The Science Fiction World of Xueba

Pang Xuelin stayed in the United States for another week. After repeated tug-of-war negotiations, the two sides finally reached an agreement.

Pang Xuelin acquired 49% of the shares of Skoop from Sun Yansheng, and Sequoia Capital also bought part of the shares from Sun Yansheng and Skoop's management team, making Sequoia Capital's total equity in Skoop reach 100%. Forty percent, with the remaining eleven percent held by the management team.

Sequoia Capital will send a CEO to Skoop, who will be fully responsible for the operation of Skoop.

At the same time, Transwarp Technology and Skoop signed a cooperation agreement. In the next fifteen years, Skoop will be fully responsible for the development of Transwarp CVD/DVD markets in the Americas, Europe, and Australia.

On this basis, Sequoia Capital exchanged its 10% stake in Cisco with Pang Xuelin's Transwarp Technology at the same ratio of 1:1.

As a result, Pang Xuelin finally got the Cisco shares he expected.

As for Sun Yansheng, after completing the equity transfer with Pang Xuelin and Sequoia Capital, he can't wait to return to China.

For him, Wanyan Company is the next main battlefield.

On April 15, 1994, in the third week after arriving in the United States, Pang Xuelin went to Cisco for the first time as the largest individual shareholder, accompanied by Benson Rafael.

Cisco President Morgridge and Vice President Chambers have been waiting at the door for a long time.

John Morgridge is a tall man in his fifties, with a pair of rimless glasses, gentle and refined, a typical white elite image.

Chambers looks a little younger. These two are Cisco’s golden partners. It is because of their existence that Cisco was able to achieve glory in just a dozen years since its establishment, and even once became the world’s most valuable company. top company.

In order to find investment, the founders of Cisco Lerner and his wife found Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital.

The condition that Valentine proposed at the time was that he organize the management team himself, and the Lerners finally agreed to his request.

Later, under the recommendation of Valentine, Morgridge joined Cisco and became the helm of this emerging technology company.

Morgridge has a stable personality and keen eyesight. His business philosophy is completely different from that of the Lerners who are used to small workshops and technology-oriented.

After several violent conflicts,

Cisco's management had no choice but to fire the Lerners.

In 1990, the Lerners cashed out $170 million worth of Cisco stock and left the company they founded.

Subsequently, Cisco officially entered the Morgridge era.

As it turned out, Morgridge was a sensible man.

He is soberly aware that Cisco is no longer a company that can develop and grow only by technology research and development, and that it needs to break away from the family workshop style of operation and management.

Morgridge was looking for a new helmsman for Cisco, and he had his eye on Chambers.

Born in 1949, John Chambers earned degrees in law and business from West Virginia University and an MBA in finance and management from Indiana University.

In 1976, Chambers came to California and worked in IBM's marketing department for six years. In 1983, he entered Wang An Computer Company as the marketing director, and later became the senior vice president of the Americas and Asia Pacific regions.

In 1991, Morgridge invited Chambers, who had left Wang An's company and was at home, to join Cisco. Chambers initially served as a senior executive of Cisco's global operations department, brought new development ideas to Cisco, and participated in a series of major decision-making for the company.

Three years later, that is, this year, Chambers was promoted to executive vice president, fully responsible for R\u0026D, manufacturing, marketing, control and other businesses.

In January 1995, the forty-six-year-old Chambers officially succeeded Morgridge as the new CEO of Cisco and began to take the helm of the network company. Under his leadership, Cisco created the most brilliant performance in the history of the Internet. In 1997, Cisco ranked among the Fortune 500 companies in the United States. At the time, the rise of the Internet was fueling Cisco's meteoric rise, and the company's routers and switches were soon seen as vital pillars of an increasingly networked world.

Since he has been engaged in front-line sales and customer service work, Chambers has a deep understanding of the importance of meeting customer needs, which coincides with Cisco's "customer-centric" corporate culture. After years of experience in big companies such as IBM and Wang An, Chambers has accumulated rich experience in marketing and sales, and has also formed his unique management philosophy.

Both Chambers and Morgridge had worked in sales, and neither of them had expertise in technology, so they were not superstitious about technology.

