David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Today, it's always a top 10, if not top 5 computer science program in the country. But unlike other top computer science programs, it's a state school, so it just has huge volumes. I think more students come out of the University of Washington and go to big tech than any other program in the country. That has stayed this amazing advantage. Yeah. I think the only thing even close to it is Berkeley in the Bay Area with a lot of the same dynamics. But there's Stanford there too, so it's a dual university system in the Bay Area. You cannot overstate how important the University of Washington was to this decision and an ultimate success of coming to Seattle. This brings us to 1980 in the beginning of the year when they move to Seattle, just in time for, I think you can make a very strong argument, the single most important deal ever done in the history of technology. It's crazy to even say it now, the Microsoft-IBM PC partnership. It's crazy. You have this absolute behemoth partnering with someone that's not really relevant. If you're standing here today, it sounds like I'm talking about Microsoft partnering with IBM. At the time, it was IBM partnering with Microsoft. It was the only computer company that mattered in the entire world, got themselves into a particular situation where they came to Microsoft looking for help. It's the craziest set of events that made this possible, and I can't wait to dive into it.…

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