On today’s show, we have Scott Kriens, chairman and former CEO of Juniper Networks, who has been in the technology industry for more than 35 years. In 1996, he co-founded Juniper Networks, growing the company to $4 billion in global sales and more than 10,000 employees in 100+ countries. In 2010, Scott and his wife Joanie launched 1440 Foundation, an organization committed to the cultivation of truly real and connected relationships, with self and others, as a basis for living well. The work of the foundation led Scott and Joanie to launch 1440 Multiversity, a 21st century learning destination in the California redwoods of Santa Cruz County.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN:
- What was it like to go through the dot.com bubble?
- What were the events that led up to Scott winning the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of The Year award?
- How did Silicon Valley Change over the years, from 1986 to when Scott left Juniper Networks in 2008?
- What is 1440 Multiversity?
We would like to give a special thanks to Michael Balistreri, a Business Performance Advisor at Insperity. Michael made the introduction to Scott. Without Michael, we would not have been able to conduct this amazing interview.
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BOOKS AND RESOURCES
- 1440 Multiversity.
- Visit the website of Juniper Network.
- Connect with Scott Kriens on LinkedIn.
CONNECT WITH SHAWN:
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- Shawn Flynn’s LinkedIn Account
- Silicon Valley LinkedIn Group Account
- Shawn Flynn’s Facebook Account
- Email Shawn@thesiliconvalleypodcast.com
Disclaimer to the Transcripts:
Intro 00:00
You’re listening to The Silicon Valley Podcast.
Shawn Flynn 00:02
On today’s show, we have Scott Kriens, who’s the chairman and former CEO of Juniper Networks, who has been in the technology industry for more than 35 years. In 1996, he co-founded Juniper Networks, growing the company to $4 billion in global sales and more than 10,000 employees in 100+ countries. In 2010, Scott and his wife Joanie launched 1440 Foundation, an organization committed to the cultivation of truly real and connected relationships, with self and others, as a basis for living well. On today’s show, we talked about a company that actually thrived from the .com bubble, what’s it like to win the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year award, what is the difference between a hardware startup and a software startup, and how to be a leader on today’s episode. Enjoy.
Intro 00:54
Welcome to the Silicon Valley Podcast with your host Shawn Flynn who interviews famous Entrepreneurs, Venture Capitalists and Leaders in Tech. Learn their secrets and see tomorrow’s world today.
Shawn Flynn 01:18
Scott Kriens, thank you for taking the time today to be on Silicon Valley.
Scott Kriens 01:22
Glad to be here, Shawn.
Shawn Flynn 01:23
Now, Scott, let’s go back to the very beginnings of your career. Can you tell me about the initial, your entrance, the beginnings of your time here in Silicon Valley?
Scott Kriens 01:33
Well, I graduated from college and I went to the placement center and I had an opportunity to take two jobs. One was assistant manager, or credit collections at a furniture rental place, and the other was computer salesman. And I thought, well, I didn’t go to college be a salesman, so I’ll be an assistant manager. But then I went to the interviews, and the assistant manager for bad credit for furniture rentals was, predictably, this job in this dingy old metal desk, dark place. And then I went to the interview for the sales job. And it was all these bright-eyed people, well-dressed, driving nice cars, selling technology. And I thought I don’t want to go work in that dark and dingy place. So I was either headed for the furniture rental business or the tech business. And since the people looked happier in tech, I did that.
Shawn Flynn 02:27
You started Stratacom. Can you tell us a little bit about that company and what led you do start a company?
Scott Kriens 02:34
Well, it wasn’t mine to start. I was part of the team. But I had worked for five or six years before that. And I ended up leaving an established computer company. It’s no longer around, called Tandem Computers. I went to this startup, completely naive about what that even was. And I got told this story about how great it was going to be which I believed. And then nine months later, we went bankrupt.
I went on unemployment and I moved into the other corner of this bedroom, one-bedroom place, over this garage with my buddy from high school. And I was collecting $104 every two weeks in the mailbox. It was my unemployment check. The company went out of business was given a little lifeline from an investor that had lost all their money and that said, “Here’s a half a million dollars to see if you can resurrect this.” So I got a phone call from the guys that were trying to do it. And they said, “We need you to come back and see if you can help us with this.” So I did, to make long story short, that was the beginning of Stratacom in 1986. Ten years later, we sold it for $5 billion. But in the middle of that, for five years, it was… We did nothing, five years into it. All we had done was burn all of the money that they gave us and produce no proceeds and no profits. And the company was on the verge of going out of business again.
