Morgridge Book

Journal entry Friday, October 7th, 1988

I had a nice breakfast with John Morgridge at a cool place in Palo Alto named Late for the Train. He showed me an offer that he had just received from a small startup technology company, I think to become its CEO, named cisco Systems, small “c” at the time. He said he had a feeling that this company could grow rapidly and he would take the leap and accept the offer. He said the salary isn’t much but he would receive considerable cisco stock. He said this should put him in a position to make another large stock gift to UW in the future. And that was how he got to cisco. The very same day he went and told cisco he would accept the offer. At that time it was a 20 million dollar business, run out of a small operation. And it grew to be, golly, I can’t even tell you, what its net worth is now, but it’s in the tens of billions. And it could not have happened to a better guy, but it didn’t happen because he was a nice guy. He is also a brilliant marketing person, and he knows how to get along with people. He worked very hard for that. And people have to understand that sometimes people say, “Oh, you are really lucky to have all that money.” But no, you work really hard for it. It is what you do with the money that gives you the luck in life.

Donald Gray Vice President of the UW Foundation, 1984–2007