MIPS

Probably a combination of people in the early 80s.

Jim Mindell, who was then the leader of the Center for Integrated Systems, who believed in the MIPS project that we were undertaking.

spurred on the local integrated circuits facility here at Stanford to actually build the chips for us, which was a real push for them in terms of building something at that scale.

And Jim Gibbons, who was then dean of engineering and really supported me and awarded me an endowed chair when I was, what, I would have been 25, 27? No, 35, sorry, 35, 35, off by 10, yeah.

Pretend you're the teacher.

You then have a foray, you mentioned it a moment ago, into entrepreneurship.

So you started MIPS, which was the commercialization of risk.

So tell us a little bit, I mean, that seems like a pretty big transition from professor to business leader, business executive.

So their careers actually, for a while at least, paralleled each other because shortly after 1980, 81, 82, something like that, left Stanford with some of his graduate students to form Silicon Graphics, which is the first of his companies that I think all of you know of.

And almost coincident in time with that, John took a leave from Stanford and went off and started MIPS, which also became a very important Silicon Valley company, which was actually later acquired by Silicon Graphics.

So there's many connections here sitting up on the stage.

So if we fast forward 30 years, of course, then we find ourselves where their careers have diverged a little bit, and John came back to the university and has had some small roles at Stanford since that time.

Subsequently, Curt and several others have come back and finished their Ph.D. here.

But it was a fascinating time because I remember how driven you were.

And much of research, there's a stumbling down a path, certainly was in the MIPS case.

We didn't start out knowing what we were going to do, saying this is true about Google and something.