Okay, this is David Zeiler, Director of the Caltech Heritage Project. It is Wednesday, April 2nd, 2025. It's my great pleasure to be back with Don Listwin. Don, it's great to see you again. Thanks so much for joining. Thank you. All right, Don, in our first conversation, we took a wonderful wide-angle lens to your career, to the issues that are most important to you. Today, we're going to go back and establish some family history. So let's start first with your grandparents. Did you know, were you lucky enough to know all four of them?
Three out of four.
So on my mother's side, my grandmother's name was Olive, Olive Urton from England, and her husband, Charlie...
died, I think, when I was two.
of cancer related to mustard gas from World War I.
So he was in the cavalry, and to this day, I have his footlocker down in the house at Lake Tahoe. It keeps all the table tennis supplies. So I knew my grandmother on my dad's side, yes, Polish-Ukrainian.
Grandpa John and Grandma Anne, and they were interesting folks. My grandfather didn't graduate, I don't know if he graduated elementary school, I don't think so. And in the Depression...
He decided to put sugar water in a bottle.
So he got, I think, was the fourth or fifth Pepsi franchise.
In Canada.
And that, it turned out to be an incredible business. It has gross margins like software. And the nice thing is, is that just about anybody in your family, no matter how dumb they are, you can get them a job. Whether they're lifting a case or selling a case or doing whatever. So grew up in that family. My dad was an entrepreneur, soft drinks, dry cleaning business, food businesses. So good upbringing.
How many generations back does your family go in Canada? Were your grandparents first generation?
Yes, yeah, they were first generation. I did meet once my Polish side, so it's Polish-Ukrainian on my dad's side, and my great-grandparents came over for a very short visit once, but I think they all emigrated, you know, in the early 1900s. Do you know the story where they got to, how they got to Canada?
I don't, and you know, I was all set to go to the Ukraine and explore that. And I put a hold on that for a little while. Good idea. So we're not sure, like, we, I think...
The Listwin, my last name, was either Listwinovich or Listwinski, and it got truncated as they came in to the country.
But it's clearly, you know, of course, 23andMe currently.
defunctish
clearly, the heritage is Eastern European through my dad's side and English through my mom's side. So let's now go to your parents. Where did your dad grow up?
Oh, both sides...
All these people I'm talking about grew up in a town called, the city called Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan is in Canada. It's north of North Dakota, Montana, about a million people.
Total, Saskatoon is probably, when I grew up, 125,000, 130,000 people. And just given the whole thing going on with President Trump and the like, probably has 10% of the world's fresh water. So both your parents grew up there.
Yes.
And they met in high school.
What were the neighborhoods? What was the socioeconomic situation for both of your parents?
I'd say lower middle class, you know, as the Pepsi business grew, it ultimately became a family business with a $10 million top line and a really good bottom line, because, well, not for the transcription, but there was a lot of cash that flowed through those kinds of businesses. I remember one day we were at...
I don't, you're not probably old enough that you remember these pop shops.
So back in the day, in the 70s, back when things were getting tough in a recession, the Coca-Cola company said, we're never going to do anything but a 10-ounce bottle on the shelf.
And some competitors came and said, I bet you people would come and buy a case.
of 30-ounce bottles, and
And so he started doing that. And then one day I worked there always in the summer. I played volleyball. Well, I have to show you my new medal. I just got my new medal. I don't play volleyball in high school and in university. And so working at a soft drink factory was incredible because you'd lift a quarter of a million pounds a day easily as you moved things around. So that was good for jumping skills. But you'd have the Hutterite farmers come in and that was their one indulgence was soft drinks. And so they'd pay you with two cartons of eggs and one carton of eggs had fresh eggs from hen in the morning and the second carton had $20 bills rolled up in the carton. And that was the business in the 1970s. So I spent a lot of time working in soft drink factories. I probably started driving forklift when I was 13. Oh my goodness. What level of education did your parents achieve?
My mom graduated high school. My dad told the story about how he failed his last exam and didn't graduate, which I think is malarkey. But, you know, mom was the brains, dad was the brawn. She was very smart, very good at math, ran all the accounts, all the books, even to the point where when...
She was dying from the cancer, which we'll get to. She told me, Don, here, I've hidden the million dollars away from your dad so he doesn't spend it on silly stuff.
Now, Mom was great. She was my best friend. Do you know the story of how your parents met or where they met? You know, I don't. I do know it was in high school. I do know they got married pretty quickly. I have an older sister, Louise, that lives in Vancouver in Canada. But yeah, not a whole lot.
Of the history of my parents, do I know. So your dad got involved with the soda business right out of high school?

A
No, well, yes, he went to the family business for a while, but then he didn't want to stay there. He had...
He was the middle son, so older brother George and younger brother Ron, which is 10 years younger, which was probably not planned.
I think he wanted his own space.
So he and George went away and they started a dry cleaning business.
And so one summer I drove dry cleaning delivery and pick up for him. So always doing that. Then that was going pretty well, and so then he had an idea to do a grocery business. It was called Capital Food Markets.
And he did that for a number of years, tried to start a second, and it failed, we're told, because they could never cut a profit out of the meat department. The meat was bad.
