Saket Vora

The leaves are changing color here, and today was actually rather warm….around 74 degrees. A tad higher than the usual 68 to 72 degrees. Some pictures I took today:

Rear of the Memorial Church as a ride to the Engineering side of campus

Tree by the Gates building

Tree by the Medical school

Consider the following: she will likely have her name on two papers within the year, has engaged in research for two years, has attended multiple international conferences, and she doesn’t even have a bachelor’s degree yet. But that’s not all: she also has landed a stint at a prestigious overseas university for a semester!

Kelly Stano, Greg’s fiance, will indeed be heading to the venerable Cambridge this spring to work in Dr. Alan Windle’s lab. The researcher she is in talks with is so impressed that he’s guaranteeing her housing. This will be an amazing experience for her and something that will place her in an even better position to dictate her own terms to the lucky university she picks for graduate school.

My head starts to spin just thinking of what I’ll be hearing from her in the future. Way to go!

Stanford’s President John Hennessy makes it a point to have dinner with a small number of graduate students several times a year. I was fortunate to attend one of these dinners yesterday night. There were about 15 graduate students present, from first years to fifth years and across a variety of schools. Instead of sitting at a table, we all sat in a lounge, giving the forum a very informal and casual feel. President Hennessy reciprocated this, being open to any question being asked. The discussion was free ranging with a variety of diverse topics. We asked him how he became President, how he transitioned from being a researcher to an administrator, the unique administrative challenges that Stanford has, the lack of Verizon cell phone reception, lack of overseas opportunities for students, potential overseas sites for Stanford, how the university is positioning itself to face the new problems, what his day-to-day life is, the recent appointment of Rumsfeld to the Hoover Institution, Ahmedinejad’s speech at Columbia, President Bush’s visit, the football team’s win over USC, etc. President Hennessy chatted with us for nearly 1.5 hours, and likely would have gone on more if the Community Associate hadn’t interjected.

He’s mentally quick, able to comfortably move from specific problems covering healthcare coverage for graduate students to discussion 20 year plans for the University. He really opened up near the end, and isn’t afraid to voice his own opinions and beliefs on certain issues. Here are a few mental notes I made during the dinner:

• Stanford has strengths across an especially wide number of disciplines for a school of its size. It has a Medical School, Business School, Law School, School of Education, Engineering School, etc. This does involve some sacrifices though. Stanford doesn’t have a Kennedy Center or Woodrow Wilson center for International Affairs. It doesn’t have a dedicated Public Health school either.
• Hennessy’s first job after graduating was being an assistant professor in CS/EE at Stanford. He rose to Lab Director, then Department Chair, then Dean of Engineering, then took the Provost job after Condoleeza Rice stepped down in 2000, then a year later found himself as President of Stanford.
• He really really enjoyed the Dean of Engineering job.
• Stanford has been exploring options of developing a presence in India or China, but it will take time. It’s faster to get things done in China, but it’s also a difficult environment. India is slow, and there is the question of where to put a campus. Bangalore/Hyderabad is tech, Mumbai is financial, New Delhi is government. Infrastructure issues too.
• Says this country has a problem where we automatically say “NO!” to nuclear energy. Thinks this is wrong and that coal power plants kill more people every year than all the nuclear plants in their history. Nice!
• He dismisses the hype about corn based ethanol, points out it consumes 8 gallons of water to make 1 gallon of ethanol, the pesticides needed to grow it are derived in part from petroleum, etc. Nice!
• Hydrogen fuel cell cars are 50 years into the future. We need to improve efficiency, hybrids, and electric cars now.
• If you want to study transportation engineering, go to MIT! They have a great program there. If you want to study environmental engineering, come to Stanford. We’re best in that.
• Very soon, Stanford will be opening up many lectures videotaped to the public.
• Thinks the Ahmedinejad speech could have been handled better with a tough moderator.
• Rumsfeld appointment (first, its by the Hoover Institution, not Stanford directly) and presents a diversity of viewpoints. Accepting an visiting fellow appointment isn’t an endorsement.
• Proudest moment as president was when Stanford won two Nobel Prizes last year. He felt especially proud for Dr. Kornberg. Back in 1959 Dr. Kornberg’s father help start the first hard sciences program at Stanford in biochemistry. There is a photo of Dr. Kornberg when he was twelve toasting his father, who had won a Nobel Prize. Dr. Kornberg followed in his father’s footsteps, and to see him come full circle and too win a Nobel Prize was truly special.
• Read an article praising the football team to the team at practice.
• Tries to take up golf, carries his own golf bag for exercise.
• Does about 10-12 trips a year.