Scott Kriens 03:53
And we had a new idea. It’s way outdated by now 30 years ago, but the idea was to connect buildings together that had networks inside the buildings, but no connections between the buildings. And so our technology was if you have these two buildings and somebody in one building wants to send something on a network to somebody in the other building, how might you do that? And we had an idea of a way to do that. And so in the second five years, it went from 25 million and broke to 500 million. And we sold it for four and a half billion. The main learning of that was in the first five years, the same team, because it’s mostly the same people in the company and the leadership of that company was very much the same… We were dummies, because we blew $25 million and didn’t produce anything. And then for the next five years, we made $500 million of revenue, it happened and created four and a half billion dollars of value. And it was the same people. So the learning about that was, you’re not as stupid, and you’re not as smart as the results might indicate. But it’s really smart to be in good markets. And that’s what we weren’t in for the first five years. And then what we were in for the second five years.
Shawn Flynn 05:07
At that time, was there any competition amongst any other company in yourself for connecting building to building?
Scott Kriens 05:14
Yeah, there was a handful. Half a dozen actually, then once it became an idea that people were like, “Hey, that’s worth doing.” That was probably a dozen more or so I would say maybe, you know, like, like always, once an idea goes from being possible to being visible, people realize that it can be done. Once somebody realized that something can be done, then it’s easy. For some reason, it’s easier to replicate it or find their own way of doing it and jump in. That happens. And it did, and there were a lot of people in the market and some others that did okay. We were able to, I think we created the most value of the people doing it, partly by virtue of the price of the acquisition, but we’re far from being the only people in the game.
Shawn Flynn 05:57
When the company was being acquired by Cisco, what was that acquisition process like? What were the conversations going on amongst your team and Cisco itself?
Scott Kriens 06:09
That’s the funny thing, because it happened in April of 1986. And I actually left Sratacom in February by pure coincidence, and there were no conversations underway at the time. We had talked to the company, to Cisco, earlier than that, and they weren’t interested. And they went away and bought some other company for 200 or 300 billion because it was a lot cheaper than what they ended up spending on us. And obviously it didn’t work because they came back and bought Stratacom. But my wife and I were halfway through the pregnancy with our first child. And I’d been at Stratacom for 10 years. And so it was time to do something else. And I remember going to Dick Moley, who was the CEO for the whole time Stratacom existed. And I went to him and I said, “I really want to try being a CEO. But all of my net worth is tied up in this company, and you’re already a CEO that’s really good, with all of my net worth in your hands. And so I want to try being a CEO but not with my own money. I’d rather leave that in your good hands. And I’ll go try it somewhere else with somebody else’s money in case I don’t do very well.”
Scott Kriens 07:12
So anyway, I had made that plan to leave and I said, I’m going to take a few months off, and my son was born in May. And in April, Cisco came back and over the course of like three weeks said, “Okay, we give up, what we tried to do didn’t work. And we have our checkbook out, we’d like to buy you.” And they put a big check on the table and that was that. So for me, it was very serendipitous, because if I hadn’t left two months before that acquisition, I would have been prohibited from going to a competitive company. Because in any big acquisition, one of the things that always happens is the acquirer insists on having non-compete agreements with the executives of the acquired company, usually for one to two years. So had I simply been in my job in April instead of leaving in February, I would have been contractually prohibited from going to a competitive company for two years. So, by the pure good fortune of 60 days and a five-month pregnant wife, I was free to do whatever I want, which eventually turned into Juniper, and that otherwise never would have happened.
Shawn Flynn 08:21
How did you get introduced to Juniper?
Scott Kriens 08:23
There were only four or five people. Well, first off, Drew, my son was born in May. And Joaniei and I were enjoying that, and challenged by that. And it was in like July that I said, “Okay, it’s time to get back in the game.” And so I had been really out of it for several months. And Pradeep Sindhu, the founder of Juniper, who is a brilliant technologist, also brilliant enough, and with a managed enough ego, to realize I can handle the technology and the architecture of all this, but I’m not a CEO. So he went looking for somebody, he went to his investors, and to a couple other folks he knows and probably, I don’t know, four or five different people said, “Hey, you need to go take a look at this company.” And I met Pradeep and I met Vinod Khosla, who was the earliest investor from Kleiner Perkins. And it was by way of those introductions, what’s now been a 25-year relationship almost with Pradeep that I became enamored with him and the company and rest is history.
Shawn Flynn 09:29
What was the onboarding like to become the new CEO of Juniper? What was kind of the internal conversations or how did that dynamic change when the CEO hold everyone announced to everyone that I’m stepping down, this new person’s coming in?
