Twenty years ago...

Twenty years ago in June I graduated from Stanford. Somehow that day came and went without my noticing.

At the time, it was a pretty momentous day for me. My parents, sister Molly, grandparents, and cousin Kim all made the trip to California to help me celebrate. I had come out the previous fall, and as a result my grades weren't all that good that quarter. My final spring quarter I was taking 23 units of classes, each a requirement for graduation. Let's just say I was a little nervous the last few weeks of school...

TODAY'S DATE, however, I remember pretty clearly, because it's the day I started my first real job. I had interviewed with Oracle Corp. in May of '88 and received a job offer a couple of weeks before graduation. I started my "Class of '88" training with Oracle on 8/8/88.

During my first six years at Oracle, I worked in the Worldwide Technical Support organization. When I started, the entire department was around 55 people. By the time I moved on, I was managing a group of nearly that size. In retrospect, those were probably my best years on the job, but in the final couple of years, the organization was moving toward a "factory assembly line" model, and I wanted out.

I spent the last half of my tenure at Oracle working in the Interactive Television Division. Especially in the early days we were Larry Ellison's pet project and had a lot of visibility. Good times. :-)

Here are a couple of pics from the 1999 National Association of Broadcasters tradeshow here in Vegas.

For more on Oracle's history, check out the timeline they put together in recognition of their 30th anniversary in 1997.

When I joined in 1988, Oracle was still doubling in size every year. I think we had a billion dollars of revenue for the first time the following year. (That same year, a billion dollars worth of Bart Simpson t-shirts were sold. I remember thinking at the time that that sounded like a lot easier way of making money. :-)

I transfered to the media division in 1994... when Larry predicted that everyone would have video-on-demand within the next two years or so. He made a lot of prescient calls; this wasn't one of them. VOD didn't become widespread until 2002. But without Oracle's support during those intervening years, our product would have withered on the vine. It now powers some of the largest VOD deployments in the world, like Time Warner Cable's system in New York city.

Our division was sold to nCUBE, one of Larry's privately held companies. That led to my moving to Portland a year later. nCUBE was subsequently acquired by C-COR, and after I left, by Arris.