It was a great evening. He even responded to my thank you email the next morning.

This week’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders seminar featured Dominic Orr, CEO and President of Aruba Networks. Aruba’s business is providing wireless networking at the large-scale enterprise level. They have 3,500 customers worldwide, was founded in 2002 and went public in March 2007. Today, they are #2 in market share behind Cisco. Orr received a B.S. in Physics and a M.S./Ph.D in neuroscience from Caltech. He was a manager at HP, and has experience in communication networking from Alteon WebSystems, Bay Networks, and Hughes Aircraft.

I have listened to close to 50 such speakers over the past four years, and this talk with Dominic Orr ranks in my top 3 favorite seminars. I truly enjoyed hearing his advice and found my own beliefs and thoughts aligned the same way. Click here to listen to it — I highly recommend it!

Q: Why go from Chairman of the Board to CEO/President?

Orr was first an angel investor, then board member, then Chairman, and finally CEO/President. Orr said that only a few times in a decade that you get a chance to take advantage of a big technology shift. He saw two major turning points:

• rapid mobilization of the workforce — employees now work anywhere
• flattening of companies around the world

The traditional IT infrastructure of companies assumes fixed locations — the good guys are inside four walls, the bad guys are outside. Not true anymore. Aruba had a winning architecture and it was exciting to be part of that.

Also, I was getting bored planting trees (over 200!) and cooking for the kids. ;)

Q: How did your experience with HP’s culture translate to Aruba being a startup?

There are different kinds of HP. The old HP, the transitional HP, and now the new HP. Orr left in 1994, and to summarize HP’s values, it can be distilled down to one thing: the productivity of your employees can be maximized by giving each of your employees dignity, freedom, and trust and let them run free with their passions. The potential problem though is ‘consensus management’ can occur, in which decision making is slowed. Thus, there was a shift to dictatorial management, i.e, increased in speed. Now it has changed back.

In a startup, it is doubly important to give each employee dignity and trust. The people attracted to a startup are motivated and respond well to that value.

Q: Aruba has decided to go head-to-head against giants like Cisco. How do you have the confidence and strategy to go after that?

Day-to-day, from a product level, we have two competitors: Cisco and Motorola. You can’t think of those giants as your competitors — you must treat it like an environment in which you must excel. Every product you build has to fit into this ecosystem that your competitors also live in. You have to fix problems they can’t.

It all comes down to one thing: speed. Speed of execution and speed of innovation.

An advantage of big companies is that they have inertia — the disadvantage is that they have inertia. They have a legacy of products, they have expectations from Wall St., etc. They often cannot afford to rapidly execute a vision because it would cause their expectations to tank. There was a saying when Orr entered the industry: God needed just six days to create the Earth because he didn’t have an install-base.

Let’s not fool ourselves — Cisco and Motorola have some great engineers that are just as good as our engineers. Aruba has been around for just over 5 years; the cumulative R&D spending by Aruba in that timeframe is the same as what Cisco spends for R&D in a week.

Q: How has going public changed your ability to take risks?

Orr commented on the difference of going public with Alteon in 1999 and going public with Aruba in 2007. Back in 1999, you go on your IPO road-show, the black limos are everywhere, the portfolio manager hasn’t even read your statement and just wants the photo-op. Now, they are reading everything, they’ve marked up the S-1 document, looked into your core competencies and business model, etc. There is smarter investing going on now.

For Aruba, going public was not so much about raising money (though $100M is nice), but it was more about branding. When you’re competing against giants, credibility is very important. Why would Microsoft choose you instead of the established Cisco? By going public, you get coverage in BusinessWeek, Bloomberg, etc. and you get an exposure to the CEO and CIO. Then, when their IT department goes to them they don’t say “Aruba who?”

It’s true you are more constrained by SOX, gap accounting, etc. But the branding process is important. Going public gave Aruba validation and credibility. One of Orr’s key objective was to establish Aruba as the clear alternative — break away from the herd of other solutions. By June 2007 they had achieved this by taking the #2 spot from Motorola.

Q: Where do you go for advice and help?

I have a great board. I picked two of my former bosses, even though people said I was crazy. I like going into the boardroom feeling challenged though. I also have been using psychology consulting. There is no lack of talent in Silicon Valley — but if you put all A+ players into a room, will they work effectively as a team? That’s what makes or breaks a startup; confidence in the executive leadership.

