I grew up in Singapore, a tropical island in the Far East. At age 20, I packed up my bags and headed to California, where I studied computer science at the University of California-Berkeley and Stanford University. The mid-1990s and early aughts were an interesting time to be in Silicon Valley as a self-professed nerd. I remember proudly wearing a “Java 1.0” free T-shirt given out by Sun Microsystems at the launch of its revolutionary new programming language called “Java,” a language I lost no time in learning.

But what I remember most vividly about the Bay Area was the startup culture.

I was in awe at the IPO of Inktomi, an internet-infrastructure company that spun out of a research team at Berkeley. Inktomi, at one time, powered the world’s internet search infrastructure. It was my first realization that university research can really shape and change the world. As I went across the bay to Stanford for my master’s degree, I had the good fortune of working at VMware during its formative years as a university spinoff, learning the ropes from a Stanford professor and his highly talented team of engineers who later developed a multibillion-dollar company behind what we call “cloud computing” today.

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE