In Silicon Valley, a Rebirth of Risk-Taking
Many people have wondered lately what happened to the American Dream. Somehow, in the face of tougher foreign competition, a wary Wall Street and skittish customers, that fabled chance to turn a clever idea into a caravan of cash seemed to slip away.</br></br>Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner are proof that the dream-and this sunny region of Northern California that thrives on it most-are alive and well.</br></br>Just a few years ago, the husband-and-wife team was developing computer equipment in a bedroom of their home, assembling it in the living room and holding meetings with their nine-person staff in the cramped dining room. Lacking a sales force, they peddled their goods over electronic computer networks. Lacking a service department, they took customer calls at 2 a.m. on a phone conveniently positioned by their bed.</br></br>Today, their company, Cisco Systems Inc., is fast filling a spacious industrial building south of San Francisco and is shipping $70 million a year worth of sophisticated equipment used to link clusters of computers at scattered locations. Modestly paid employees of Stanford University until starting Cisco, the young couple now have a net worth in Cisco's publicly traded shares of $80 million.</br></br>Bosack and Lerner are doing much to strengthen the ethic of risk-taking that has made this area the world's leading hothouse for innovation. Even as the technology-rich Northeast flirts with recession and as defense cutbacks cloud Southern California's future, Silicon Valley is enjoying a bit of a resurgence. Fed by the recent hunger on Wall Street for new stock offerings, young technology companies like Cisco are stirring up an enthusiasm that is unmatched since 1983, when nearly three dozen Silicon Valley companies went public in a frenzy of first-time stock offerings.