I have a good memory of the beach and sunset at the Hollister Ranch. I have no recollection of what happened inside that ranch house.  After graduation, Ruric and I traveled Europe with 6 other kids and a Laguna Blanca teacher and his wife.  We rented a van and took our skis.  It was a good trip even though we spent most of the time trying to ditch the teacher. The best part of the trip was the Alps, then Paris, London and Florence. The most memorable event was waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of rapidly spoken French in the bunkroom in a Swiss Chalet in the Jungfrau that we had hiked to. I observed Ruric sitting on the end of the bunk facing a 3 foot high woodpile and offering it a piece of wood, while engaging in a rapid-fire one sided conversation with an unseen participant.  I shook him and ducked to avoid the flying log.  In the morning he explained that he was merely getting directions from an old woman in Paris. While in Europe, the Russians invaded Prague, the French students took over the Latin Quarter and the Yuppies joined the anti-war protestors at the Democratic Convention in Chicago.  It was a wild time.

This past summer I had the pleasure of retracing that wonderful hike in the Jungfrau region of the Swiss Alps.  Very highly recommended.  You can fly to Geneva or Zurich and take a train to the Jungfrau, never needing to rent a car.  A wonderful city to stay in is Wengen.  We hiked to a chateau out of Murren.

In the fall of 1968 I went to Bard College, 90 miles up the Hudson River from NYC. I was lucky to get a single room off a double that saw its share of mind-altering experiences. One particular freighter, making its way up the Hudson River, and looking every bit like a large purple insect on steroids is an image that won’t go away.  At Bard I studied American Political Theory and took every course that they had to offer on American history, literature and economics in three semesters.  Lucky for me that the fourth semester was organized by the students, so I was able to create and hire teaching for two seminars that entirely focused on current political/social events of the time.  I was elected President of the student body because I organized 40% of the school to go to Washington in the November 1969 mobilization march that brought 850,000 people to DC.  I also brought most of the local high school class to whom I taught Drug Abuse Education.  I spoke throughout the mid-Hudson region on the war in Viet-Nam and the issue of drug use and abuse in the US. During the summer of 1969 I had lived with David Congdon at the Boat-hotel in Inverness, watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon and took a couple courses at Stanford, including drug abuse education for educators (I was the only kid in the class).

I left Bard in June 1970 to move to Berkeley to join one of the loves of my life, Alison Ballard. Like so many things in life, it was a life change that I neither understood nor respected at the time. While I didn’t see Alison much, I created an “independent major” in “Contemporary America: A Changing Society”.  I began development of a thesis that the American small group community, support and faith infrastructure and independence that De Tocqueville had so eloquently described in the early 1800’s as the heart and soul of America was being reborn in the 1960’s and replacing the sterile, conformist thinking of the 1950’s Organization Man (monolithic government, business, military).  It was provocative, but I didn’t complete it in 1972, so I didn’t graduate.  Instead, after attending a skit at the Free University on the inadequacy of personal interaction among youth, I decided that I was totally deficient in communicating and establishing relationships with other human beings. Therefore, I joined Radical Psychiatry, an offshoot of the Berkeley Free Clinic that was led by the lead protégé of Eric Burns (“I’m OK, You’re OK”). For five years, I learned about direct communication, intimate relationships and things that were unnecessary at Midland because we just understood each other at a level of minimal communication.   I participated in and led mixed and men’s groups in both verbal problem-solving and Reichian psychology. I had a booming practice.

In 1977 I decided that I had had enough of working with professionals and pre-professionals, so I left Berkeley, moved to Oakland, and went to work at Colgate-Palmolive in Berkeley packaging dishwashing detergent and making Ajax cleanser.  To this day, any close proximity to chlorine makes my skin crawl.  I was required to join the International Longshoreman’s and Warehouseman’s Union and at some point was elected to be the plant steward (450 union employees) and a union executive board member. While in the union I negotiated two major employee contracts, including a plant shutdown contract in 1981.  I attempted to put a deal together with the city of Berkeley and Colgate to buy the plant (with a loan from the company) and to continue to operate the facility.  The city and company agreed, but the union sabotaged the deal.  On the podium on the day of reckoning, the President of the International of the ILWU offered me a lifetime job if I would oppose the buyout (they were afraid that the image of union workers running a large production facility in a monopoly industry would obviate the need for a union). They were right, I supported the buyout, and we lost the vote because the union bought out too many of the employees. A few months later, a close friend and one of the three leaders of a group that was trying to reform the union was found dead in the union parking lot with a single bullet in his temple. He left five kids.  Needless to say, coward that I am, I decided to leave the union, so I applied to law school and told the then-President of the union that if he didn’t write a recommendation for me that I would torment him for the rest of his life. In 1977, I also got married. It lasted one year.

