer washing cars than I learned in college.

Pat

Scott, do you think that, you know, the trades or, you know, going into directly from high school or whatever that looks like in the future, that going in, almost like the apprenticeship, is something that makes a comeback? Well, if I could redesign things, you know, I would make the railroad car rails wide enough so the car could drive sideways onto a rail car. But we can't do it. It's not fixable. But if I could redo education, I would have everybody take all of the classes online, self paced, to get to a level of degree where they have reading, writing, arithmetic and civics and some real, a little bit of history.

Scott McNealy

And then whatever age they're done, then they can go get a job. And I wouldn't have minimum wage because their parents can and should take care of them and feed them. I mean, if there had been a high minimum wage, I probably wouldn't have been in the car wash washing cars with Harold for Roger Penske. And what a disaster that would have been in my life. I believe.

So then people can go back to college later, but you don't have to go to campus to college, and you can still tailgate every Sunday or every Saturday. Schools are nothing more than libraries with football teams attached, and now nobody goes to the library, so. And if your football team sucks, you don't even go to those games. Right. And so internships everywhere where, you know, you don't have minimum wage, you don't have all these rules and laws and all the rest of it, people would just learn and find things they like to go do.

And as long as the government just doesn't pay you everything and you have to, like, earn something, you start to feel good about making money, and you get used to getting up every day and going and getting something done, and you get kudos because people say, hey, here's some money because you did something good for me. I mean, there's nothing. There's nothing that will demean somebody's self esteem more than giving them something they didn't earn. That's just a disaster to. And you wonder why we have so many depressed people.

I mean, that's a real big reason. People are getting money for nothing. Jeff. Yeah, no, and thank you for all the work you're doing there, because I think it's going to take people like you, who have had so much success in their life, to be, have the energy and the passion and the dedication to give to this issue that is so deep in our system. But I guess I love to see my son's rated over a million dollars through his birdies program.

I've spent millions of dollars on my own nickel, and we've had tens of millions of people, dollars of people helping with this project, but it's far from fixed. Yeah. Outside of this, what are some other things that you're really excited about to come, whether it's in the tech industry or just global business, what are some other things that you are, you know, keeping? These are personal answers. My youngest, well, my oldest son, I'm just absolutely.

I mean, I'm his biggest fan. I'm so much so that he won't let me go watch. So my wife and I have to watch from home. But, you know, I get it. And I've caddied for him in the US Open, so it's not like I didn't get a chance to be with him in some of the most special daddy moments you could ever imagine.

Second son is a car nut like me, and he's managing the network, a factory to network, factory to car network for Ford. And he's just the greatest human being you could imagine. My third son started little horse, which is doing workflow engines, microservices based workflow engines, which changes the way, you know, life is a workflow ride. Little horse is our war cry. And every company that does anything can use a workflow engine like he's done.

And then my fourth son is going to be. They all claim he's going to be the richest of all of us. He's already, he's 22, and he owns about 30 houses with his partner that they're buying, fixing and flipping. And he sort of thought, dad, I'm making so much money, I feel bad about it. But he said, I was in the neighborhood with this dump that we bought, and everybody came over to say, we're so happy you bought it and you're fixing it up and you're making the neighborhood a better place, and God bless you.

And that's all he needed to hear, was that I'm making a difference. And he just loves. I said, every time somebody buys a house, you have made somebody super happy. Every time you buy a house, you made somebody super happy because they are obviously selling it for a reason. So he's very excited about his.

And I'm just loving spending time with those. I just joined Flume Ventures and I'm an operating partner there with a former sun guy who I've known forever, best friend. And we're having a ball helping entrepreneurs. See, I. Look, I'm not a billionaire.

I wish I was, because billionaires do four things. They spend money, which redistributes money in a fair way and a voluntary way. They invest, which creates jobs and goods and services. They save their money, which lowers the cost of capital, which allows many new businesses to be and technology to be sold, and they give their money away. Those are all four things that they do that are good.

I think the first three are better than giving your money away because like I said, giving money away is sometimes just not helpful. And I don't think or works are run very well because they don't have stock options. And the fifth thing they do, which is just horrible, is they give the money to the government. Right. Well, is it your goal to be a billionaire still?

No, I don't. Goals only limit you. I get up every day and I try to move the ball forward with my boys, with the 30 companies I advise, with the flume and for the flume investors, for the curriculum effort, for, and most importantly, I just want to make sure I'm creating a good life for my wife because I wouldn't have my four boys without her. I wouldn't been able to do what I did at sun without her. And I think one of the surely lost things, I mean, two thirds of we're coming up on 30 years together, I don't think there's a happier couple on the planet than us.

And, you know, I was talking to a couple of gals. This is sort of mean, but it wasn't meant to be mean. I was at a conference, and there were a couple of gals there at the conference, and I was talking to one of them, and she said, I said, do you have any family? And she goes, yeah. I go, how many?

She goes, three kids. I go, how old? Two, four and eight. And I looked at her and I said, and you're here instead of with your kids? It was like I gut punched her.

She didn't get mad at me. She didn't say anything. She didn't. She just was stunned and sort of walked away. And I said, I got to try this again.

Another gal came up, and I said, do you have any kids? And, you know, it wasn't the first question. It was, you know, we were made into it. And I go, do you have any kids? She goes, yeah.

She goes, I want to go. A one year old. And I said, can I see a picture? She showed me this cutest little baby, and we're Dallas, and she's a thousand miles away. And I said, you're here instead of with that cute little thing.

Same reaction. Nobody's asking that important question. And the family unit is so powerful. It is so important. And if you want to point to something that, you know, I think has made my four boys successful, they've had a mom at home the whole time.

And, you know, I just wish more people could do that. And if we didn't have inflation, regulations, taxes and all the craziness, people say, oh, I can't. I can't. Yeah, you can move to the midwest. Don't live in San Francisco.

No, you can't do that in San Francisco. You got to have two $400,000 a year jobs. And what's more important? And I said to my sister, who has one kid, we were talking about it, and I say, how empty would your life be now that you're 60 years old if you didn't have your daughter. And she said, I can't imagine.

And I think those are the messages that we need to talk about a little bit more, other than, how can I be superhero CEO? Find a mate who will. One of them's got to stay at home and raise the kids, and the other one's got to go make the bacon, and then the two of you got to get along, because our boys have never really seen an argument, and they think that that's possible and expected. Yeah. Well, thank you.

Posh

I love that you mentioned that, and obviously, the importance of that, too. And, Scott, it's been such a pleasure to talk to you. You know, just hear all these stories, all these fun stories, and just, I feel like we could go on and on and probably have ten different podcasts about ten different topics, but maybe someday we can pick it up and do. Come to Vegas, and we'll go down and have a couple cocktails on the strip and tell stories all night long. I'd love to.

Pat

Let's do it. Sounds great. I will give you a call next time I'm there. All right. Take care, everybody.

Posh

Thanks, God. Cheers.

It.