Scott Kriens 09:48
Well, that’s a funny story about it. First of all, he really wasn’t saying stepping down. He, I think there was always the knowledge that there needed to be a CEO because I was, there was about a dozen people at the company at the time. Maybe 15. All engineers and Pradeep had been very open about it from the beginning that we need to see if we have a real idea here. And then we need to get somebody to help us build a company. So it was not any sort of a surprise, but the day that I accepted the job. So I said, “I want to meet every person to get an idea of what this is like.” I talked to everybody individually, in an interview process. And then I went to the company, the day that I accepted the job to announce and celebrate this. We gathered 15 of us in this room. I said, “I’m really excited to be your new CEO and I think we’re going to do great things. How can I help you? What can I do that would help you?” And it was 15 engineers and me. And we didn’t have a product for two years after that, because it was a significant development effort to produce one of these things called router. So we’re two years away from the engineering effort being completed. And I’m standing there as the first non-engineer in the company. And I said, “What can I do to help you guys?” And there was this silence in the room. And finally, this guy in the back raised his hand and he said, “Can you get us an espresso machine?” And that was my first contribution. And in retrospect, probably the best investment I ever made. Because for $500, I just… no telling how many hours of productivity that espresso machine produced. But in a room full of engineers with this one guy, that was the only thing I could do that was of any use in the early days. So it came up in the first meeting.
Shawn Flynn 11:26
Now, I’ve heard that hardware companies are hard. Why is that? Why does it take so long to get a product out there? And what are the investors’ thoughts when something is going to be built for two, three years without them even knowing if it will work or not?
Scott Kriens 11:43
It’s the nature of… in the middle of really high-performance hardware. It doesn’t matter if it’s networking hardware, computer hardware, storage hardware. In the middle of a really high performance, complex systems are silicon chips. And if you’re really on the cutting edge of that you have to design your own chip. You know, when we buy an iPhone or a laptop or something, we’re using chips that are designed in mass market by Intel. But if you’re doing a custom application, then you need to design your own silicon, with its own logic for the particular architecture of the thing you’re trying to do. Well, really complex, really dense, really high-performance silicon is about a two year plus project to go from the design to the actual delivery of a piece of silicon. And it’s better now. Still basically true, it’s better because there’s more tools.
Scott Kriens 12:46
But in 1996, we spent all that time, we did all that development. You get back this piece of silicon and until you put it into the system and start running signals through it, you don’t know if it’s going to work. And so there’s a reasonable chance that instead of a silicon chip that will power your networking product, you have a worthless piece of sand, because that’s all it is. If the signal that you put in on one side doesn’t come out on the other side, and you can’t change it, because it’s hardware, it’s done. And again, this is a little bit of a binary statement about a more sophisticated thing. But basically, you either find out that it works, or you find out that it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, you go back to the drawing board to try and troubleshoot this thing, which is a six months to 12 months process before you get another piece of sand in order to find out whether it’s going to be a silicon chip that you can use or not.
Scott Kriens 13:52
And in our very first product, we had to design and deliver four of those. We didn’t know if any of the four would work individually. And we had no idea how the four would work together. And we actually needed, of course, each one of them to work in a way we expected. But we also needed all four of them to work with each other in the way that we expected. And the number of combinations that can happen when you have a large amount of processing and IO happening on each chip times four, times all the combinatorically ways you need all four of them to work. The number of ways you could get it wrong is almost exponential. And if you do that, then you lose another year of your product, which means no revenue, no product, no customers, and probably no money, no investor money. That was the task that lay before us. And I guess to go back to your original question about hardware, one of the reasons hardware companies, if they’re really building sophisticated systems are so hard to do is because some version of that amount of complexity is in the critical path of delivering a piece of this complex hardware system. And compare that to a software company where you write it, test it, change it tomorrow, try it again, change it tomorrow, try it again, recompile. You don’t recompile in today’s agile systems in the same way you used to try it, fix it, try it, fix it, try it, fix it, you can do that every day. Instead of once every two years with one year in between, it’s a different game.
Shawn Flynn 15:23
Going back, would you do hardware again? Or would you go to a software company?
Scott Kriens 15:29
Well, there’s a reality of physics on the planet, which is that at the really sort of base, binary digital level, if you want all you’re doing is turning on and off, ones and zeros. And ultimately, you can reduce all of the sophistication of digital technology to ones and zeros, and you have to turn them on and turn them off. Well, there’s only a certain rate of speed at which you can do that in software. And if you can’t turn the ones and zeros on and off fast enough, then you need to do it in silicon. At some level, it’s kind of simple. It’s how fast the electrical current travels. And if you have to go off to a piece of software, go back and find a piece of hardware to turn the ones and zeros off, go back to a piece of software to find out what to do next. That takes a long time. And if you can run the electricity right through the piece of hardware and turn the ones and zeros off fast, and you know, I say faster, we’re talking about billions and billions of operations in a second here. But at the base level, at some point, you reach a limitation of physics where I can’t turn the ones and zeros on and off fast enough in a piece of software that has to go back and ask a piece of hardware to do it because the route return path takes too long. So you have to put your logic and your design in silicon because otherwise, electricity doesn’t go fast enough. And at least on this planet, you can’t change that. So nobody would do hardware designed by choice. For all the reasons I said, you know, who wants to take that risk? I’d rather just change it every day. But at some point, you can’t do it fast enough. And so you’re just left with the reality that we’re going to have to do this in a piece of silicon.