In August 1981, I was out of work, so I decided to go back to school and get my degree.  I had two senior theses to finish. I did it and graduated in December 1981. I also took a course in Physics for Engineers at Cal that was 99% Asian attended, incredibly intimidating and confirmed that I should go to law school rather than venture into science. In September 1982, I moved (with my girlfriend, Jennifer Howard) to Brookline, Mass. and started at Harvard Law School.  We figured that if we could last through one year of law school, then we could probably survive marriage.  In June 1983, we got married and have lasted 20 years. We have lasted only because she is a saint.

Upon graduation I moved (with Jennifer and my 3 month old son, Alex) to Los Altos, CA and began practice with Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati, one of three or four well known but small (65 lawyers) technology-oriented law firms.  I rode the wave of professional support for the exploding high technology industry, became a partner and focused on business advice to start-up technology companies, venture capital firms and a couple of investment banks.  I handled the Series B financing for Yahoo, the initial public offering for the Robert Mondavi Winery and about 100 other private financings and 20-25 initial public offerings from Silicon Valley.  In 1988, I represented The North Face in a sale of the company to a Hong Kong conglomerate.  At the closing of the deal, the company presented me with a custom-made sleeping bag for my 3 year old son, which he took on his first four day backpacking trip into the Ventana Wilderness (near Tassajara Hot Springs, not Midland) that Spring.  He walked 6 miles in and I carried him half the way out.  He has since backpacked all over the country. In 1987, Ben was born.

In March 1996, I left the law firm, then 600 lawyers in one office, (without realizing any serious economic benefit) to join one of my early stage clients, Genesys Telecom.  I had heard from my VC clients that they were all eager to invest in telecommunications software and I couldn’t see how to get away from the legal rat race, especially the calls throughout the weekend, unless I left the law.  I was the 60^th employee in a company that had 55 Russians and 45 engineers.  It was complete chaos.  The first thing that I did was to close a Series A financing and take on opening up Japan and Australia.  I then closed a mezzanine deal with MCI and Intel, followed by an initial public offering in June 1997.  I remained responsible for overall business development and strategic planning for five years.  In January 2000, Alcatel (the French telecommunications conglomerate) bought Genesys and I agreed to stay for one year.  In February 2001, I left Genesys to plan and build a garden in a house that we had just built and to train for a 350 mile summer hike with Alex (then 16) up the John Muir Trail.  We were in the wilderness for 47 days and had what I would characterize as the best experience of my life.  We started 40 miles south of Mt. Whitney and ended 60 miles north of Yosemite Valley.  It was awesome.

Upon re-entry to the business world in late Fall 2001 I began to consult for a couple of VC firms and joined a startup company, Fonelet Technology, as the CEO in March 2002.  This company automates the creation of voice self-service applications (the dialog that prompts a caller with a voice-activated message when you call certain companies).  We have raised two rounds of funding (total of $6.5 million) and I am currently looking for a new CEO.  I love the strategy and positioning, but my strength is not in the day-to-day operations. I will remain as an active Chairman or something.

Today, I sit summarizing my last 35 years for the first time in my life. My wife is a very accomplished residential realtor in the Palo Alto/Atherton/Los Altos area, my older son (18) is a good tennis player (3 years on varsity) and great thinker.  He is going to be attending Swarthmore College in the fall.  My younger son (15) is a good athlete (soccer and baseball), a good musician (guitar and piano) and a fun-loving, independent handful.

I look back on these past years and would say that my guiding philosophy is to work hard, listen to others and practice the Golden Rule. Midland taught me self-reliance and for that I will always be grateful. Midland also taught me the value of the natural world, which I consider to be incredibly humbling.  My greatest accomplishments are the relationships that I treasure and the effort that I’ve engaged in to teach myself, my kids and my co-workers how to recognize and develop good judgment. 

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