Meeting Scott McNealy

by Ben Summers

24 June 2008

Last week, I met Scott McNealy. It’s not every week I can boast about meeting a computer industry legend.

Scott’s the chairman of Sun Microsystems, who supply our servers and the Solaris operating system to run on them. Sun have been extremely helpful to us with all sorts of things. It’s very important to have a good relationship with your server vendor when you’re running a hosted service, and as a small company it’s wonderful (and surprising) to get such personal attention from a global corporation.

As well as providing us with high-quality hardware and technical support, we get the occasional treat, such as this “VIP Event” to meet Scott. When I got the invite I didn’t realise how exclusive it was — just 25 startup companies attended.

Scott didn’t disappoint. He’s an incredibly engaging speaker, with some great stories and a whole load of experience to share.

After being delayed by the usual London traffic, he introduced himself very briefly, then asked for questions. With only about 25 guests, everyone who wanted to ask a question could, and we got through lots of interesting topics.

I think a couple of points stood out for me.

“Be controversial”

If everyone agrees with you, you’ll just be doing the same thing as everyone else. But if you’re different and controversial, you’ll stand out, be unique, and lead your market.

He was wise enough to point out that it’s also rather important to be right.

“Be ethical”

Over the years, Sun has behaved almost impeccably, especially compared to the likes of Microsoft. Scott believes strongly in “never taking any, legal, financial or ethical risks”. All your risks should be in business or engineering, which is how a company creates new and innovative products. It’s turned out well for Sun, showing that doing the right thing is always the best thing to do.

Oh, and there were some good stories

Having had an eventful and high profile career, he’s gained an awful lot of stories to tell. And knows how to tell them!

My favourite was how they persuaded Bill Joy to co-found Sun. They wanted the best UNIX developer in the world, and kept asking “who’s the best UNIX engineer you know”. By asking the same question to those named in previous answers, they followed a chain to the best ever, which turned out to be Bill. At which point, Andy Bechtolsheim, the other technical co-founder of Sun, said “oh, I know him”, and this personal connection convinced Bill to join.

Scott tells the story better than me. The video of the event is online, and watching it is 45 minutes well spent.

Innovation in Britain

But it wasn’t just Scott who impressed. It was wonderful to talk to others creating great technology — as well as those who’ve made it big, like last.fm, there were those who undoubtedly are about to make it big.

You hear so much about Silicon Valley being the only place you can create a technology startup. But it’s not true. Over here, British innovators are quietly getting on with creating revolutionary products. We may be less brash about it, but we do it just as well!

All in all, an inspirational evening.