Cisco Systems Today

and other computer network hardware. Today, I'm going to look more at where the company went after the co founders left the company, and also talk a bit about some of the technologies that the company got involved in. Now, the early years of Cisco focused on just a few products, from network boards that could allow computers to interface with larger networks to the routers that could actually facilitate communication between networks. In the mid to late nineteen eighties, this

was cutting edge technology. Computer networks were just beginning to expand beyond tech companies and universities and start to enter into other industries, and demand was growing around the world,

not just in the United States. By when the co founders, Lynn Bozak and Sandy Lerner, then husband and wife, left Cisco, the company was generating an annual revenue of sixty nine million dollars and had two d fifty one employees and had obviously grown quite a bit since its launch as a business out of the founders living room, and obviously it was no longer operating out of their living room. They had an office in Menlo Park at the time. The company had also gone public with stocks trading on

the Nasdaq Stock Exchange, and in ninetee Cisco Systems. Under the guidance of John Mortgage, the new president and CEO, who had been put in place by the UH investment firm Sequoia Capital. He had been there since nineteen he opened up their first international office in the UK. The company also had its first stock split in just one year after it got listed on the stock exchange. So here's a quick refresher. What the heck is a stock split?

What does that mean? So a company issues a certain number of shares and this represents a percentage of ownership in the company. Right, If you buy shares in the company, you own a part of that company. The number of shares determines how much of that company you own. So if a company puts out a whole lot of shares and you buy only one, you have a very tiny percentage of ownership. In that company, the shares are worth a certain amount each. Right, that's what we see when

we say the stock is twenty dollars. That tells you how much it a single share of stock in that company costs. UH. That amount is determined by lots of different factors, especially when you are first launching a company, Like how do you determine how much you're going to charge for a share of stock in your company if

you have not yet launched an UH initial public offering? Well, get lots of different factors that figured that out, including underwriters who judge what the value of the company should be. For simplicity's sake, let's take a very easy example, one that would never really happen, but just to be able

to talk about this. So, let's say I am launching a company, and I've determined that my company is worth about a thousand dollars, you know, princely some I decide I'm going to go public with this very prestigious company, and my underwriters decide that the one hundred shares I plan to create will cost ten dollars each. They agree my company is worth one thousand dollars. So UH, one of my company will cost you ten bucks. Right, because

I have a hundred shares ten dollars of share. That means that you know, that's all you're gonna get is just those hundred shares um and that that's the whole value of the company. So I keep fifty one of those shares because I'm no dummy. I want to have controlling interest in my own company. And the other forty nine shares hit the market at ten dollars each. Then the market decides whether or not those shares are actually worth the ten dollars, and people either buy them or

they don't. Now, let's flash forward a year. Let's say that the stock price has gone way up. Now it's a hundred dollars per shared. It started out ten dollars per share on the I p O. A year later, they're valued at a hundred dollars per share. There's still a hundred shares out there, but that means my one thousand dollar company is now worth ten thousand dollars. Right. I take that same number of shares that exist, that's one hundred times the price one hundred dollars. This gives

me the market capitalization of the company. Now, it's awesome that my company has increased in value like this, But I would kind of like to see more trading happen in the market, more liquidity, right, I want to see people actually buying and selling these shares more frequently. And at a hundred dollars per share, all investors might feel pushed out. They feel like that's too expensive to buy any shares really worthwhile. So my board decides that we're

going to do a stock split. We're gonna do a two for one stock split. That means for every outstanding share of stock, I will create another share and issue it to the people who are holding those shares. So if you are currently holding two shares in my company, you would now hold four shares in my company. However, I can't just magically double the value of my company, right. I can't sit there and say, well, I had a hundred shares at a hundred dollars, now I've got two

hundred shares at a hundred dollars. That doesn't work that way. So all shareholders would see the number of shares double, but the value per share would be cut in half. So instead of having two shares worth a hundred dollars each, you would now have four shares worth fifty dollars each, but the lower cost per share might mean greater liquidity and trading. That might encourage smaller investors to get involved, and that can sometimes help a company grow even more.