And long story short, the understanding after they shut down is there was a timer clock no one knew about, and the freezers were going off and the fridges were going off at midnight, coming back on at four, and that was just enough time to screw that up. But then he started the Pop House, which was the competitor, the wholesale competitor, to the Pop Shop.
And then ultimately, Pepsi forced...
the family to sell the business, which was a travesty because it was such a good platform for everybody. I mean, it probably employed upwards of 150 people in that kind of business. And the dynamic had just changed where the business had been protected because we did glass.
And recycling. And the legislature said, we don't want cans. And finally, cans got to a point where they were more recyclable. And so the economics on shipping a case of soda in a can is about 10 times easier than shipping a case of glass. So Pepsi said, hey, you have, we have 80 franchises. We're going to consolidate to 8 or 10 or whatever the number was, and force the family to sell.
to Winnipeg and consolidate there. Don, what year do you enter the scene?
I was born March 22, 1959. My mom's probably 5'1 on a tall day, and I think I was 9 pounds, 14 ounces, so.
Good work, Mom.
Now, your upbringing, were your parents pretty well off by the time you arrived?
You know, I would say no. We were middle class, but moving forward.
We lived in a pretty small house.
And as the Pepsi business and the soft drink businesses started to grow,
Then my dad decided that he wanted a bigger place for us to grow up as a family. He bought up a plot of land and, apropos to Raymond, he started, he became the general contractor himself and built it.
We were one of the very few, at the same time he was building the Pepsi plant.
And my uncle was a mechanical engineer, and so my dad said, you know, design the plant. And he said, I don't know anything about it. He said, well, what should I do? And Dad said, start with a straight line on top and then make one 90 degrees down and keep going. So there were extra materials and things left over.
And so he decided to build a pool, which in Saskatoon was pretty rare because it's probably minus 32 there right now. And so we hand-built this pool. Like, you know, there was a backhoe to dig the hole, but with one carpenter, we built the frames.
Poured the concrete, did the aggregate. I remember wearing plastic bags on my feet, you know, putting muriatic acid to seal the aggregate around the pool. So it was, but at that point, the soft drink businesses really took off.
And,
You know, Coke came around. There was there was no Pepsi competition. There was a Coke competitor.
And the two fathers did turn the businesses over to the sons, the co-father and my grandfather, and that's when the money started flowing into the family. And then like any red-blooded aggressive guy, they started fighting with each other until there was the famous...
duopoly meeting where the grandfathers took all of the sons by the ears and sat them down and said, Let me explain to you what a duopoly is and how it works.
Stop beating up on each other.
You know, you can have 55% market share this year and we can have it next year.
So it sounds terrible, it sounds like the mafia, but...
Those as I said, those businesses were very profitable.
And so that's when I'd say we went to upper middle class. About how old were you during that transition?
Yeah, around high school, you know, I ended up...
I ended up accelerating back when they did that, so I did first grade through fourth grade in three years.
And I got invited to go to this
you know, special experimental school.
And we were just moving into that new place that I was talking about on Harvard Crescent. And I got an offer to go to this school, and the unique thing about it is it was a...
free-ranging, wide-open...
Not a structured educational program, almost learn at your own rate, but at the same time, there were mentally handicapped kids that were there, and the...
The hypothesis was to see whether or not in a social environment, not an academic environment, that that would benefit one or both classes of kids that were there. They never did come to any real outcome, but, you know, we'd eat lunch together, and we'd play sports together, and football and things, and that was, yeah, King Edward High School for four years.
And that's when, actually, we talk about history.
We had no sports. The only thing we had was an ice rink, and there was no gym or anything, so we would go to the YMCA Friday from 9 to noon, and that was the extent of any kind of...
Any kind of sports.
So I ended up going that one Friday, and I ended up seeing the table tennis players.
And so the Saskatchewan table tennis team played there, and so I joined that team, and in 19...

I can go look at it.
and I became the junior champion.
the junior table tennis, but that was, you know, people don't understand the difference between ping pong and table tennis. Table tennis is, I practiced five hours a day for, you know,
And I played the national champion once, and I think he gave me one point. So, like the tiering of excellence is pretty, and like any elite sport, it just changes radically as you go up the stack. Don, that gifted program, did you score particularly well on a test? Did you catch the attention of a teacher? What was it? Well, you know, in one through four,
I apparently scored...
off the charts on all of that stuff, and then once I was accelerated, I was flagged, so now, that's all I know.
Doug, were there any important religious or cultural events?


observances in your house growing up?
No, you know, my mom, my mom was, you know, part of the Boston church and...
Early on, we got taken to church early, but no, you know, I think...
There was a pretty good separation, which I still preach to my kids, the difference between faith and religion. I'm not a big fan of religion. I think it's some of the best pyramid schemes in the world.
You know, we talk about way back in the day where the really smart people who don't own any land said, what can we own?
I know, a piece of someone's mind. That's what we'll own. So, no, no, not much in that way.
