2min chapter

#380: Ed Zschau — The Polymath Professor Who Changed My Life

The Tim Ferriss Show

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CHAPTER

What Did You Think You Would Be When You Were Young?

When you were 20 years old, what did you think you were going to be when you grew up? I know exactly what i was going to be, all right. At that i was to be a physicist. And then in my sophomore year, i discovered philosophy, and i thought, this is way cool stuff. So i decided that i would major in philosophy with, in those days, what was called a bridge programme with physics. My senior thesis was a describing what the german philosopher manuel kant's theory of space and time would have been had he been born 50 years later and had known einstein's general relativity.

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Episode notes

"Entrepreneurship isn't about starting companies. Entrepreneurship is an approach to life." — Ed Zschau

Ed Zschau is the Interim President of Sierra Nevada College, and he brings to the college 17 years of leading technology companies. He founded System Industries in Palo Alto, California in 1969, and as its CEO led it to a successful IPO in 1980. In the 1990s, he was the General Manager of the IBM Storage Systems Division headquartered in San Jose, California. Ed has a total of 10 years of teaching experience as a professor in the graduate business schools at Stanford University and Harvard University, and he has taught high tech entrepreneurship courses for a total of 22 years in the engineering schools at Princeton University, Caltech, and University of Nevada, Reno. In addition to serving on the boards of major public companies such as Reader's Digest and StarTek, Ed has helped to start and build several technology companies during the past 20 years, some of which were founded and led by his former students.

In the 1980s, Ed represented the Silicon Valley area of California for two terms in the US House of Representatives, serving on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Also, during the 1980s, he was a General Partner of Brentwood Associates, a venture capital firm, and he was the Founding Chairman of The Tech Interactive, (formerly The Tech Museum of Innovation), a non-profit educational institution in San Jose, California.

Ed holds an A.B. degree (cum laude) in Philosophy (bridging with Physics) from Princeton University, as well as M.B.A., M.S. (Statistics), and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University and a Doctor of Laws degree (Honoris Causa) from the University of San Francisco. Currently, he is a Senior Fellow of the California Council on Science and Technology.

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