Companies like Cisco have had numerous stock splits, and I'll talk more about the result of that at the end of this episode. I just wanted to mention that it was impressive that a company would hold a split only a year after getting listed on the stock exchange. When Cisco Systems first went public, it had the market capitalization of two four million dollars. So, in other words, you took all the shares of Cisco that existed, you multiplied it by the price per share, you get up two

four million dollars. That's how much the market cap is for Cisco when it launches in Just a year later, that market cap was already one billion dollars. In ninety two, Cisco was awarded its first patent, which was originally filed back in Because patent applications can take a while, the patent office takes a while to review a patent and

then uh issue a patent. It was US Patent number five million, eighty eight thousand, thirty two That patent was for technology called the Interior Gateway Routing Protocol or i g RP. That was a set of rules that routers would follow for efficient communications within a computer network, peaking ahead for a moment. In the summer of ten, Cisco would celebrate getting its ten thousand US patent. But to be clear, Cisco also grew quite a bit through acquisitions.

Uh Primarily, Cisco grew by acquiring other companies, so I imagine many of those patents were part of acquisitions and not just patents that were filed by Cisco R and D. Cisco also opened offices in Canada and Japan in n and hit revenues of three one million dollars and grew

to eight hundred seventy five employees. Now, from this point forward, I'm only going to mention revenues and employee counts when it's particularly notable, since a lot of Cisco's history is all about it got bigger that year, and that gets really old, really fast, So I'm not going to do that for every single year. In ninety three, Cisco Systems

made its first acquisition. It was a company called Crescendo Communications, and Crescendo was working on network switching technologies, particularly for local area networks. The acquisition cost nearly nine million dollars, and again, if I were to list every single company Cisco Systems purchased from that time up to present day,

it would probably take about twenty minutes to do. Most of them were companies that focused on technologies relating to networks, so within Cisco's wheelhouse, they were largely companies that made routers or switches, or modems or firewalls. Others, however, were

in related fields like computer security. There was even a couple of companies that were related to Internet television, back when everyone was convinced that was right around the corner, when in reality, it would take you know, a decade or two after that acquisition for any sort of Internet TV to kind of take off, and even then it was a totally different UH implementation than what people had

imagined back in the nineties. Cisco would also acquire companies in the mobile space, also in surveillance, in voice over Internet protocol, in digital cable, and more even in consumer electronics. More recently, the company has invested heavily in cloud computing infrastructure.

So in all, Cisco has spent around seventy billion dollars in acquisitions, and most of the products Cisco offers comes out of those acquisitions, So you could say a lot of Cisco's growth came from buying out other companies and adding to their own offerings. That way, John Mortgage and his successor, John Chambers both used acquisitions as a means for growth. According to a two thousand two Business Week article,

acquisitions accounted for about fifty of all Cisco's businesses. Cisco's uh moves also meant that it maintained a dominant position in business to business enterprise, and it focused on network technology. It was the dominant player in that space. If you planned to build out a computer network, chances are you were relying at least in part on technology from Cisco. This included Internet service providers, so we started seeing more and more Internet service getting rolled out to the United

States population. Those network infrastructure pieces had to come from somewhere. Cisco provided a lot of the routers and switches that would be used by Internet service providers in their various networks, so it was a lucrative source of revenue for the company. Now, to be clear, the acquisitions were likely necessary to some extent. Cisco had built much of its business early on on multi protocol routers. If you listen to my last episode,

you know what I mean by that. Those are the routers that can communicate between different networks that are operating on incompatible communications protocols. But by the nineties a lot of that was changing. Most networks were starting to rely upon Internet Protocol as the standard in communications, so you

weren't seeing as much proprietary approaches. Everyone was kind of leaning towards Internet Protocol because that was clearly going to become a dominant means of communication through computer systems, and that made multi protocol routers less important because really only legacy systems were dependent upon them. Newer systems were adopting Internet Protocol, so you didn't need something that was multi protocol. It's like you don't need a translator if everybody in

the room speaks the same common language. So without diversifying, Cisco could have been in danger of becoming obsolete. So these acquisitions were actually not a bad thing, But there is this sort of view among certain people that a company growing by acquiring other companies is kind of sort of cheating. It's like the pay to win philosophy and games. Uh, according to some people. Sometimes I feel that way. I'm

not gonna lie. Sometimes I look at a company that makes most of its growth through acquisitions and I think, really, but it's a smart business move. It makes sense, and for Cisco, it paid off in huge dividends for at least the near term. Now back to the history of the company. While he gobbled up other companies, Cisco also opened up more operations around the world like Hong Kong, Mexico, and Belgium, and it would continue to open up offices

all across the world. By the company hit revenues of more than a billion dollars for the first time in its history, and they also moved offices from Menlo Park to San Jose, California, And a year later the company posted a revenue of two point to three billion. So they go from a billion to two point to three billion. They double their revenue in a year, and it was

like the company had a license to print money. But remember this is also a time when people in general were first becoming aware of the Internet as a thing. Early nineties. That's when your average person starts to hear about internet. Before then, you pretty much had to be a college student it or you had to work in the field to know what the heck the Internet was. Most people before the early nineties had no inkling, and it was around this time where people were saying like,

what does the AT symbol in an email mean? What does this Worldwide Web? What does this Information super Highway? This was a boom time for network technology. Was also when John Chambers would become the new CEO of Cisco and John Mortgridge would transition to the role of Chairman of the board. I'll talk more about Chambers in just a moment, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. John Chambers had earned a Master's of

Business administration from Indiana University. He had worked for IBM in their sales department in the late seventies and early nineteen eighties, and then went on to work for Wang Laboratories, makers of the Whang compute or Wong if you want to use the correct pronunciation, I would say this was in the late eighties. This was a computer company that

one time was extremely successful. A lot of people haven't really heard about Wong or Wang computers these days because they were again sort of a business to business company. But by the time Chambers left the company in nineteen ninety, Wong was already on a downward spiral and it would eventually declare bankruptcy. It would emerge from bankruptcy, it would then get acquired, and ultimately it would end up dissolving after a couple more acquisitions. Maybe someday I'll do a

full episode to talk about the history of that company. Anyway, by that time, John Chambers was already part of Cisco. He had joined that team officially in nine and he would serve as the Cisco CEO for two decades. He would stay on a CEO until July two thousand, fifteen, and a lot happened in those two decades. So Chamber serves as the new CEO of Cisco and its business as usual, meaning the company is continuing to grow and

acquire other companies. This was a time when people began to get incredibly excited about the potential of the Internet the mid to late nineties. Startups were beginning to bloom in the mid nineties, but that would really build to a fever pitch by the end of the nineties. It got crazy. The Information super Highway was being hailed as the next frontier. It was where people were going to make their fortune. It was a land grab of massive scale.

It was where we were all going to live, and we were going to have experiences in virtual environments that would let us work and shop and play and experienced life in a way we just could not imagine before the Internet, Or at least that's how it was all sold to us. No one was really sure how it was actually gonna shake out, but they were all sure

that it would lead to this amazing virtual future. And Cisco, a comedy that continued to supply the technology that made Internet connect communication possible, was profiting from this excitement in a very real way. More companies were building up networks that meant they needed the equipment that Cisco produced in order to do that. Uh, they were going to Cisco

primarily because it was the biggest name out there. It was the dominant manufacturer of various network components like routers and switches, so if you needed to build out your network, chances are you were going with Cisco hardware. They needed to establish safe networks, they had an air gap between the network and the Internet, so they would go with the best, biggest name in the industry. They needed the hardware that Cisco was known for, and the company was

doing business like gang busters. In Fortune magazine would list Cisco among the Fortune five Companies list at number three thirty two. But in just a couple of years, Cisco would become the most valuable company in the world tech company, that is, for a short while anyway, Cisco first started offering cable modems for end users. This is one of the few products the company made for home consumers as

opposed to enterprises. So they entered the consumer market in a limited way, uh and experimented with this for a little more than a decade, and Cisco would later purchase companies like links Is in two thousand three to increase this offering. Links Is makes routers home routers that kind of thing and had existed before Cisco came along. Then

Cisco lumps links us and under its wing. However, Cisco would not hold on to all these consumer facing companies like links Is, which Cisco sold to Belcan in two thousand thirteen, one decade later. In fact, at that time, Cisco pretty much divested itself of all home market products in general. Interesting side note by the way links Is Cisco was founded by a married couple. This would be Janey and Victor sal who founded links Is, which originally

had the name D E W International. And yes, the original site for that company was in fact a garage in California because the archetype exists for a reason. Marked Cisco's fifteenth anniversary. It had hit revenues of twelve billion dollars. It had grown so much through expansions and acquisitions that now had more than twenty thousand employees, and in March two thousand, Cisco hit its peak that it has never

met since then. Spoiler alert, Cisco's market cap, which when it launched was two four million dollars I'll remind you, hit five hundred fifty five point four billion dollars in March two thousand. That meant Cisco had officially displaced Microsoft as the most valuable company in the world. This value was fueled again by the fervor around the Internet. Internet service providers were furiously building out their infrastructure and relying heavily on Cisco technologies to do so. The company was

in great shape, and then the bubble burst. Now I've covered the dot com bubble and other episodes, so I'm just going to kind of give a quick summary of what happened here in the late nineties and into two thousand, even into two thousand one, to some extent, there was an almost unreal amount of investment pouring into internet ventures. Now, some of those ventures would prove to be good ideas that could stand the test of time, like Amazon that

was able to survive the dot com bubble burst. Others were decent ideas, but the people behind them were unable to execute those ideas the way they had envisioned, so they weren't able to make any money off of this cool idea. And it might be that once the bubble did burst a few years later, someone else came along with a similar idea and they were able to make it work. At the time, it just didn't. Some of

the ideas were just playing bad. But around this time in the late nineties, the general feeling was if you did not get in on this internet craze, if you did not put your money there, you were going to miss out on an incredible investment opportunity. The venture capitalists were blasting companies with huge investments. I mean, it was almost like people were throwing money at these startup companies

they were finding themselves flush with cash. Some of them were finding themselves in possession of way more money than was necessary for them to actually do what it was they said they wanted to do. And lots of startup entrepreneurs went more than a little bonkers with all that dough. They started tricking out their offices with lavish furniture and amenities. They had spent huge amounts on stuff they didn't actually

need that wasn't contributing to their business at all. Some of them didn't have a business plan to speak of. They had a cool idea, something that sounded neat, but they didn't have a strategy of how they were going to even generate revenue, let alone make a profit. And once the initial excitement started to die down, people began to ask hard questions, like how the heck is this company going to pay back the investment I put into it. The market peaked in March of two thousand, fueled by

rampant speculation, and then the bubble burst. Now, why the bubble burst is complicated, as there were there's more than just investors waking up, right. It wasn't just people got out of bed one day and said hang on and then and then the balloon just totally pops. That's more

simple than what really happened. A lot of startups had burned through their initial cash and had nothing related to show for it except pending disaster, and the dot com crash saw several internet startups go under just months after they had made headlines with incredible successful I p o s. These were companies that had failed to generate a profit, or, like I said, in a few cases, they had failed

to make any revenue at all. While some of them received enormous amounts of investment money, that cash was spent, and without a steady source of incoming revenue or more investment, those companies couldn't stay afloat, so the market retracted. Cisco was in a different space. It was a big, established company. It wasn't about to go out of business, but it did take an enormous hit from this dot com bubble burst.

Its stock price declined by more than eighty percent as a result, and the company had been on a rocket to the stratosphere before this. A lot of people were even predicting that Cisco was going to become the first trillion dollar company, but it's market cap ended up going from more than five hundred billion to one fifty one billion in two thousand one, and it would dip even lower in subsequent years, so it didn't go out of business, but its value was reduced to less than half of

what it had been at its peak. By the end of fiscal year two thousand two, Cisco stocks were trading at around twelve dollars per share. The change from fiscal year two thousand one to two thousand two is noticeable if you look at timelines for Cisco, even once from the company itself, because companies tend to not want to draw attention to really difficult years, and they sometimes will just they don't necessarily fudge results, but they might leave

details out. But there's an official Cisco timeline that gives you revenue and employee count every year from its founding up to two thousand thirteen. At the end of fiscal year two thousand one, the company posted twenty two point three billion dollars in revenue and they had thirty eight thousand,

four hundred two employees. One year later, that had gone down from twenty two point three billion to eighteen point nine billion, and there were three thousand fewer employees Around but still, and you're talking about billions of dollars in revenue. It's not like Cisco was suddenly on the verge of collapse. It just was suffering a pretty big setback. But I was able to keep its footing, and CEO Chambers concentrated on trying to lead his company to reverse this trend