What is something that has surprised me? That people who are passionate take a lot of effort to change. This brings me to my management style.

If you want to go for speed — thoughtful speed — then you have to trade a lot of discussion and analysis and go with your gut. I have a phrase for what we use: brutal intellectual honesty. There are too many decisions to make and not enough time. Get all the information and facts available on the table, get a real debate and discussion going, and make a decision. To do this, you need the right people. People can get bogged down though in emotions or politics. If people put their passion 9which is good) with their ego (which is dangerous). When this happens, people put themselves in a corner and must spend time in politics or favors. This wastes time — which is your only competitive resource you have in your hand. Don’t invest your ego — let your intellectual honesty decide.

The phrase also applies to you as a person. Be brutal to yourself. If you find intellectually that another idea makes sense, you agree and accept it. You have to encourage people to be be thick-skinned and don’t defend ideas with their ego. Fundamentally though, for people to be thickskinned, they need to be confident. It takes work and counseling and get people to be comfortable with themselves in front of their peers to achieve their brutal intellectual honesty.

Q: Running a company at this speed must be a 26 hours a day job. How do you manage the work-life balance?

Orr amusingly said that he’s not a good example of work-life balance. But Orr pointed out that he feels that “work-life balance” is not the right word to use in Silicon Valley. He is sitting here talking to us — is that work? Is that life? It is hard for people who have passion to define what is work, and what is life. It’s a mixture. Ultimately though, don’t let technology become a distraction. Don’t check that Blackberry every 5 minutes.

In Orr’s case, he gets passionate about things he loses track of time. So a while ago, he hired an assistant to solely keep track of his time. He ceded all authority on time to this lady. Orr provides priorities. Orr describes the amount of time as a bottle and tasks like rocks, pebbles, sand, etc. How do you fill the bottle? They will say to put in the rocks, then the pebbles, then the sand. So in Orr’s staff meeting, they first put in the rocks, then the pebbles, and often don’t have time for the sand. Now, if they are moving so fast we’ve added a new term: boulders!

Q: You have experiences working around the world. What are your observations there?

Orr has moved around a lot. HP Software in Singapore, Hong Kong, a few labs in Japan, HP in France, he had a lab at Nortel at Ottawa, has been in Boston, Bay Area, etc. Orr didn’t want to provide a regimented way of looking at this complex topic, but he sees one consistent different in domestically (ie, Silicon Valley) versus the rest of the world. In the Silicon Valley, probably because of the emphasis on speed, we focus on transactions. In Europe and Asia, they focus on relationships between entities. There are more similarities though. One thing is that people work like crazy; they work incredibly hard whether you’re in France, Singapore, America, etc. He talks to engineers and has realized three common reasons for why they work hard:

1. People fundamentally want to make an impact. They want to feel that what they work so hard on makes a difference.
2. People have fun. They enjoy work, have good colleagues, have good bosses.
3. People want to be rewarded. Not just financially, which is important. But the other part that is less emphasized is that they want to be recognized. Sometimes small, like a pat on the back, or a mention at an award presentation, etc.

Q: What do you wish you knew when you were a student in school?

All throughout school, Orr was a science school. Orr said that academia is a meritocracy where the unit is the individual. Papers published in your names. Though with large projects you need to collaborate and such, but ultimately it comes down to giving people individual credit and merit. In the business world though, individual merit doesn’t necessarily matter. If a product doesn’t work, the customers don’t care who was making the decision. It matters about the team and the entire company — are the products selling or not. Obviously we give individuals recognition, but from day one its ultimately about the team. If the team wins, everyone wins. Orr wishes he had more of that perspective earlier on.

Now audience members got to ask questions.

Q: Is it in general a hopeful case that the big companies are so busy that the small companies can get a crack into the market share?

Orr says that the most important is to define success. Sometimes there is too much focus initial successes, like IPOs are given to maybe 4 or 5 out of 100 companies. Think about it though: When Aruba reported $41.7M last quarter, Cisco reported $9.3 billion? Is it something to celebrate when you can find a $41.7M crack in a $20 billion environment?

Good ideas are not difficult to find. It is execution - operational excellence — to get through productization and marketing and supporting your product. The 4 or 5 winners have the tenacity and operational management skill to execute.

This is no means of assurance to longevity.

In this industry that Aruba is in, Orr says that if you can achieve $400-500 million you’re a major player. When you’re that big though, your big rivals put the crosshairs on you and you need to be ready to withstand that. Orr constantly reminds his employees that now they have gone IPO, they have simply passed the qualifying round and are just now ready to play.