I have faith in a variety of things, but I really am not a big fan of organized religion. Did your mom work in the business? Did she stay at home? Did she have her own career? She stayed at home, but she was the bookkeeper. So she, you know, would get us to school and then she'd be down in the office doing the books for tip-top cleaners, it was called, or capital food market. So she did all of that, you know, the general ledgers and all the accounting. Don, would you have had a sense of your parents' politics? Would they talk about, you know, the Prime Minister or the Vietnam War, things like that at the dinner table?
No, you know, Dad came home pretty tired most of the time, and his MO was, you know, eat dinner and go downstairs and veg out.
We did talk about taxes, I mean, and I, you know, I hold the same thought at this point.
Up to 50% is okay.
After that, why am I killing myself doing this? Like, I mean, right now, I think my marginal tax rate, even though I don't pay it in California, is 57%. And so we talk about that, and we talk about, you know, business and go do it and get it done. And don't, don't let anything stand in your way. And I've learned that from my dad because he just, he could be a bull, and there's two sides to that, to that. But he was, he was hardworking, dedicated, and determined.
Done working in the business, was that more your own initiative? Was that an expectation that was put on you?
Well, if I wanted a vehicle, it was. There were no free cars or, you know, anything. My first vehicle was an old Chevy.
delivery van, white delivery van, that I had saved money and I put, this is probably terrible, I put red shag carpet and black velour on the inside and a speaker system and a hidden compartment for your booze. And that was my first vehicle and, you know, couldn't go any more than like 50 miles an hour and um but then I, I worked at the soft drink factories and um and then my first purchase at the house is I said, Mom, I want a pool table. And she said, well, I'll get half of it.
And so I bought a pool table, so I'm still a pretty good stick these days. And...
And then I finally got my Firebird.
And I wanted to keep my van, and my dad said, nope, there's one parking lot in the driveway.
So I sold my van with a tear down my eye and got my bright blue Firebird. So all this is to say that even as your family was starting to make good money, you certainly didn't grow up spoiled.
No, no, I mean, we, you know, we...
That's a very fair statement, but we didn't want for anything either, right? I mean, you know, there was always, and we would go, you know, family treat as we got older, more into the late teens, always do a Hawaii trip that they treated us to because it was always freezing cold and people tried to get out of there.
And, you know, and as time went on, they would help with things like, you know, dad's...
Christmas gifts were always a, you know, half an inch of $10 bills or something. And that was sort of, he said, I don't know what you want. So, you know, never, never, but with him, you know, with that, I mean, Dad was old school, right? With table tennis, I got to the point where I had to travel.
to Calgary to compete.
That's an eight-hour car ride, and I was fourteen. He's like, I ain't doing that.
So that's when I started playing volleyball, and then...
Well, that's my...
My team just won.
The team I host back home just won 3rd place at Nationals, so they sent me here on their flight. So I hosted them.
A million years ago, when we were playing, I was playing for the University of Saskatchewan.
We came down to the U.S. to play some U.S. teams.
And it turned out to be a storm of the century, which was not good logistically, but then we would go.
Well, we just got annihilated, like, but it was so many different factors. The gyms were so much bigger, the balls were different, the rules were different. We were totally unprepared.
And we ultimately won the national championship that year in 1979, so I have my medal on the wall. And so I got to know the coach recently there, just having gone back to Saskatoon to visit some friends.
And so I started supporting them. And so we did the same trip. I brought them down for a week in December this year. And they just got smoked by Pepperdine and UCLA, and the coach said it was awesome because it was this huge wake-up call that while they were competitive with just about everybody in Canada, there was a whole new level to be.
And so now I'm going to do scholarships for them, and David, a scholarship for a volleyball player at the University of Saskatchewan, one year tuition, is $8,000 Canadian or $5,600 U.S. That's pretty good. That's a lot of bang for your buck. I did, yeah, I did buy them some, so I tried to do half the team. So anyways. Don, being around your father, just to foreshadow to your own achievements in business, did you learn from him? Did you learn what it takes to succeed in business from your dad?
I learned the hard work and dedication part of it.
You know, I mean, it was a 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. job, and...
And I learned that, and I learned, I learned he was very creative. Whenever, you know, a soft drink factory is a giant electromechanical series of systems. And he would not be shy with calling his machine shop guy and saying, you know, this would be better if this thing twirled this way instead of that way. And they'd make it. So, you know, I learned, I learned, I think, that creativity from him. And, and as I said, just, just the hard work part of it. I mean, fast forward to Cisco, you know, I was in the office at 5 a.m. and was there till late, and then when you could work from home, you know, it was 5 to 10 p.m. on a daily basis. So I learned that kind of
work ethic from him.
How old were you when the Pepsi franchise had to end?
Yeah, I was in, uh...
Sadly, I wasn't old enough. If I had known more, I could have helped there. So the answer is, I think, late 20s. And the opportunity was that the franchise was granted in the 30s, 1930s, in perpetuity. So Pepsi really didn't have a right to take it away, but they strong-armed everybody, and everyone got afraid, and they said, well, this big guy in Toronto tried to stop. Well, the way a soft drink is made, it starts by concentrate that you buy from Pepsi-Cola, and they ship to you, the magic formula. Then you add water, and then you add sugar and bubbles and all that kind of stuff. So they just stopped accidentally shipping concentrate to people who weren't cooperating. So all of a sudden, you would make soft drinks weekly, and all of a sudden, you're out of inventory. But that would have been...
An easy media play for me today, but, you know, they didn't know. And unfortunately, they thought they, the family thought they were going to have a chance to have a bidding war between Calgary, which was on the west, and Winnipeg, which is on the east. And Pepsi said, no, we have a master plan and you get to sell it for one-time sales to Winnipeg. Well, a business like that in today's day and age is worth six times sales, eight times sales, easy.
cash flow and gross margins and yada yada. So it was too bad that I couldn't.
Couldn't help him more at that time, wasn't skilled enough. How did he pivot? What happened next?
Oh, he started trying to sell Canadian water.
Which he learned very quickly that...
Consumer businesses, retail in particular for consumer businesses, are...
incredibly challenging. You have to buy shelf space. You know, if someone from Safeway says, well, if you give me $250,000 under the table, I'll give you four facings. So it's...
Back to the mom hiding the money because that was going nowhere, and he was probably a little younger than I was at the time, but just, you know, couldn't give it up. But I learned a lot about retail from my grandfather. We would go, he'd go on the truck with me and he'd say, OK.
We wanna go Thursday to this store. I said, why? He says, well, the Coke guy comes Wednesday. So then what we do is, after the Coke guy comes, we take his six facings and we make them three, and then we hide the rest of the bottles behind the cereal. And then you put yours out there. I said, my family sounds like crooks. Sorry, but, so I'm always very wary when people, you know, in high tech say, Oh, I'll tell you about retail. I'm like, yeah, I had like three years of it, and it's a brutal dog-eat-dog environment.
Done. Academically, what were your interests in high school? What did you like to study?
Oh, I was a math and science geek.
You know, I, I was...
I think top three in math in the province a couple of times, until my senior year where I thought, okay, I got a chance to win, they opened it up.
to...
a whole bunch of the Chinese kids that had come in, and they had all been held back because their English was bad, but they'd all finished four years of math in university in China. So I didn't do that, and they changed the whole...
The whole testing environment. But yeah, and I got invited, I got recruited for God's sake, to math.
At the University of Saskatchewan. So I went for a weekend to math camp, if you will, and it was kind of fun. It was interesting things. But I know I didn't want to be a doctor, and I didn't want to be a lawyer. I mean, all the professions that you would do. And so engineering was...
Default, but a good default, like something I enjoyed. So there was an assumption or an expectation that you wouldn't continue sort of a working class entrepreneurial life like your dad, that you'd go on to college?
Yeah, there was my, I think I was the first family member that went to college. Wow. My sister went and wanted to go to nursing school and for every bit of
Math and DNA that I had, I took it from her, I'm sure, because she just really couldn't.
Just couldn't handle all the different math and science that a nursing degree. So she she stepped down and she got her nursing.
Diploma, I think it's called, but I was the first one that actually graduated, and now my daughter is the first one, I think, will get her PhD. Cool.
Dan, what was available to you? How widely could you apply?
yeah, like did you know you wanted to stay home, or did you think about elsewhere in Canada, even the United States? It wasn't even, it wasn't even that thought process back then. You were going down the street, and you know, and you stayed at home until you got a girlfriend, and then you got checked out to the apartment because they didn't want her around all the time.
So there was no, you know, there's no idea. I mean, you know, my daughter now, or this fall coming up, we're going to go tour schools, and she wants to go to NYU, and I was like, well, okay, but maybe we should have some backup schools, you know? And she's a Canadian, so we're also looking at UBC and McGill and some other good schools in Canada. But no, it was, it was, you know, right down the middle, you were going to the University of Saskatchewan. That first year, the men's had never had a volleyball team. They had just got funding to do one, so I was the only high school grad that made the team. There were a lot of older dudes that, you know, were seniors in college that had joined the team. It was, yeah, it was a great four years. What were some of the strong programs in university?
Well...
Ag is probably the stronger, I mean, it's a huge agricultural province, right? Wheat is the big, big, I mean, some, there was a slogan someone came up with, it was just terrible when they were trying to advertise the country, the province. It's called the POW province, potash, oil, and wheat. So those are the three things, the three natural resources that the organization has. So ag was strong, engineering was very strong, and then the rest of the school, when it's built in a province like that, is built to graduate the whole host of people you need to run a province. So there's a dental school, and there's a medical school. Is the medical school fantastic? No, but will it produce doctors? Yes, right? There's a legal environment. So it was pretty broad-based.
I have
for years tried to argue that you need to try to become known globally.


for something there. They built maybe a decade ago a world-class cyclotron, and that helped differentiate them, but it's almost impossible to recruit somebody as a professor to that place in this day and age because it's
It's cold ten months out of the year.
lovely place, lovely people, with super low cost of living, but...
You know, it's really cold, and it's really slick in terms of its...
rankings in terms of a lot of the schools. So you lived home all four years?
No, then the girlfriend came and then the dad said, hey, here's the apartment. Get out of here.
So he would come every Friday morning.