Shawn Flynn 17:10
You started at Juniper in 1996, what was it like the first couple years you’re there, but then the .com bubble, how did that impact you?
Scott Kriens 17:21
It made us because the origin of the internet in the earliest days, it was born on college campuses. And the idea was to try and connect the science building to the administration building to the math building. And computer systems were built in the days by lots of computer companies that are now gone. And what they tried to do was, if you bought a computer system from DEC or from HP or from IBM, and you now suddenly because this was emerging in the 90s, if you wanted to connect one and to put another… this building that building this computer that computer. What the computer guys did was they said, “Well, you know, if we put a unique protocol on the back end of our computer, which was how you connect to another one. And if the only way you could do that was to buy one of ours on the other end, then you’d have to buy all your computers from us.” And this thing called networking that was emerging in the 90s, we could actually take over the market by making it so that the only way you could connect your computers to this thing called the network is if you bought one of mine on both ends. So routing was born so that you could connect an IBM computer to an HP computer to a DEC computer, Compaq computer. Those companies that are gone, that all work.
Scott Kriens 18:41
So it was actually designed for college campuses to defeat the strategy of computer companies to dominate this new phenomenon called networking by using proprietary language that only they understood. And then the idea of the internet, something called the internet protocol or IP came along that said, “What if everybody uses the same protocol?” So the reason routing was born because the idea was, we’ll just build one language, and everybody will talk to it. And then everything can talk to everything, and anything can talk to anything. So that was the whole idea of the origin behind the invention of how you connect the internet together in a large scale. The first days is enlargement campus of a college, right? Well, even then you could see it was going to be a lot bigger than that. Nobody could predict where we are today. But it was obviously going to be a much bigger thing that was going to connect not just campuses, but let’s just say eventually, the whole world. And so you now had this scale of design you had to meet which was totally unrelated to what it was born to do. So one of the analogies for that is like saying, designed a whole different scale point. It’s like saying, “Can you redesign this house and make it into a football stadium?” No, you just might as well bulldoze the house and start over knowing you’re building a stadium. That was what had to happen in the evolution of all of this, that became Juniper. And we had a glimpse of that a little bit ahead of when it was actually happening. And so we were building these giant machines, giant at the time. And the big fear when we were building them was, you know, when we get done with this, the world’s only going to need five of them. And we’ll be done. And how’s that going to work?
And so we built this really fast, really big at the time thing. But of course, the internet came along and got much bigger, much faster than anybody thought. And so we found ourselves in this combination of being thoughtful enough to try and, you know, the sort of classic Gretzky line, you know, skate to where the puck is going to be. But we had no idea the magnitude of the opportunity. And so when it happened, and we came out with our product, fortunately it worked. We did for the first three years of company existed, we did 100 million, 600 million, 900 million, because all of a sudden, everybody needed something that large. And we had a football stadium, nobody else had houses. And so it was the right place at the right time, with at least some credit for some forethought, but a lot of good luck that it also happened exactly when we were ready to capitalize on it, and before other people figured it out.
Shawn Flynn 21:44
At that time with that massive growth, was there any scaling issues?
Scott Kriens 21:49
We don’t have time for how many scaling issues there were. People, processes, systems, everything broke. Stuff was being held together by pencils and spreadsheets, and what we call diving catches. Meaning that, you know, we were just about to need to finish a quarter or do something to a deadline. And there was no process that you could rely on to do it. And so somebody just dove, gave up their body to catch it, just before it broke, and make it happen. And those diving catches in the midst of this rapid scale that we were totally unprepared for became famous. And that became a part of the culture, not necessarily a great part of the culture, because then you became a hero for making a diving catch, which also, deemphasized the importance of creating a process so that you didn’t have to make a diving catch, which took us a while to figure out because you know, the body can only stand so many diving catches. And we were doing that all the time because the scaling broke everything.
Shawn Flynn 23:00
With that, in the year 2000, you won the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year award. What were some of the key events you think that led to you winning that award? And how was winning that award? Tell us a little about that.
Scott Kriens 23:15
One, you can call it it’s the Ernst and Young right place at the right time award, because the room was full of all kinds of people that have done amazing things. And ours happened to be in the middle of a thing that was bigger than anybody else’s, happening faster than anything else. And so it appeared as if we had magically created that. And really, we were just on the wave of what was happening. But it was fun and was great for the company to get the recognition. You know, I think coaches and CEOs and leaders many times they get too much credit when you win and take too much blame when you lose. So CEO of the year quote-unquote, means a successful team at the right place at the right time, and you know, right forethought it’s not as if it’s all pure luck. That’s what I learned at Stratacom when you’re in the right markets and you do the right things, you look smarter than you are. That was a grand case of that.
