46. Interview with Steve Garnett: A lifetime building software giants (Oracle, Siebel, Salesforce)

Well, it's interesting that computing was part of my maths degree, but it was the subject I was probably weakest at and something I didn't particularly enjoy.

What happened next was I didn't really know what I wanted to do.

I guess like a lot of us have gone through university.

And I looked, I saw an ad in the New Scientist to do a PhD in nuclear engineering.

And at the time, I thought maybe the nuclear industry was the future.

It's always been 30 years away.

I think it probably still is today.

And I thought maybe getting a qualification in nuclear engineering, a PhD, wow, how great would that be for us? for my family and for friends and myself, of course.

And so I went up to Manchester and enrolled on a PhD course in nuclear engineering.

It's basically theoretical maths and the maths was a little bit hard.

So you use computers in the day to solve the maths, numerical analysis.

But those days were punch cards and Fortran and all those good things.

Yeah,

look at the size of my stack of cards.

Exactly.

You'd walk along and the size of the stack would be how clever you were in writing big programmes.

We did meet many, many years later, but we were probably, given we were both postgrads at Manchester University at exactly the same time, we're probably sitting in the regional computer centre with our great big piles of paper doing second generation language programming.

Absolutely.

So you were there, you did your PhD, but something else we had in common was by sort of the mid eighties, we're both rather tired of the academic life.

You know, what happened to you next?

Well, this is sort of 83 ish, I finished the PhD and I, you know, I've been offered to stay in academia, but, um, There was a lot of very smart people, but I just felt there was a lack of drive, ambition, enthusiasm to go and make things happen.

And something was inside me saying, I don't want to be part of this.

I'm going to be... know in 20 years time i'm going to be in my 40s and bored silly a lot of some very smart professors were churning out the same the same notes year in year out and uh i didn't want to be part of that so i decided to give it all up give it give up science give up academia and when i started looking around there was lots of jobs for could can you program and can you program in fortran So I went and joined a little British software company actually called Logica down in London.

So I moved down to London on my own and started working at Logica.

Wasn't there a rather legendary meeting in the Orange Tree pub in Richmond? You're absolutely right.