Culture: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
Two weeks ago Keith Krach, Chairman and CEO at DocuSign delivered a guest lecture at my Stanford class. He said a couple of things about company culture which resonated with me, perhaps because thirty five years ago, fresh out of school, I joined one of the original Kleiner Perkins startups, Tandem Computers. Many people in Silicon Valley don't know about Tandem, but back in the 80s Tandem, along with Apple, was the company you wanted to work for. Today you hear about the Google cafeteria and the 20% time. In those days it was the Tandem swimming pool, Friday beer bust and the 6-week sabbatical everyone talked about. And just like the leading companies of today, the quality of the engineering team was second to none. While I could name you many, some of you will know the 1998 Turing award winner, Jim Gray, did much of his seminal work at Tandem and influenced a generation of software engineers.
I went to my first company party in 1981 in a building big enough to house six beer trucks with taps, two music stages and of course a Texas-sized BBQ since the founder, Jim Treybig, was born and raised in Texas. Several years earlier, as a graduate student, I read about the company in the IEEE Spectrum. I wanted to learn more so I called the company number on a corded, landline phone. The guy who picked up the phone spent almost an hour and seemed to know a lot. I asked him at the end of the call what his job was? He replied "I'm the founder and CEO and when you get out of school, you should come work for us". If I had understood stock options I would have said, why not now?
I was invited this year to deliver the keynote speech to the annual user's group meeting. It caused me to reflect on what made the company successful. While it had great products it also had a great culture. To remind us all I opened my talk by listing some of the founding principles of the company:
- All people are good
- People, workers, management and company are all the same thing
- Every single person in the company must understand the essence of the business
- Every employee must benefit from the company’s success
- You must create an environment where all the above can be true
Jim Treybig and his fellow founders had great wisdom. Thirty-five years later I work with young startups and these principles can be as true yesterday, today and tomorrow.
Pass it on.
I worked at the Tandem Cupertino site and loved every minute of it. I was part of the Television department, although I joined after Tandem had been sold off to Compaq, I was allowed to join the TTN alumni. The people and culture there were fantastic. The only other company that rivaled that culture was Ampex in Redwood City. There was a terrific family atmosphere at both places, unparalleled anywhere else. These are the places where everyone, and I mean everyone, knew each other on a first name basis. I haven’t found anything comparable to these two in my entire career. I would jump at the chance work with either of these two companies again.
I worked at the Tandem Cupertino site and loved every minute of it. I was part of the Television department, although I joined after Tandem had been sold off to Compaq and then to HP, I was allowed to join the TTN alumni. The people and culture there were fantastic. The only other company that rivaled that culture was Ampex in Redwood City. There was a terrific family atmosphere at both places, unparalleled anywhere else. These are the places where everyone, and I mean everyone, knew each other on a first name basis. I haven’t found anything comparable to these two in my entire career. I would jump at the chance work with either of these two companies again.
Great post Tim and feel lucky to work with a company that hasn't lost sight of its founding principles after more than 25 years.
Tim, love the story of your cold call to Tandem!
It is amazing to me how a company culture can persist through so much change. A small slice of Tandem's database team founded Esgyn Corporation, where the people, technology, and yes culture of Tandem lives on. Check out the pool Tim refers to: http://imgur.com/a/xItgx - Compaq and HP both failed to remove this Tandem branding, but Apple's new Cupertino spaceship finally succeeded.