Shawn Flynn 24:14
And then you were at Juniper Networks for another eight or so years after that. What were some key highlights in that next segment of your career there?
Scott Kriens 24:24
I was the CEO from 96 to 2009. And there were highlights and lowlights, but it was fits and starts of the company. Over that time that in the .com, boom, the company’s value went to $75 billion, and the stock went to 270. And then in the .com crash, the stock went from 270 to 4. So talk about looking stupid, like who could let that, how can anybody destroy that much value. But it was overvalued to begin with, and then it was overcorrected and undervalued. And so you look like you created the value in the beginning, then you look like you destroyed it in the end.
And it’s part of the whole boom and bust of those early days of all of it. And, you know, one of the things that happened in that time that was a highlight, you know, it might not seem obvious, was when it crashed and our revenues flattened out when they’d been rocketing. And that’s why the stock collapsed. And people said, “You need to stop spending on Research and Development and Engineering at the same pace because you’re not making as much money.” And I said, “We’re not doing that.” And so our profit margins went from 35% plus to zero. And we made absolutely nothing. Because we spent all the money on research and development anyway. And that was to preserve the lead that we had in the market. And if we’d have stopped spending like people wanted us to do, instead of having a $4 stock, maybe we’d have had a $10 stock, but we’d have lost our lead, and we’d become totally overrun.
And that was when the company was a billion and a half dollars or so. And today, it’s a $5 billion company. And one of the reasons that it is because in those days when people were telling us to stop spending money, and that we didn’t know what we were doing, because who could destroy that value, one of the things I’m probably most proud of looking back on is having said we are spending anyway. And we’re doing it because it’s the only way and the company won’t be here if we don’t, and we preserved the lead that we had. And that’s one of the ways that we came out of all that and continue to grow. So it’s one example, in general, what I’d say is some of the things that I’m probably most proud of that happened over the course of the 12 years of being the CEO, were not the things, the decisions we made in good times. Because those are easy, but the ones that we made in the bad times that were more courageous, that are the best.
Shawn Flynn 27:07
Were there any moments there when people were trying to tell you to cut the research that you were worried about staying a CEO?
Scott Kriens 27:16
Yeah, a little bit, I suppose. You know, I, what I tried to do at the time is I tried to step back and say, “am I doing everything that you could reasonably expect somebody else sitting in this chair to do? If I really had done as much as I could imagine anybody trying to accomplish in the midst of whatever the situation is, that might cause people to think maybe you shouldn’t be the CEO anymore?” If I can answer yes to that question, then after that, whatever happens happens because don’t worry about things you can’t do anything about. And if I’m not doing everything then I obviously should do something different. But if I’ve done everything that a reasonable person could think of to do in this city and by whatever circumstance, it ends up being the decision of somebody else’s, that I shouldn’t be the CEO anymore, well, then I can’t do anything about that.
Shawn Flynn 28:10
In 2009, what led you to want to take the next chapter in your life? Why not still be at Juniper, maybe even today?
Scott Kriens 28:19
I’m still there today as the chairman and I have been… I was the chairman and CEO in 96. And so I’ve been the chairman for too long, 23 years now. But 12 years into being the CEO was five years after my dad died, which was in 2004. And that was a real-life intersection for me, because it was sometimes what I call a confrontation with mortality. And even though I knew death was real, because I was 45 years old, and he died. I hadn’t really had the firsthand experience with it in the way that I did, losing my father. And I continue to be the CEO for five more years because I tried to pretend like it wasn’t as meaningful as it was. But it was and what I decided in 2009 was, there’s more to do in this lifetime, than, you know, earnings report, number 47, or whatever eight or whatever it was, and 10 or 12 years of doing this and chasing after widgets and dollars and so forth, at least that the day to day operating level of the CEO, that’s enough. There are different priorities for me, and different settings I needed to put myself in in order to pursue them, than to maintain the duties and responsibilities of being totally consumed by the job of being the CEO, 24 hours a day. And when you have a company of any number team of any size, there’s 10,000 people at Juniper, they deserve to have somebody who was totally consumed 24 hours a day, by being a leader in that community and driving it to success. I couldn’t continue to make that commitment that they deserved in that role. And so it was time to recruit somebody else who was really prepared and wanting to do that.
Shawn Flynn 30:26
For a company of that size, what is it like when the CEO goes to the board and says it’s time?
