How the World Got Wired · Routers and the People Who Built Them

Cisco in the Living Room

In December of 1984, Sandy and Len did something that thousands of people had done before them, and millions of people have done since, but that very few had ever done with a piece of technology that would change the world.

They started a company.

They named it cisco — written, in their original style, with a small c. The name came from San Francisco — the city they could see from the hills around Stanford. Their logo, which they designed themselves, was a stylized line drawing of the Golden Gate Bridge.

They ran the company out of their living room.

This is not a figure of speech. Their actual living room, in a small house in Atherton, California, was full of soldering irons, wires, computer parts, and assembled routers being shipped to customers. They worked seven days a week. They had no employees. Sandy did the orders and the books. Len did the engineering. When a router needed to be tested, they tested it on the kitchen table. When a customer called, they answered the phone themselves.

The routers they sold were not pretty. They were rough metal boxes, the size of a stack of textbooks, with little blinking lights and lots of cables coming out the back. But they worked. They could connect almost any kind of network to almost any other kind of network. And in the mid-1980s, that turned out to be a thing the world desperately needed.

Every university had different kinds of computers. Every corporation had different kinds of computers. Every research lab had different kinds of computers. Until Cisco came along, those different computers mostly couldn’t talk to each other — or could only talk to each other through expensive, specialized equipment from the big telecom companies. Cisco’s router was small, relatively cheap, ran on top of TCP/IP, and would talk to almost anything.

By 1986, Cisco was selling routers as fast as Sandy and Len could build them. By 1987, the company had moved out of the living room and into a real office. They had a small staff. They had customers in dozens of countries.

But they were running out of money.

This is a thing that often happens to small companies that are growing very fast. To make more routers, you have to buy more parts. To buy more parts, you need cash. To get cash, you can either wait for customers to pay you (which takes time) or you can borrow it, or you can sell a piece of your company to investors. Sandy and Len had been turning down investors for years. They wanted to keep the whole company for themselves. But they had run out of ways to grow without help.

In late 1987, they took the meeting they had been avoiding.

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