Q: (my question!) In relation to going IPO was about branding, How do you find a champion in a potential client so when you go to the executive team they feel comfortable choosing Aruba?

Orr said that he definitely doesn’t mind the extra cash either. ;) The ultimate thing in people’s mind is that they have more problems in their mind than creating a wireless network. You need to take problems off their plate. You need to understand, from an executive perspective, what their problems are; their pain points. If a CIO’s operational expense is a problem or his mandate it to gain an operational competitiveness, then that is something to build upon.

Q: How do you feel your advanced science degree has helped you in business?

Well, first of all I try not to tell people! If you ask most people, they will say doing the graduate degree helped in their analytical thinking, etc. That is kind of generic there. For Orr, the most beneficial part was working with cutting edge research and always dealing with questions about scope. It gave Orr one major psychological insight.
Working at the edge forces you to have the courage to face uncertainty. Good scientific research ventures into the unknown. “Brutal intellectual honesty” is demanded not only for success, but for survival.

A pretty balanced weekend, I’d say. I woke up early Saturday morning and joined Amit, Nader, and a few others to a special roundtable event titled “Courting Disaster: The Fight for Oil, Water, and a Healthy Planet“. It featured an impressive panelist list: General John Abizaid, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman, Dean of the Earth Sciences School at Stanford and recipient of a MacArthur ‘Genius’ grant Pamela Matson, and CEO of Edison International John Bryson. Stanford’s President John Hennessy hosted the roundtable, while CNN’s Carlos Watson moderated it.

Tom Friedman was the most animated and engaging speaker, clearly adept with words and explaining concepts. He described his trips to China where he would hear from automakers “America, you polluted for 150 years and became who you are. Now let us have our turn.” In response, Friedman told them to “take their time, because in 5 years, you’ll be wanting our clean technology so you don’t choke to death.” Friedman sees that clean and green technology is the next big global industry, and agreed with Bryson that economic pressures must exist in order to cause meaningful change in society. General Abizaid illuminated many points about Iraq and our reliance on foreign oil as a threat to national security. General Abizaid has three or four direct relatives serving in Iraq, including his daughter and son-in-law. Stephen Breyer was fun to listen to, because his comments were never as direct or straightforward as the other speakers. At one point, Watson asked him what he thought about taking into consideration international laws when deciding a Supreme Court case. Breyer started this response that didn’t seem to deal at all with his question. He spoke for several minutes, and only at the very end did you finally realize that he was answering the question the whole time. Very clever.

After the roundtable, I did the laundry and had some lunch. I met up with Nader and two of his buddies from the VLF group - Morris and Dennis. Morris is a major player in the group. As a 5th year grad student, he has worked in the VLF group for 9 years (yeah, since he was a freshman at Stanford.) Dennis didn’t really know the game, so we explained it to him on the way the stadium. We stood in the Red Zone (student section), where we yelled and cheered the whole game. Some notes:

• for kick-offs, all the students jingle their car keys.
• students do a “oh-oh-oh first down!” when we make first downs
• some guy with a microphone tried leading the section in cheers, only he kept shouting when our team was in the huddle on offense or setting up on the line. You don’t make noise when our offense is there so they can listen to the play. A bunch of us started to yell “shut up!” at him towards the end.
• Since this homecoming, a bunch of band alumni were invited back to play with the current band. The drum majors this time wore a V-for-Vendetta outfit, complete with the mask. The half-time show was rather stupid though.
• Our de facto ‘fight song’ is All Right Now, originally by Free. This song is played when we score touchdowns. There really isn’t anything comparable to the Red and White song at NCSU or even our classic fight song.

We lost a close game, 36-38. I got back to the apartment, and worked on some homework and watched TV.

Sunday morning I woke up early and continued work on this EE 214 homework. At 2pm, Jimmy and Nader came over. Jimmy, who is a senior this year in EE, was a huge help. We worked through our last problem and Jimmy got my unix environment all set up. Nader was lagging behind, so I helped him quickly finish the rest of the homework. Amit and I went over to Mary and Matt’s house for dinner again. She is amazing. She made spinakopita and Italian risotta with basil, tomatoes, mozzarella with balsamic vinegar reduction drizzled over it. For dessert, she had made lavender infused creme brule, complete with the culinary torch and everything. She dropped a stalk from a lavender plant while cooking the milk, cream, and eggs. You can taste the essence of it but it’s such a challenge to place the flavor. It was delicious. After dinner we played several rounds of bridge. Amit is learning fast. I had several good hands, and Mary and I made 5 a few times.

I tried going to the Rains computer lab to print my homework for tomorrow, but the printer is broken (again). The paper tray is out of paper, but they have locked the paper tray so I can’t open it. Oh yeah, and the Rains housing office, which is right across the courtyard from the lab? They don’t have the key. Sigh. Anyway, gotta get ready for this upcoming week.

As promised, here are some pictures from around campus and my first few weeks at Stanford.

My apartment in the Rains neighborhood.

Mine is the 2nd window on the right.

This is what the Rains neighborhood is like.
Lots of courtyards interspersed with fruit trees.

Skilling Auditorium. I’ve got two classes here,
and its setup for live TV broadcast for distance education students.

Packard Building. One of the best eateries/coffee
places on campus is in its lobby — Bytes Cafe.
The Packard Building is HQ for the EE dept.

The Center for Integrated Systems — the Paul Allen building.
There is a giant cleanroom in the heart of this building,
where nearly all the semiconductor related research goes on.

The William Gates building for the Computer Science department.
They have a nice computer lab I often work in.
I pass by an exhibit holding the original Google server everytime I go into the lab.
This building is right across the street from the Packard building.

Nick Weiler and Luke Butler, at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival.

There were a lot of people here for the free concert in the park.

We found a place by the road to have lunch and hang out. That’s Nick Steinmetz.

Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. I liked these guys a lot.
They will open for Dave Matthews Band sometimes.

Rupert Randolph, world renown bassist.

Today’s Entrepreneur Thought Leader’s seminar was the founder of Tesla Motors, Martin Eberhard. Eberhard gave an overview of the development of the Tesla roadster from his initial motivation to how it finally came together, including some key observations He very briefly discussed where Tesla Motors is going from here.

1. Do something meaningful.

He put up a slide that had a picture of Al Gore with environmentalism and Condoleezza Rice with national security. He wryly noted that often one people like one of them and hate the other. He doesn’t care. The point is that an electric car helps the environment and can improve national security by reducing oil consumption. Three questions he asked when evaluating which alternative energy to use:

a) Net resource consumption per mile?

b) Net carbon dioxide output per mile?

c) Net reduction in petroleum?

Ultimately he settled on Tesla’s choice: large numbers of the lithium ion batteries. The AA kind, commodity good produced in mass quantities at very low prices.

Why have other electric cars failed? GM shut down the EV-1 cause there were never enough customers to make the business proposition viable.

2. Be bold

Eberhard wanted to fundamentally changed people’s conceptions of what an electric car could be. With existing automobiles, you either sacrificed performance for efficiency, or efficiency for performance. Why? Can an electric car be designed to be both? This is why Eberhard chose to go with an eye-catching roadster, to prove the idea. A bunch of Silicon Valley dudes didn’t have the know-how about cars, so they went to Lotus in the UK. Interesting challenge — “homologation” — which is understanding all the rules that you have to follow to make a car legal in various countries and states.

3. Think your idea through.

Write a real business plan — naivety only takes you so far. It will help you think your idea through and find the problems.

4. Build your company too.

Your product is only half the job. Think about what kind of you company you want — what traditions or expectations do you have? Eberhard showed us slides describing the continuing process of building the car, almost on a quarterly basis. Clay model, prototype of motor, first round of funding, first crash test, etc., etc. Some neat crash videos too (the car held up extremely well and matched computer modeling).
5. Face reality.

Wishful thinking is your worst enemy. He also mentioned some key obstacles:

a) they wanted to use commercial off the shelf headlights, but couldn’t get the styling right. They ultimately opted for customized headlamps despite the price.

b) the Lotus base they were working with had a door frame above the height of the seat, which made exiting the car awkward. Since this door beam is an integral part of the structural integrity of the car, they were hesitant to tinker with it. Finally, they decided to redesign it.

c) The unique transmission gave them several problems.

6. Hire the best people.

And get rid of the ones who don’t fit. He made use of Lotus ‘redundancies’ to hire some good talent.

Other observations:

• Battery efficiency has been improving at 8% a year for the last 20 years.
• The EPA tested Tesla’s roadster and found it got 245 miles per charge, combined highway/city.
• Doesn’t care to open franchise dealerships. Says they have very strange silly laws about them. Has slowly started to open stores that can serve and sell the car.
• Thinks hybrids are a good interim solution for the next ~10 years. But ultimately, electricity is the way to go.
• The next car will be built from scratch.