Scott Kriens 30:34
It depends on how you do it, and what the circumstances are. In my case, I went to them and we all talked about it and I said, “I need to make this change for my own self. And so I will go recruit my successor. I’m not going to quit and walk out of the company.” The company to me is kind of like it’s like a fourth child. Part of birthing it and raising it and, and I have that commitment to it, just as any parent would, which is lifelong. I just wasn’t the right person to be consumed by 24 hours a day, after 12 years. So I went to the board and said, “Let’s just know that this change is coming. And I’m going to recruit my replacement. And the board makes that decision, but I’ll bring you the candidates.” So we did that. And we hired Kevin Johnson from Microsoft to take over the CEO role. And I went to be the chairman only at that point and set aside the CEO duty. So you know, done well, it can be a graceful thing. And we were able to do that.
Shawn Flynn 31:43
And then after that transition from that to right now 1440 Multiversity What was the thought process? Did you just want to stay retired for a little bit or was there this calling in the back of your mind to do more? What brought this next thing on?
Scott Kriens 32:02
It came about as a result of those five years between 2004 and 2009. Because there were two thoughts that circulated in myself. One was, there’s more important things than just widgets and dollars. The other was with particular respect to the company. The company is now at the time, 2 billion and something dollars and it’s in 100 countries, and what am I going to do that actually makes a difference every day? And the answer to that, for me was leadership development, because I can’t be in 100 countries. And in fact, even if I magically could be, I’m not smarter than the people that grew up in those countries and live there every day and own whatever that job is, engineering or manufacturing or sales or marketing, what have you. So, you know, it’s not for me to parachute in and do something brilliant that somebody focused on it all day couldn’t do. So what I need to do is develop leaders so that people who are at the point of impact can have a model for how to do the right thing in the moment and at that point of impact.
And so I started in on this pursuit of leadership development, and one of the first things I discovered is that nobody cares who you know until they know who you are. And so the job of being a leader isn’t a matter, at least not at first… It’s not a matter of how eloquent you can be or how brilliant your market insight or your strategy your whatever it is, it’s how authentically can you show up as who you really are, with the courage to do that and the vulnerability to do that, that causes people to look at you and say, “This is a real person sharing not what they want me to believe but what they actually believe.” Because we all know the difference. We do it. Sometimes even subliminally, but we know if somebody’s telling you some fabrication of what they want you to believe, you know it.
And if it is, then I’m suspicious. And on a different tangent, we could go into the neuroscience of why the brain cells that are programmed for our survival put us into fight or flight mode when we’re suspicious. There are regions of the brain that kick in and regions that shut down, and we’re programmed to survive. And if we are suspicious that we don’t understand our surroundings, if the bush is wrestling, and it could be the wind, or it could be a lion, you can’t afford to ignore that. You can’t ponder casually what that might be. Because if it’s a lion, you’re dead. And so when we’re suspicious that we may be in some danger, we don’t engage in deep thought. We run or we fight or we do something, we freeze. One of those three.
Scott Kriens 34:56
Anyway in leadership, if you aren’t trusted and safe in a place where you know that you’re hearing the real thing from the leader, the leader might as well not waste their time trying to tell you a bunch of things about what you should do and about the market and about the company and about anything, actually, because you’re not listening because you don’t know whether you might die. And the thing about this survival programming that’s in all of us is it hasn’t kept up with the times. It’s what was put in us a million years ago for the species to survive. And, you know, it’s just like anything else, if you don’t update the software, it’s pretty far out of date a million years later. And so today, if we’re afraid of a presentation or afraid of a conversation with somebody or worried about how we might look or what we might think, the brain treats it as a life or death situation, unless you’re able to manage that very consciously, very differently. And that’s very outdated programming that doesn’t really work when you’re trying to inspire a team.
Scott Kriens 35:57
So anyway, that’s a function of design of the human mind and human body. And originally at Juniper, when I went into the leadership development field, it took me several years to make that association that that’s really where leadership development starts. And the move to 1440 was simply an expansion of that. Because that need to show up in a relationship in a courageous, authentic, vulnerable real way, is the same requirement whether you’re talking to an employee or to a spouse, or to your friend or to your child, or to yourself. If you’re making up some story about who you wish you were, who you want other people to think you are, that’s not going to go very well anywhere. And said in the positive, which I prefer, if you are, then a much richer connection can be built in your entire life. And so 1440 is just the outgrowth of a belief that is applicable for leadership development in the professional world. And I believe even more valuable in the rest of our lives if practiced consciously and thoughtfully with presence and with awareness. And so it’s no different than what I began to learn after losing my dad and trying to answer the what matters question. We’re just here practicing on the larger scale than just trying to make it work team successful.
Shawn Flynn 37:27
The name 1440, what meaning does that have? And can you tell me more about what goes on in this beautiful location here, Santa Cruz in the Scotts Valley, this amazing 75-acre location that we’re at?
Scott Kriens 37:44
It’s a cool place, a thousand-year-old redwood forest is where we found ourselves with this opportunity and the property. 1440 is a name of our foundation, of the multiversity that was created by my wife Joanie. It represents the number of minutes in a day. And it’s a reminder that if we pay attention to being completely present in each one of them, its, first of all, it’s a much richer way to live. And we find ourselves being present hard to do. We’re much more preoccupied with the past or the future, and with either our regrets or our fears or hopes or our doubts, and it’s part of that programming. You know, if you’re completely present, and paying no attention to the past or the future, in certain settings, if it’s not safe, you might be consumed by the present moment, and that lion might appear. And you’re not remembering that last time you were here. It wasn’t safe. Or you’re worrying about next time whether you should do something different because it was scary the last time you were there and all that stuff. So quite a natural thing for the mind to preoccupy itself with the past or the future. Very different than animals.
You know, you can if you watch an animal they can be in a life or death fight and a half hour later be in a sound sleep. Because all… I think they just live in the present moment. It’s all there is, when your dog is excited to see you and you come home, that dog is not thinking about anything else, it’s totally present, let’s learn from the animal. So 1440 is and foremost is reminder that everything starts with being present, because if I am, then I’m paying attention to what’s happening now. And if I want to be in a rich relationship with you, the first requirement is that I have to be with you. And if I’m sort of here physically, but really, I’m thinking about something else, or wondering about what I have to do next or whatever, then I’m not with you. And you know that because we all know that.
It’s obviously very blatant. Now when somebody takes out their phone and is texting away, you know, both people at a dinner table and neither one of them are at dinner. That’s much more subtle than that, that’s all I have to do is be sitting with you and my mind wanders, and I’m not actually really paying attention and saying about what I’m going to do next, or what I wish I would have done differently whenever. We may not know it consciously, but we know it. And the same circuitry in the brain restricts us from full expression. And so 1440, if it were to serve its most ambitious intention for the world, is what we say sometimes the place where energy discovery and creativity flourish. Because if you’re present in the moment, one of the things that produces is energy, human energy. And it’s a powerful, generative, dynamic exchange. Energy is very real. Now it’s also very seldom as energy neutral.
Energy is either positive, or it’s negative. And so you can be in a dark place and spiral down into that and be in an energized place of connection and trust, and inspiration and possibility and hope. And, you know, just uttering the words, creates energy. And if you’re in a place that holds that container, that invites you to immerse yourself in that experience, then the energy is going to be positive. We’re going to make a lot more discoveries in the mindset of what’s possible, and that’s going to stimulate creativity that we didn’t have before we came to 1440 and got that jolt of energy. And the energy can come from the redwood forest, it can come from inside of your own self, it can come from a teacher, it can come from a colleague, it can come from one of our staff, and it can come from all of those. But if what happens at 1440 is that we become a catalyst that stimulates positive human energy, then our belief is that will get used for positive things, as we’re basically good people at our course. If we’re being stimulated by positive energy, we will do good things with it. Whatever is important to you, if you leave here with more energy and its positive energy than you came with, and whatever you go and do with what matters to you is going to be better. And that’s the basic intention. Our definition of success is if you come here and leave with more energy than you arrived with, I’m almost certain it’ll be positive. And I’m convinced that something good will happen out of that, that should be yours to determine not ours. That’s why we’re here.
Shawn Flynn 42:27
Is this a problem that is currently happening maybe in the working world where people are just getting run down?
Scott Kriens 42:36
It’s definitely happening in the world and has been for a long time and it’s more visible now. I’m not sure if it’s happening more than it did. Or if we just have the means by virtue of the connectivity of the world to make it more visible. I think that’s true of a whole lot of things going on. Is there more bullying going on? Is there more depression, more anxiety, more stress? Pick a bunch of negative things. Is there more that than there used to be? Or is it just in a world? It’s highly connected? And not living in these little silos unaware of one another? Is it just the case that the connectivity makes what was always true, more visible? I actually think it’s that more than that we live in a more stressed world. You know, I think the world had to be more stressed during World War 2, or during the Great Depression. And the fact that we’re anxious and depressed today, I don’t know how that can compare to the possibility that the whole world could blow up, or that the Cuban Missile Crisis might turn into a nuclear war that destroys entire cities. That had to be at least as stressful as an iPhone, you know. So anyway, it’s always some version of it’s always been there. The question is, what do you do about it and how do you approach that? And the reality is we each need to approach a resolution or an awareness or a handling of that in our own way because it’s a very personal thing.
Shawn Flynn 44:00
Since founding 1440, how have you changed as a leader?
Scott Kriens 44:06
Joanie and I, and many others who were co-creators of this space. One of the great learnings for me, of the experience of being a co-creator of this was this balance of having an intention. And also at the same time, trusting that forces beyond my control, if I was intentional, would arrive and contribute to an outcome that if I allowed that to happen, would be much better than what I could have done with the pretense of being the one who controlled all. And so, the design of this campus it’s 170,000 square feet in total. It’s 75 acres of land. It’s 1000-year-old forest. It’s got all this stuff in it, restaurants and hotel and classes and infinity tubs and healing arts buildings and workout rooms and retail stores.
And I had no idea how to build all that when we started other than just a first step and some help that started in early on. Joanie was doing the same thing and we were just groping and to look back on it what I learned was, if you set a clear intention, but at the same time, and this is the paradox is where most learning is found, I think, both having an intention but also surrendering to what is trying to happen and letting it happen… The synthesis of that intention with these intervening forces, and in this case, it was people that showed up on the design, people that showed up in the construction, people that showed up in the imagination of how it would all connect and how it should be used and what we should do with it, and a whole community of distributors with no particular design for how all of those participants would appear, created something that was so far beyond what any one person could have done. Or I’ll just speak for myself. It’s so far beyond what I could ever have done if I was operating under the pretense that I was in control of it. And so the ability to surrender, If you’re interested in the book, Michael Singer wrote a book called The Surrender Experiment, a manifesto of his about a life that he led on the premise of surrender, and it doesn’t mean have no intention and be rudderless. But it means allowing forces larger than yourself and being aware of when they appear in which how to embrace that you produce something that’s way more than you ever could have done. And it requires giving up the pretense of having control of outcomes, which is the surrender part that’s scary. But to the degree that I can do that more every day in my life. If you had this knowledge
Shawn Flynn 46:55
If you had this knowledge back when you started Stratacom or first going to Juniper, how would those companies have been different?
Scott Kriens 47:02
They would have been more successful than they are today by far, because I could go back through stories of times when I was being signaled about things that I knew, if I’d have let them happened should have happened, that would have created stronger, better companies. But instead of letting those things happen, I pretended to control what I thought was supposed to happen, instead of what was trying to happen. And it interfered with the success of both companies.
Shawn Flynn 47:30
Is there any more advice that you would give an earlier you or entrepreneurs out there that are starting their journey now?
Scott Kriens 47:39
You know, the thing about questions like that, that I am committed to, is to try not to give trite answers, because there’s so many trite things you could say about a question like that. But I guess I would say a couple things. One, is what I was just talking about, which is be willing to surrender to the fact that you are not in control of the outcomes, and don’t adopt the imposition of others and pretend that you are. And sort of an extension of that is, be who you are unapologetically, instead of who you wish you were, or who you want someone else to think that you are. Because the imperfect, broken, faulty, unsure real person will get a lot farther than the pretend composed certain person could ever get. And I’ll just speak personally, for me, one of the most difficult things for me, two of the most difficult things for me to do, still, today, 62 years into it… One is let go of outcomes, really hard to do, really a scary thing. And the second, which, you know, I would say is certainly really to that is just being whoever you are without pretense. And to the degree that I can do more of that every day, much richer, deeper, stronger, better things happen then when I pretend otherwise.
Shawn Flynn 49:19
Is there anything else you want people at home to know about you your journey, 1440, or how they can get more information about everything that’s going on?
Scott Kriens 49:29
It’s easy to get more information about 1440 and just go to 1440.org and find out classes and programs on the website. You can call us. We would love to have you know, the next hundred thousand people come and experience things that some of those who have been with us over these first two years have found and we will bring our best intention around deep hospitality to welcome everybody who comes.
So that’s a good way to find us if one is interested to do so. Otherwise I think that if, if people can set their own intentions in their own lives, then the good news is you don’t need anybody else. The bad news is you have to do it yourself. And I’d say it shouldn’t be bad news. It’s just truth. So if we can, if we can help people step into what they really want, and be energized to take ownership of that, then that one person becomes a model for the next and the next and the next. And I think that’s the best gift we can give anybody isn’t to tell anybody what to do or how to do it. It’s just to model it, each of us in our own way. And when you’re talking about stuff like this, which is spiritual, relational, emotional, inner work, there is no such thing as a teacher who can tell you how to do it. There are just modelers who do it the way it works for them. And those of us who are in the company of those who model those things, just learned by association. So that’s really what we want to try and do here and if that sounds of any interest come and spend some time with us.
Shawn Flynn 51:02
Right, Scott, thank you for taking the time today to be on Silicon Valley. And we also want to thank Michael Balistreri, who made the introduction that allowed this interview to happen. His information will be in the show notes. But Scott, once again, thank you for your time today.
Scott Kriens 51:16
You’re welcome, Shawn, great to be with you.
Outro 51:19
Thank you for listening to The Silicon Valley Podcast. To access our resources, visit us at TheSiliconValleyPodcast.com and follow our host on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn @ShawnFlynnSV. This show is for entertainment purposes only and is licensed by The Investors Podcast Network. Before making any decisions, consult a professional.