He come with groceries?
Every Friday morning at 6 a.m., I always remember, he'd ring the doorbell in the apartment, and I'd just stagger out and he'd go, okay, here's four bags of groceries and 12 beer. And he'd put it inside the door and then he'd go to work. So, but we, we played, I mean, volleyball, I'd say my sporting career has been...
You know, the volleyball team practiced 4 to 9 every day, and that was tough on studying engineering. And then when you...
We were a poor school, relatively speaking, so when you went to travel...
To play other Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, you're on the bus for 10 hours. So you'd leave Thursday morning on the bus and you'd get home Monday night, so you went to school Tuesday and Wednesday.
And just we're begging people for notes and stuff. So it was, again, it was a wonderful experience, and we ultimately, in my...
Junior year one, but it was tough on the grades. Don, why electrical engineering? Why did you choose that for your major?
Yeah, yeah, good question. I don't, I think it was, I think it was a sexy one back then, you know, I mean, civil engineers, you build a bridge and I think it was just that, but...
If you're looking for a whole bunch of deep, deep thought, Dave, you're looking you're looking in the wrong tree. It was fun, though, you know, do you know of the iron ring ceremony? Oh, sure, sure. Yeah. Well, it was just, it was bizarre because I wasn't, but like half the guys were high in this thing, and it's a closed ceremony. Like only if you're, if you have a relative who's an engineer, they can come in and they, and then you hold this chain and you chant and it's, it's pretty interesting, but Um...
But again, I wouldn't trade those four years. I graduated fine, and I ended up meeting...
One of the founders of the first company I worked with.
who ultimately got me my first job in engineering at his networking company. Ah, interesting. So in college, did you take any business classes, econ? Was that attractive to you at all?
No, no, no. We, computer science was just starting. I actually hand-programmed a PDP-8 with toggle switches, which is pretty cool.
We ended up in your earlier years, they called it, you know...
Engineering English
You had to go to these classes and the professors were mad because they knew you didn't want to be there. So they would put a whole bunch of questions.
saying in this book, who is the maid? Fill in the blank.
So reading the Cliff Notes did not help you do that, right? So everyone squeaked through all the rest of those classes, but by the time you were in...
We used to call third and fourth year, you know, everything was just all engineering and thermodynamics and whatever it might have been. So.
Did you work during the summers? Did you stay on campus to do research?
Oh gosh, no, no, I worked, man. I lifted soft drink bottles 12 hours a day.
Yeah, no, I would go with my dad. I, um...
I always, I didn't like getting up early, so I ended up, and he'd come in and wake me up, and I'd go, get out of here! So I built this, this thing, which is pretty ridiculous. I took my record player,
And I should Daisyed an electromagnet and some tacks that I put on my door. So all he had to do is open the door a half an inch, and the tacks would make the electromagnet go on, and I had another coupling to 110 volts, and it would turn on my stereo, and it plays Stairway to Heaven. So it started slowly. That's how I woke up in the morning. But no, no, it was pretty, pretty down the middle, you know, get a job, and then we played, we played volleyball like all the time, right? If you could, if you could get a crew together, you would do it. And the nice thing was, you know, there was a girls team, so you weren't, you know, when we were, when you're not training, you're playing, this is now I'm talking, you know, high school and university, you know, you would, you'd be playing volleyball. Now the college girlfriend, would that become the wife?
Ne.
Now, did not turn out, a lovely lady named Dorothy.
She was...
among the best if not the best player in the country.
And we ended up meeting at a tournament, and one thing led to another. She ended up coming to Saskatoon, and in 1979, both the men's and women's team won the national championships, which is, I think, a one and only ever done.
But no, that ran its course, and then in 1980...
I moved back to, I moved back, I moved to Vancouver, and I had been given a job by this founder, George.
In engineering, and, you know, I had an engineering job and we were doing, I mean, you can't believe how you used to do circuit boards. You used to do green and blue.
plate green and red tape for lithography, and then you'd take photos of it, and then you'd etch circuit boards this way. So you'd be drafting basically to build a circuit board. And I thought, yeah, I don't know if I wanna be doing this very long. And they had a sales opening in Vancouver for Western Canada, and they said, would you like that? And, you know, it was technical sales, and I said, great.
And so I moved to Vancouver in 1980. Is that the year you graduated?
Yeah, well, you graduate in the fall, so I went to work for a little, maybe six months in town. Okay.
And in the spring, was off to Vancouver. And who was that original connection? Who did you know?
In Vancouver? Yeah, well, to get you the job in Vancouver. Oh, so...
The two founders of the company, one named George, was a professor of engineering at the U of S. That's how I met him. And he said...
You're a real ball of fire. Why don't you come work for us?
So he got me a job, $1,500 a month, stayed with a buddy. We bought six albums every Saturday morning, came and listened to the music, and...
And then finally said, you know...
We have this sales job, and I mean, the territory was British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. It's a big chunk of country.
And so Monday morning you'd get up, you'd get on the plane, you'd fly all the way east to Winnipeg, you'd do sales calls, you'd come all the way back.
