Tiecon organizers chose VMware CEO Paul Maritz to kick off the self-proclaimed world's largest entrepreneurs conference
VMware CEO Paul Maritz kicked off Tiecon’s conference in Santa Clara, Calif. as the opening keynote speaker.
Maritz started his speech on entrepreneurship by drawing on his own experience, as a young computer graduate freshly arrived in Silicon Valley – on January 1st, 1981 – from South Africa, with his wife, a 9-months old baby and about $600 in cash!
“I’ve walked the path that many of you had the privilege to walk. The fairy tale and an incredible experience that all of us know of being part of a society that fosters entrepreneurs and has given us such tremendous rewards,” said Maritz.
But before joining Intel and then Microsoft as one of its top executive, Maritz had to go through some mainframe years. The computer landscape in 1981 was very different from what we know today.
“The [mainframe] world was dominated by IBM and the 7 dwarfs (Burroughs, Sperry Rand, Control Data, Honeywell, General Electric, RCA and NCR). I have left South Africa to work in the computer industry and in those days IBM was the Microsoft of these days: it was the uncool place to go in those days! Instead I went to work for Burroughs because they had a very cool instruction set,” recalls Maritz.
Today’s cool places to work in Silicon Valley are Apple (still), Google or Facebook, replacing the likes of H-P, Sun or Yahoo. But with unemployment soaring, does it matter really anymore?
Great resource.