A Road not Taken

When I left the Army 32 years ago in 1992, I had several good job opportunities. One of those was with a new company called Cisco Systems, where my buddy Dave tried to recruit me. He started there in ‘91 and retired a multimillionaire in ‘99. Looking back, it’s a classic “What if…”

After graduating from West Point, my first two tours were in the “muddy boots” Army with 3ID and then VII Corps in Germany. Returning to the States, the Army, in its infinite wisdom, sent me to grad school and I earned a master’s in electrical engineering. Deploying back to Europe in ‘85, the engineering group I was with started designing and implementing something new both for the Army and the world – Computer Local Area Networks (LANs) and Community Area Networks (CANs), eventually connecting them to DoD’s worldwide network. Remember this was all before the World Wide Web started in 1991 and was revolutionary. Hardly anyone even had email at the time. (My first email account was in ‘88 and was actually one account for seven of us in our office).

In our implementations, Dave and I started working with Cisco Systems, which developed the first commercial “router”. Without getting technical, routers enable different computer networks to talk with each other and were one of the necessary physical building blocks for what became the Web. The work we were doing was new enough that we were selected to make a presentation at a NATO Technical Conference in 1989 in Brussels, Belgium.

In ‘89, I returned to the States. Meanwhile, in ‘90 or ‘91 Dave left the Army and was hired by Cisco. Living in London, he became their sales engineer for Eastern Europe and Northern Africa.

Fast forward a couple more years to ‘92. The first Gulf War had ended in victory. The Berlin Wall fell a couple years before, and the USSR was falling apart. The Army decided it would downsize and started offering early-out packages.

I had been promoted to Major in the summer of ‘91 and was in a classified engineering job in the DC area at the time. I wanted to get back to the “muddy boots Army”, but the Army had decided to track me as an engineer and that wasn’t going to happen. After considering all options, in early March of ‘92 I decided it was time to leave the Army and started looking for a job in the civilian world.*

Pre-Internet, there were really only two ways to apply for a job – getting referrals from people you knew (always the best) or scanning the ads in newspapers. I was diligent with both and was soon interviewing for several opportunities. In the middle of all of this, Dave returned from London for a short trip and we got together for dinner.

As we talked, Dave grew animated — “I have a great job for you, and you are perfect for it. Cisco is expanding in Europe and we need engineers who understand the technology. It would be an easy transition, although you’d need to move back to Europe.”

I asked Dave to tell me more about what he was doing for Cisco.

“Well, as you know, I live in London – absolutely great city. On Monday morning I head to Heathrow and fly with a sales guy to somewhere in Eastern Europe or Northern Africa. We spend the week there working through sales opportunities. He handles the corporate part, and I work the technical. We also do follow up with locations where we’ve already sold systems. Of course, there are plenty of opportunities for fun while in those countries as well. On Friday, I fly back to London, party in the city and do laundry. On Monday I wake up and repeat the cycle.”

I should mention Dave was single at the time.

I looked at him and he looked back at me. “If you want the job, it’s yours. I can make it happen. It would be a combination of salary, stock and stock options”.** I asked how long he was in town for and said I’d get back to him in a couple of days.

I thought about the opportunity and Cath and I talked about it. While it had great potential, there were also several items in the “no” column. Cath and I spent almost the entire decade of the 80s in Europe, and although we loved it, we missed a decade’s worth of time with family and friends back home, including watching our nieces and nephews grow up. Cath’s career was taking off here in the States – after following me around in the army for over 13 years, was it fair to uproot her again? She also had a new horse and we would need to sell it. At the time, it was also a problem bringing a dog into England and would require months of quarantine there – did we want to subject our dog, Top, to that? And, ultimately, did we want to return to Europe for the kind of life it would be – me on the road five days a week? I’d travelled extensively during my time in the Army, but typically for a week or ten days at a time every month or two. This was a completely different beast.

Of course, Cisco wasn’t yet what it would later become. At the time, it was a small company making a box that would become (but we didn’t know it yet) instrumental in the Internet and a new-fangled idea called the “World Wide Web” – who knew what kind of future they would actually have?

In the end, it was an easy decision to make. I let Dave know I was appreciative of the offer, but had to say no.

Cath and I ended up staying in the DC area where I had a dozen interviews and half-a-dozen offers. I joined a company called SRA and enjoyed a wonderful career. Later I was COO at a smaller company called Pragmatics. Both companies were good to me and I retired in 2013 at the age of 58.

And Dave? Dave rode the fast train at Cisco. Cisco went public in 1990, about a decade before the dot-com bubble. According to Forbes, the company was the top-performing Initial Public Offering (IPO) of the 1990s. It reached a peak market capitalization of $555 billion during the height of the dot-com craze, briefly making it the most valuable company in the world. Dave returned to the States in the mid 90s and continued working for Cisco at their headquarters in California. He retired in 1999, cashed in his options and bought a house in Los Gatos, CA and a Porsche. We remained friends and attended his wedding a few years later. One of the smartest guys I know, he went on to work with at least two more startups.

As for Cisco, well, other things happened. The dot-com bubble peaked on Friday, March 10, 2000. Over the next two years Cisco lost 80% of its stock value, but was one of the lucky ones. It rode out the storm and is still around today, still a cornerstone in the Information Technology industry. Many companies went bankrupt or just disappeared during that period of time. I knew several friends who were paper millionaires in the late ‘90s. Almost all of them were looking for new jobs in the early 2000s.

Over the years I’ve told the story more than a few times at my own expense. The questions I usually get are “Do you regret it? Do you think about being so close to the opportunity of a lifetime and missing it?”

The truth is, I have occasionally thought about it off and on. I mean, who wouldn’t? It makes a great story. I also often think to myself, yea, I might have become rich as hell by ‘99, but I also might have been divorced. Not that Cathy and I were having any problems at the time, we weren’t. But returning to Europe? On the road that much? Putting our lives back home on hold again for the foreseeable future?

We all have paths and choices in our lives. We never really know how things might have worked out on the other road, do we? Better? Worse? Who knows? I (we) have been pretty happy on the path chosen back in the spring of ‘92. I have no regrets.

Occasionally, in my mind’s eye, through the haze of an alternate future I see myself in a Porsche driving along Highway 1 in California, the sun setting over the Pacific Ocean. About half the time, I seem to be alone in the car.

Addendum:

• * When I was considering leaving the Army in ‘92, my thought process was only about whether to stay in the Army or not. On purpose, I didn’t cloud the decision with thoughts of a particular job, or salary. It sounds a bit crazy perhaps, but the choice, in my mind, was about Army, or no Army for me. After I decided to leave the Army is when I started looking for a job.
• ** To put the chance to work for Cisco in perspective, An investment of $10,000 at Cisco’s IPO in 1990 would now amount to around $6.6 million, and that excludes the dividends they started paying in 2011. Of course, an offer with stock and options would have pushed those numbers significantly higher.
• I did work extensively with Cisco Systems in the late ‘90s when I was a lead engineer for the Pentagon Renovation Program. As the building was gutted one wedge at a time, we were replacing and updating the computer networks then in use. Cisco’s switches and routers were deployed across parts of the Pentagon. At some point I was given this coffee mug, which somehow ended up at my sister Roberta’s home in Illinois. When visiting her, I often use the mug and smile, thinking about alternate lives.