So let's do Regina, Edmonton, Calgary, you come home, and on Friday you try to do some sales calls in Vancouver, and on Saturday you do your paperwork.
But, um...
It was fun. I ended up moving, when I moved to Vancouver, I moved in with my sister's best friend on the couch.
And I kept looking for apartments in the newspaper and she finally said, Don, if they're in the paper, they're shit.
You got to get in your car and drive around. I was old because there, you know, so I drove around and I found this place, one bedroom above a shoe store and a restaurant. French restaurant was fantastic, chocolate mousse, and ended up meeting a really good guy named David who owned the shoe store. And so I would go down Saturday morning and do shoe sales for him. And we'd have a friendly bet over a beer on who would sell more shoes in an hour.
So then, so that was, that was the whole Vancouver bit, but I knew a lot of people in Vancouver because University of British Columbia had a team in the league we played in. So many of those, both men and women, I knew, and they played volleyball Saturday morning. So I got invited and it was a very easy integration into a community. Did Vancouver feel like an exciting, cosmopolitan kind of place compared to where you were from? Oh, no doubt, no doubt. But, you know, Vancouver is mini San Francisco. Like it's, it's a huge Chinese Canadian community, you know, huge Chinatown. The biggest, um, gay community in Canada is there. So very much a San Francisco vibe. I think it's the prettiest big city in the world when it's sunny, which is not very often. Yeah. Because when I moved there, I counted. There were 52 days in a row with no sun. Didn't rain every day, but it was overcast. And you come from Saskatchewan that has 300 days of sunshine a year.
So I do suffer from SAD, sun affective disorder. I have to turn it off for Zoom, but I have this giant white light on the side here for the winter time here.
Did the technical aspects of your education, was that useful? Did you draw on that for sales?
Oh yeah, absolutely. We sold...
We originally sold one thing, which was basically we know today as
Modems, right? So we invented the precursor of the basic modem technology that comes to your house now. And so I basically had to go to the telephone companies because that's who bought them, and were trying to get, and it was like 56,000 bits per second was the fast ones, you know? So yes, having an engineering background really mattered. And because all the buying people were super technical, and I wasn't super technical. I had to get up to speed fast on that stuff. And then the second product line was a switch. And back in the day, if you had three different computers doing three different things, one doing finance, one doing HR, one doing admin, you had three screens on your desk because they didn't talk to each other. So we made a box that went in the middle where you could only have one screen on your desk. And that became a very successful product line in the company, ultimately went public on the strength of that growth. Who were the clients? Who were you selling to?
In the modem world, it was mostly telephone companies, but in the switch world, we were big news. We were the leader in enterprise switching, so GE Aerospace was a big customer. NASA, Kennedy Space Center was a big customer, and ultimately, we sold the NASA, our next generation. I was the program manager, and so I worked at Kennedy Space Center for two or three years. I commuted.
Saskatoon, Minneapolis, Minneapolis, or no, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Minneapolis, Minneapolis, Orlando, rent the Hertz car and drive an hour on the B-line. It was a good thing I was 25. Then we had a three-bedroom apartment in Cocoa Beach.
And so I had other guys that worked on the team, and I would be two weeks on, and the other guy, a buddy named Andy, was two weeks off. But we were...
We were there during the Challenger explosion. Who were the competitors for your business? Who were you competing against? You know, it was another Canadian company called Gandalf, as like Gandalf the Great.
And they just hadn't figured out how to use microprocessors.
In their switching fabric before, we figured it out first, our head guy Brian.
So we really, the company was really, really taking off. But then...
Well, two things happened. One, that's when dad got colon cancer, about 1984.
And I said, I said to my management, I said, hey, look,
I gotta move home and take care of my family, so, you know, if you can find me a different job, because I can't do this sales job, great, and if not, I'll figure something out. So they said, no, no, no, and they put me in...
product management, which, you know, the four P's, product, pricing, promotion, positioning, and I learned that, and that has actually been the backbone of my career since then. Helped figure out where that new product lived, which worked very well for a long time. Uh, we didn't execute very well on engineering on it. And then Ethernet came and became the big disruption, which we did not embrace properly. And I ultimately left the company and went to another small company.
called SBE, Sideband Engineering. It was actually a shell of the CB radio company, but they built datacom stuff.
And that was the one, I don't know if we briefly talked about where we'd start drinking wine at 4 o'clock and...
I didn't, I didn't like it very much.
Don, in all your adventures as a traveling salesman, did it come naturally to you? Were you a good salesperson, or did you really have to work on that aspect of your personality? Well, I think I was pretty good at it. I mean, I have...
You know, this is a goofy thing to say, but my wife had me read once and said, hey, here's the news. You've been alive 60 times, and this is the first time you've been a guy.
I said, oh. So she, and then she said, so do you have good instincts? And I say, I have fantastic instincts. If I don't listen to them, I...


What am I talking about? So, no, I think I have good instincts and...
And a pretty good, I've learned how to be a pretty good active listener, so it...
You know, it wasn't the ice cubes to Eskimo kind of sales guy, but you build some trust and you know your stuff and you listen to what they want.
Don, what sticks out in your memory when you got news of your dad's diagnosis?