Chambers was forced to lay off 5,000 employees when he was at Wang's because the company's reliance on outdated technology eventually led to a decline in the company's performance. Afterwards, Chambers became more determined to "no technology worship", which later evolved into another core of Cisco's corporate culture.

Chambers stands ready to buy any new company that represents the future direction of technology.

Chambers believes that this acquisition can make Cisco less detours, reduce future uncertainty, and save money in the long-term market development.

The acquisition also expanded Cisco's market share in various fields and accelerated the establishment of Cisco's market leading position.

Chambers believes that entering the market is not the goal, the important thing is to occupy the first or second place in each market. If Cisco can't do this by itself, then form an alliance with other companies in this market, or make an acquisition, must achieve the goal, or exit. Acquisitions have been a driving force behind Cisco's growth since 1993. In 2000 alone, Cisco acquired 22 companies. Acquisitions helped Cisco absorb innovative technologies, quickly enter new markets, and brought a large number of engineering and technical elites to Cisco.

Chambers didn't let the ethos of the company part ways with the founding couple. He encouraged Cisco engineers to use their spare time to start a business, even if they leave Cisco for the start-up company, it doesn't matter, Cisco will support them with funds as an investor rather than a manager.

If the project is successful, Cisco has the right of first acquisition. If it fails, the company will lose some investment, but it will save a lot of trouble in management, personnel, and organizational structure adjustment. Cisco also outsources its manufacturing activities.

This means that Cisco can quickly expand production without having to worry about expanding the factory and recruiting employees. When demand shrinks, companies can easily scale back production, so they don't have to worry too much about laying off workers during a recession.

This concept can be said to be completely different from Huawei's business philosophy.

Huawei is looking for a technology, starting from the bottom principle, understanding it step by step, and then expanding the application field of the new technology step by step on the basis of it again.

This approach, whether it is a communication equipment supplier or the later consumer electronics era, Huawei is exactly the same.

For example, when making a mobile phone, Huawei would click on the technology tree in front of the camera, so when the screen and memory were not as good as Samsung, and the system was not as good as Apple, Huawei finally relied on its super high level in the field of photography to forcibly stand in the flagship machine market. Steady your feet.

In the 5G era, relying on its deep technical foundation in the 5G field, it has bucked the trend and is one step ahead of Samsung and Apple.

In Pang Xuelin's view, this is the gap between a first-class company and a great company.

Both Chambers and Morgridge are excellent businessmen and entrepreneurs, but they are one level behind Ren Zhengfei.

This is why after Cisco became the company with the highest market value in the world, it fell into a slump due to the Internet bubble, while Huawei was able to buck the trend and experience several crises, but it became stronger and stronger.

"Mr. Pang, hello, welcome to Cisco!"

Both Morgridge and Chambers looked at the magical boy from the East with some curiosity.

They don't know much about Pang Xuelin. They only know that this young man invented a brand-new audio-visual imaging equipment in China, which swept the whole of China in just a few months and created billions of wealth.

Then that company attracted Valentine's attention, and eventually Pang Xuelin and Valentine became one of Cisco's largest individual shareholders by replacing Cisco's shares.

However, Morgridge is not worried about the impact of such an extra person on the board of directors on Cisco.

Not to mention that the combined shares of the two of them in Cisco surpassed Pang Xuelin, Sequoia Capital still owns 20% of Cisco's shares, plus the shares of other investment institutions, the 100% in Pang Xuelin's hands Ten shares, there is no trouble at all.

Pang Xuelin stepped forward, shook hands with Morgridge and Chambers respectively, and then, accompanied by the two, entered the Cisco headquarters for a visit.

"Mr. Morgridge, I remember that you seem to have acquired a company called Crescendo last year. The R\u0026D department of that company should also be included in the Cisco laboratory? Is it convenient for me to visit now?"

Morgridge and Chambers looked at each other, a little surprised that Pang Xuelin knew Cisco very well, but he didn't think too much, and smiled, "Mr. Pang, of course!"

Pang Xuelin followed Morgridge and Chambers and went straight to the Cisco lab.

