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Interview

Caltech Heritage Project Oral History (2025)

A four-part oral history recorded March–April 2025 with David Zierler (Caltech Heritage Project). Don Listwin traces the arc from building Cisco’s growth engine to leading Openwave through the dot-com collapse—and then rebuilding his life around early cancer detection through the Canary Foundation.

What this series covers

  • Building markets, not just products: Cisco-era lessons on platform shifts, distribution, and customer-pulled roadmaps
  • The pivot from tech to science: why early detection became the mission, and what “team science” fixes
  • The Canary model: seed funding → early data → leverage into major grants (and why milestones matter)
  • Why imaging is the next big bet: biomarker + confirmatory imaging as a practical path to action
  • AI’s near-term impact: imaging + pathology as the first domains where algorithms reliably outperform variability

Listen + download

Download full transcript (PDF) Download full transcript (TXT)

Episodes

Episode 1 — March 25, 2025

From Cisco to Canary: building early detection as a system

Runtime: 1h 04m

Episode transcript (TXT)
  • Why the “two-step” early detection model matters (biomarker + imaging)
  • The leverage strategy: seed dollars that unlock major grant funding
  • What progress looks like today—and what still hasn’t broken through
  • How a first $1M gift and later $10M Fred Hutch investment set the early team-science model

Episode 2 — April 2, 2025

Origins: family, Canada, and the making of a builder

Runtime: 1h 00m

Episode transcript (TXT)
  • Growing up in Saskatchewan; early work ethic and entrepreneurship
  • Engineering education and early networking sales/product lessons
  • How early personal experiences shaped later leadership instincts
  • A ground-level operating lens built from factory work, field sales, and product management discipline

Episode 3 — April 7, 2025

Cisco years: product rigor, acquisitions, and the internet boom

Runtime: 1h 04m

Episode transcript (TXT)
  • Product management under hypergrowth: engineering vs sales vs customers
  • The IBM interoperability push as a market unlock
  • Scaling lines of business and what it takes to go from $100M → $250M → billions
  • How release discipline, roadmap arbitration, and customer signal translated into repeatable growth

Episode 4 — April 28, 2025

Loss, purpose, and the next decade of early detection

Runtime: 1h 18m

Episode transcript (TXT)
  • His mother’s ovarian cancer story as the catalyst
  • Why diagnostics economics are still broken—and how that affects adoption
  • The forward bet: molecular imaging + ultrasound + AI as the next frontier
  • A practical thesis: fix care-continuum bottlenecks first, then scale delivery economics

Related links

Canary Foundation Oral History (Computer History Museum, 2018) Press & References