So with ONI, I founded it, I was the CEO and the president, and we started this company in 1998. It was a metropolitan area telecommunications company. We built long-haul telecom gear and there were a number of things that we did that caused that company to be remarkably successful. In fact, the...
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The next thing you should do in terms of a company is over-communicate all the time. Practically every single person that comes into PacBio, as an interview candidate, they ask PacBio employees, "What do you like most about this company?" I would say 90% of the people would say, "Hugh’s company ...
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We got to be very lucky and attracted two quite famous in the venture community entrepreneurs; one was a guy named Art Rock. Many people don’t know Art, but he was the first money into Apple and to Intel and to Teledyne; he is quite a famous venture capitalist. So we got Art Rock on the board an...
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If and when you resign from a company and you’re going to go do something that you really believe in, recognize that the company has only one interest, and that is to keep you in the company. They're not focused on you. They're focused on their products and their company. And so when I ...
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Sometimes, I think people underestimate the impact that a CEO can have on a corporate culture or the company’s success. The example I'll give you is John Sculley and Bill Gates. Though Apple paid lip service to the Unix market with A/UX, both companies missed the Internet by a country mile. Nets...
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The first is people are everything to a startup. People say it’s the technology, it's the market opportunity. Forget it. It really is how great is the team that you can hire and how well they work together, and that will matter so much more than what technology you have, and that has been proven...
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The other thing I just want to talk a little bit about is how do you build in resistance to being acquired? So I thought a lot about this. There are many entrepreneurs who said, my company is going to go all the way, we’re never going to have to sell, we're in great shape, we're not going to sel...
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Another thing we did well is having enough cash, so we had several points where we needed to raise money and though it was the middle of the Bubble, there were a number of telecommunications crashes through that entire period. And because I never focused on ownership, I always focused on how do ...
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The other thing, I want to talk briefly about ONI is never, ever, ever be afraid to go up against big dominant players in the market. In fact, the bigger they are and the more dominant they are, the better it is. That sounds counterintuitive, but if you have three players sharing the market whic...
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