Interesting talk, though I would have liked to hear more about Tesla’s next step — a more ‘common person’ friendly car without the $100,000 pricetag. Eberhard appears to believe that he wants to bring the electric car to the masses in order to reduce oil consumption, thus helping the environment and improving national security. I agree with Eberhard that he needed to change what people think about electric cars, but I’d really like to know more what he wants to do besides the $100,000 roadster coupe.

What a day!

Woke up early this morning and was with Luke at the Caltrain station at 10:15am. We meet up with Nick Steinmetz and Nick Weiler (see why I wrote their last names?), the two we were supposed to be rooming with. They brought a friend, Jordan, from the neuroscience program. Last night, Nick W. told me about this Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival and invited us to come. Though I only recognize three artists on the schedule and have never heard of any of them before, so I said what the heck. I could do a lot worse than spend a beautiful day in SF with cool people.

Due to problems with trains, we finally make it to Golden Gate State Park at around 12:30pm. This music festival is free and there are people everywhere, and many look like what you’d expect to see a bluegrass festival. There was a bring-your-own-alcohol-we-don’t-care policy too. We meandered over to the 5th stage where Bela Fleck and the Flecktones were gonna play at 4pm. Unfurled some blankets and enjoyed some of the food we brought with us. Nick S., who is from Kentucky, was very proud of his bourbon. Luke and Nick W. enjoyed some wine. Jim Prine was on stage. Nick S. knows a lot about bluegrass so he was telling us about the artists and stuff. The topic changed a lot, going into different musical genres, neuroscience, philosophy, etc. 20 and 30-something year old yuppies passing around pot, long haired hippies, wine and cheese and blankets, sunshine and breeze, the easy sounds of bluegrass wafting over from the stage, punctuated by the Blue Angels flying in formation overhead. In a word — San Francisco. (Ok two).

Just before Bela Fleck took the stage, we met up with several of Nick S’s friends who go to Berkeley. One of them, Joe, looked 98% like my friend Keith Dowd did in high school. It was so eerie. Together we walked down to get closer to the band, and spent the next three hours listening to first Bela Fleck and then Los Lobos. I had heard about Bela Fleck before, but this was my first time listening. It was great — jazz with bluegrass, musically interesting, and nice.

It was getting dark as we left the park and found ourselves quite hungry. We found a Thai restaurant that had garnered numerous accolades but for our group of 10 people, we had to wait nearly an hour. Its a family run restaurant and even ordering our food was quite an adventure. The food though was excellent. We finally got out of the restaurant at around 10pm, and tried catching the Muni (subway/tram) to get us back to Caltrain station. We chased the Muni for four blocks, made it to the stop, knocked on the door, but the driver said “no” and drove off. We had to wait another 30 minutes for the next Muni. I called up Nader and he told me there was no 11pm train back to Palo Alto; the next one is at 12am. Oh well. We finally make it back to the Caltrain station, kill some time by walking a few blocks to a cafe/diner, and finally make it back to Palo Alto at around 1:10am.

I had a wonderful time and I’m so glad Nick told us about it.

To top all that, Stanford beat USC. As we were waiting for dinner, I got a text message from my Dad. I thought the game was at 7pm so I was confused. I called him up and asked him about it. Still incredulous, I called up my trusted sports advisor Mike and he confirmed it — Stanford beat USC 24-23. I excitedly told the group and they were still skeptical, so I called Nader and he also confirmed it.

How unreal is that.

• We lost last game 41-3 against #24 Arizona State.
• We lost the 2nd to last game 53-21 to #14 Oregon.
• Our starting QB had a seizure and sat out
• The new QB had thrown only three passes in his college career for 1 completion.
• We were playing AT USC.
• USC is ranked #2 in the country
• The odds were 41 points in favor of USC.
• Stanford is last place in the PAC-10
• We haven’t beat USC since 2001.

And yet…we do it. Read the game re-cap linked above. Incredible — the QB made two HUGE 4th and long plays…including a 4th-and-20 where he had to make his own call and later a 4th-and-9 in the redzone where he threw the TD pass that put Stanford ahead with just 40 seconds left in the game.

The defense won it though — 4 interceptions, 4 sacks, 1 blocked point after, <100 rushing yards allowed. Outstanding performance.

Need to do some grocery shopping tomorrow then work on HW tomorrow. I have a moon meeting at 2pm too.