Expletive deleted.
um
Yeah, I had just started getting into a more serious relationship in Vancouver, and so, you know, I was thinking, what am I gonna do here? But I just told her, I said, look, I gotta...
I gotta go?
And then I went, I recall going and talking to his doctor about it. It was his general practitioner, it was not a cancer doc.
But he's like, you know...
He's not gonna live. And I was like, okay, dude, I got a perfect score in statistics in my senior year. Let's lay out the graph. Let me see where this thing has opportunity. And...
So he got lucky. They managed to...
resect the colon, take out most of the cancer.
He had a bag for a long time, but then they actually reattached that. So he survived for a good 20 years post that cancer.
And...
Where mom was not, as we had talked about earlier, mom was not so lucky. She got 20 months.
Do you think that your response to the doctor's fatalism about your dad, do you think that planted a seed in you that there's got to be a better way here?
Well, I, you know, I don't wanna get a front of my skis, but what was clear to me was...
That there was an opportunity to succeed and that the doctor hadn't given the family any hope. And I thought that was a travesty. So I came home to Mom and said, hey...
There's a chance here, and, you know, we just gotta...
Block and tackle and keep working through this, because it was chemo and, you know, I had surgery and then chemo and radiation, and it was pretty brutal attack on his body. I don't know if it planted a seed or not. Certainly, the wide range, my Uncle George I talked about, my dad's older brother, ended up getting prostate cancer.
And he didn't want to treat it, and then he finally did, and he died on the operating table.
And so he's a guy that shouldn't have, you know, that prostate question that I said we work on as a prostate team, should you or should you not? Had I known what I know now, I would say, George, you know.
Live with it for two more years and die with it in two years instead of going to the OR and dying next Wednesday, which is what he did.
So you going home wasn't just moral support, you were with your dad, driving him, taking care of him.
Oh, yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah.
Everyone, everyone was, yeah. Yep. And, you know, it's, it's, nothing's more than three miles away in Saskatoon. You get anywhere. It's not like you're going to UCSF or something. But you had the bandwidth, you could keep up with the work. That was okay.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. No, having bandwidth has never been an issue. Don, tell me about the four P's. Let's go through them one by one.
Oh, okay. Well, just, you know, you start with what's your product.
What's the positioning?
What's the pricing and what's the promotion? So when you start teaching young product managers, you talk to them about that. And, you know, on positioning, you know, a good buddy of mine who is a marketing guy, Procter & Gamble star, he said, look, you either describe it or you position your product, right? So it's Joe's low-cost cars. Oh, okay, they're low cost, right? So there's just some basics of doing that. It's, you want to occupy a piece of someone's mind. You know, in today's day and age, I could never be a head of marketing. The promotion techniques and technologies and online stuff that goes on, I would have to relearn a whole portfolio of that. But that, you know, that's always the basics. And you want to be, if you can, you want to be a worldwide leader in some category for something. You know, I want to be the worldwide leader in routing for the internet. Oh, okay, I'm Cisco. So too many people try to build the number four product. And, you know, I think.
60% of
Profits go to the number one market share product, and twenty percent go to the number two, and everyone else gets what's left. So if you can't build a great product, you're just pissing in the wind.
So this was, you know, the company saw potential in you. This was not necessarily an opportunity that you would have gotten had your father not gotten sick. You might have been on a different trajectory. Absolutely. Very true.
And I did well there. I got that new product off and going, won that contract at NASA. But as Ethernet evolved...
They said, you know, we got to get down to this place called Silicon Valley because we don't know what the heck is going on. And so they brought the company offered.
Four or five, I don't recall, of us who did not have children, some were married, some weren't.
to move down to this area.
And we all moved down the
They hired a new president, a wonderful man, Peter Krieg, Kriget.
And he looked at our finances, and so we had a small office in Dublin, California, and I bought a home in San Ramon.
The first home I bought in Saskatoon was $102,000 Canadian. I paid outright for it, so it was $70,000, and that was my down payment for my house in San Ramon. Welcome to California. Barely make ends meet and had dirt in the yard for at least a year, but it got us going. What year would this have been? When did you make the big move?
A
84 or 85. Okay, and your dad is stable at this point? You felt okay leaving?
Yeah, yeah, I mean, once he got his innards reconnected and, you know, things were going okay, I moved down and...
am
and then, and then...
And then that company went into a big proxy fight.
The CEO lost, and a new CEO came in, and he fired everybody except for me and the CFO.
And I thought, oh, merciful God, fire me too. And...
And we had won this weird deal in Vancouver, which was not representative. The product could do it, but it was the wrong fit. And he thought, oh, this is it. And I said, no, it's not.
And it was my first
Like I was super naive. I sort of like, well, I'm gonna leave. And he said, OK, well, I'm gonna give you six months' severance. I was like, oh.
Because I just thought I was sleeping and, you know, clearing out my locker and um...
So that that was fine. And then I went and joined this other networking company, which was an OEM, just a technology provider. And actually, Cisco was one of the customers. And as we talked about earlier, that was, I lived in San Ramon, that was a commute to Concord, which wasn't terrible.
I left that whole scenario to go to Cisco.
Which, of course, turned out fabulously for my life, but it was, man, gosh almighty, there was no 2:37. That was an hour and 45 commute because Cisco was in in
originally in East Palo Alto and in Mountain View.
Dan, I have to ask, this being a long time ago, did it feel at all like the Silicon Valley that we know today? Was it a buzz with technology and development and investing, or was it sleepier than that?
I'm not sure I would have had the full optics on it, David, but it was certainly more exciting than Saskatoon, right? I mean, it was. And, you know, and networking is the thing, like at that time.
3Com
Judy Astran, a well-known tech person there. 3Com was up and coming, Synoptics.
So there was more, you know, interest around the networking, which was...
All enterprise-based networking, which was sort of the precursor to the internet. It was not internet yet. You built private networks. But, you know, that was where the older company, DevelopCon, had a great opportunity. We had all the pieces to make campus area.
Technology that Synaptics ultimately made and became a multi-billion dollar market cap company and...
The CEO said, no, we're going a different direction, and that's when I said, well, geez, we had everything we needed, and he made the wrong choice. So I understand correctly, Synoptics was a contractor to Cisco? No, Synoptics was a, in that era,
The first wiring closet company. So you put your switching box in a wiring closet and over twisted pair, you would, over twisted pair that ran Ethernet, you could then connect your PC to the systems. We had all of the pieces. Remember those modems we talked about? Well, that's that same technology. We had all that. The switching technology for Kennedy Space Center, we had that. We had 3270 IBM technology that nobody had. We had X25 switch. We had all the pieces and it was just sitting there and super disappointing because it would have...
Would have worked really well, and we'd had a customer base that had our older technology that I think we could have upgraded, but did not happen. You mentioned the four Ps were so formative. Already at this stage in your career, were you drawing on that to sort of propel your career?
Yeah, I mean, I came up with a map which, you know, said, here's local area network, here's campus area network, here's wide area network, here's the size of them. So it was a 3x3 grid, and I said, we own the middle piece.
That's the one we should own. Let's not...
Around, and the boss said, no, we're gonna do the wire area piece. And I said...
The big structure of what we transfer is 25% efficient. It's terrible. It's 75% inefficient. That's the last thing you want to do over super expensive light overnight. Nobody cares if you're doing it on fiber on Kennedy Space Center. So...
Yeah, that...
And that did help because then I joined Cisco as a first product manager, and as we talked about earlier, you know, ended up...
I'm doing cleanup on aisle 4 on all the software that people wrote overnight, tried to tell people what it was, hey, try to figure out what the hell it was, and then clean up. So I would do this thing called, one of the old sales leaders of mine taught me, make the appointment at 5:13, so I would do beer, I'd go buy beer at 5:13.
And invite the engineering guys, so they would tell me what they wrote in code that week.
That was in East Palo Alto, when East Palo Alto was the murder capital of the United States. Wow. And I'd go across the street to the little store and get the beer, and the people are going, dude, what are you doing? I said, they seem really nice. But we had...
We're preparing for Interop, the trade show, and one of my guys comes in and says, there is some shots in the parking lot. I said, well, get in here. FBI raids. I mean, it's nowhere like that now. East Palo Alto, love you.
I go to the golf store all the time, but it was super dangerous back in the day, right at the Dunbarton Bridge there.
Was Stanford in those early days, was it sort of interconnected with Silicon Valley? Were you seeing Stanford graduates do startups, or this is all earlier than that?
You know, I think that it's earlier, where they did startups, was Sun Computer. So it was in the compute space that was the hot space then. I mean, during the Cisco's tenure,
Both Jim Gibbons and John Hennessy, both of whom were dean of engineering at Stanford, were on the board.
So, you know, they did try to create linkage. Mr. Valentine, we talked about my father-in-law.
he created a lot of scholarship opportunities in Stanford. So I think it got tighter, but in those days, networking wasn't quite the thing. It became it quickly, but let's call the 80s was compute and the 90s was networking. Sure, sure.
So at this stage in your career at Synoptics, were you already sort of C-suite or one step below that? Oh, I never went to Synoptics. What I said, and I said poorly, at the Velcon company, we had all the fixings to become a Synoptics. I see, I see. We didn't, I said, forget about it and left to this other company. When I joined Cisco, that was the 50% pay cut to an individual contributor.
And so, no. And that's when Sandy and Len, the founders of Cisco, were there. They, that was the story where Sandy told, there were no brochures.
And Sandy told everyone, if the customers weren't smart enough to figure it out, we didn't want them for customers.
Which didn't go with the classic marketing strategy. And there was a, when I was just joining, there was a revolt.
And all of the VPs came into the CEO's office and said, it's us or her.
So that that was what I, like the first week I'm there, I'm like, what the hell is going on?
But I worked with this lovely guy, Doug Hsu, and he was just starting to build out the product management team.
And, you know, help me get centered.


there and...
And I went up the ranks. Well, Don, I think maybe that's a perfect narrative break given how important this pivot is in your career when you started Cisco Systems. Why don't we pick up there for next time?
That sounds awesome, Dave.