He didn't come to Cisco this time to meet these two business tycoons.

Pang Xuelin's real target is Cisco's Catalyst switches.

In 1993, Cisco completed its first acquisition since its founding, targeting a startup called Crescendo.

Although Cisco created as many as 200 mergers and acquisitions in the future, this was the first time in its "life", and it was this acquisition that opened the glorious era of Cisco Catalyst switches.

The amount of this transaction is US$94.5 million, which is not a small amount for Cisco, which has just been listed for three years and has a revenue of less than one billion US dollars.

But a few years later, Catalyst switches had an annual revenue of $15 billion.

Here we have to admire the vision and luck of Cisco's management. In this era when even network hubs (HUBs) are far from popular, Cisco, which started out as a router, is keenly aware of the network switch market, and chooses to make a decisive move. "Blood capital" bought Crescendo.

This acquisition not only acquired Crescendo’s products and technology, but also got 3 key figures to join, Mario, Prem and Luca, these 3 people later became Cisco’s legendary engineers, known as the company’s “heart, Soul and Brain", also known as the "MPLS" team. (The other one is Soni)

After the acquisition, based on Crescendo's technology, Cisco launched its first switch, the Catalyst 1200, in 1994.

This switch supports 8 10M Ethernet ports (10Base-T copper cable or 10Base-F optical fiber), and there are two module slots for UPLINK.

The slot module supports two 100M FDDI or CDDI interfaces, which is the so-called optical fiber distributed data interface.

At this time, the Internet is still relatively sluggish. No matter copper cable or optical fiber, it can only run up to 10M, while the speed of FDDI/CDDI is 100M, which is twice as high.

And one of Crescendo's specialties is FDDI/CDDI, so the debut of Cisco Catalyst is such a switch that combines Ethernet and FDDI.

This is not enough to support the great Catalyst product line. Next, Cisco, which has tasted the sweetness, launched a series of mergers and acquisitions.

This year, Cisco will also acquire Kalpana, which developed the industry's first Ethernet switch in 1989/90 and invented port binding technology (PortChannel).

Later, based on Kalpana's modularization and stacking technology, the Catalyst 3000 series switches were born.

In the same year, it acquired ATM switch manufacturer LightStream, so that Cisco has ATM technology.

In 1995, Grand Networks was acquired, which gave Cisco 100M Fast Ethernet technology.

This is also the origin of the Catalyst 1700/1900/2800 series of desktop switches.

In 1996, Cisco acquired two companies, Nashoba Networks and Granite Systems, with token ring network technology, and the latter with Gigabit Ethernet technology.

At the same time, based on Crescendo's technology and talent accumulation, Cisco also launched its own first-generation backbone switch—the Catalyst 5000 series "big box" in 1995.

After some operations, Cisco completed the accumulation of full-stack technology in the switching field at that time.

From 10M Ethernet, Fast Ethernet to Gigabit Ethernet, from FDDI to ATM to Token Ring, from modular technology, stacking technology to Chassis.

So far, Cisco has become the leader in the switch market, and the first-generation Catalyst switch fleet has begun to take shape.

The time has advanced to 1999, and people are immersed in the panic of the end of the century and the hope of the new millennium.

A major event happened in the middle of the year, comparable to the acquisition of Crescendo, and the most classic product in Cisco's development history was born.

This is the Catalyst 6500 series backbone switch.

Strictly speaking, no matter before or after the release of the 65 series, it is not achieved overnight.

Starting with the C5000, Cisco has been trying to develop a chassis-based backbone switch. After C5000, C5500, and C6000, the Catalyst 6500 has finally become the "cross-century" generation.

No one thought that this series of switches would be sold for 20 years as soon as they were sold.

In 2019, the Catalyst 6500 celebrated its 20th birthday.

Over the past 20 years, Catalyst 6500 has created countless industry benchmarks, obtained more than 500 patents, and the total number of shipping ports has reached hundreds of millions. With generations of customers, it has crossed the "" era, "cloud computing" era, and "Internet of Things" era .

Such a core-level product with a life cycle of more than 20 years and a cumulative sales volume of more than 1 million units can be called a "magic work" in the history of network development!

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