Jeff Hawkins Discusses Undergraduate and Early Career Experiences

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Transcript

hawk_01accidentalEntre1

Well, I would definitely call myself an accidental entrepreneur. I had no desire ever in my life to start a company and never thought of myself as an entrepreneur. When I went to school here, no one ever talked about entrepreneurism and, if anything, might have been thought a slightly dirty word. It just wasn't a thing to deal with. I actually got off to a pretty unremarkable start to my career. I stumbled into electrical engineering because my father said to me "You know, this microelectronics stuff looks interesting. Maybe you ought to do that." I said, OK and then the first thing I ever designed was right here at Cornell, we had this 3 credit course that all undergraduate engineers had to take. Two of the credits were like programmed images on punch cards. The other was drafting. We had to pick one of three things to design. I picked a seat belt buckle. I don't know if you still do this kind of thing but - I designed my seat belt buckle and got an A on the paper. After I got the paper back, I realized it was totally inoperable - you could never open it as I designed it. It was an ethical question, do I tell the instructor that maybe I shouldn't have gotten an A? I don't know? When I left school here, I got a job at Intel Corp. You might think that was very impressive thinking, here's a new company that's going to be very powerful. No, I chose them because the job was in Oregon which really looked like a nice place to live. I went up there and hung out with Intel for a while. One of the first jobs I did for two years, you might view as a poor career choice, and turned out to be a pretty good one, actually. I taught classes to customers at Intel - how to design microprocessors. This wasn't a great career move but for two years I did this and what I did, most of these people were career educators, I said I'll teach a class and I'll learn while I'm teaching it. I went through like 25 courses (I taught each one about once) and after two years I learned a hell of a lot about computer science and about programming and real-time operating systems, etc. I also learned a very valuable skill which was how to be fearless in front of large audiences. So, hopefully, I look fearless - I don't know. From there I joined a start-up company in Silicon Valley called Great Systems. Great invented the lap-top computer. I didn't, I joined right after they launched that product but I dealt with my first taste of the portable computer. At this time I started falling in love with neurobiology. I got really interested in brains. I actually quit my job and said "I'm just going to study full-time", maybe I'll go to school - so I went to Berkeley.