and to go back into a period of growth. But it took a few years. Cisco revenues and employee count remained pretty flat from two thousand two to two thousand four, So first it was all about stabilizing the company, then it was trying to grow it again. During that time, Cisco was doing other business. They had gotten into the voice over Internet phone protocol system, so they were selling I voide phones. They had shipped four million of those

by two thousand four. It had introduced security solutions in two thousand five, and it appeared to be on a slow climb back to where it was now. I want to talk a little bit more about what Cisco did in the aftermath of the dot com bubble and what it's doing today, But before I get into that, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Two thousand six saw a big year of growth for Cisco. The company was really able to get out of that rut it was in. It was also getting into the business

of telepresence. That's, you know, the whole video calling business, which in two thousand six was still a pretty young science and technology. It wasn't that it was really novel. Not a lot of people had had made use of it. Yet these days you can have it on your smartphone. It was still a dominant player in switches and routers at that time, and it had grown to nearly fifty two thousand employees, so it looked like it was well on the way to full recovery, and it continued to

make strategic acquisitions. It also officially dropped Systems from its name and simply became known as Cisco. They also launched a campaign called the Human Network. This was an advertising campaign pain to uh kind of position the company as one that had a place in the average household, and this was a relatively short lived attempt for Cisco to make a bigger move into the consumer electronics market space. Ultimately, the company would change gears and again focus on enterprise customers.

They would ultimately decide that it was a mistake to get into consumer electronics. Now. One very disturbing story involving Cisco around this time that first started to emerge in the UH around two thousand eight or so and has continued to be brought up in discussion since then, was

the company's involvement in supplying technology to China. Now, according to allegations brought against Cisco by various human rights organizations, Cisco was instrumental and provide fighting and customizing technology for China's Golden Shield System. We have also called the Golden

Shield System the Great Firewall of China. The Chinese government restricts access to the Internet, so a lot of sites are strictly forbidden, and the Great Firewall allows the Chinese government to essentially dictate which parts of the Internet are are are accessible within China and which ones should not be accessible within China. It's a very authoritarian approach to

Internet access. Now, the allegations state that Cisco provided technology that allowed the Chinese government to identify and pursue individuals that the government had identified as being undesirable, people that the government had said are dangerous. That included practitioners of the Falloon Gong religion. So, according to the allegations these people were reportedly hunted down, captured towards, shured, and in

at least one instance killed. The lawsuits accused Cisco of knowingly providing technology that would be used in those endeavors, saying there's no way the company would not have known that the tech they were designing for the Chinese government was specifically for the purpose of the government identifying, singling out,

and pursuing specific individuals within China. The initial lawsuit was dismissed when a judge stated the plaintiffs had failed to provide evidence that Cisco would have known the technology would be put to such use. The plaintiffs appealed, with oral arguments happening in April seventeen, but then the submission of the case was vacated, pending the judgment on a different case that the Supreme Court was hearing. It was called

Jesner versus Air of the Bank. At issue was whether or not foreign corporations could or could not be defendants in suits brought under the Alien Tort Statute. The Supreme Court found that they could not in a five to four decision, and as far as I intel the matter is at arrest, there that that in US courts will not hear the case. That's my understanding. Uh, it may turn out to be different. I am not a legal expert.

One of the ways that Cisco tried to target consumers around this time was in the consumer video camera market. In two thousand nine, Cisco acquired Pure Digital Technologies. That's the company that was behind the flip video cameras. Do you remember those? They're kind of cool. I actually kind

of thought they were neat. Uh. Cisco might have timed that kind of poorly, because two thousand nine was right around the time that the handheld cam quarter market was getting pushed aside by smartphones, more of which were including cameras capable of taking video. Cisco stuck with this plan until April, and then it discontinued the flip video cameras because the company was looking Cisco, that is, was looking

to extricate itself from the home consumer market entirely. The space was too crowded with too many competitors, and many of those competitors had been at the game for way longer than Cisco. In fact, even longer than Cisco had existed as a company, so things were pretty rough for Cisco. There By two thousand eleven, other companies were also starting to really seriously compete against Cisco in the network infrastructure

business that's the bread and butter of Cisco. At least up to that time, Cisco was still the dominant player that was no longer commanding nearly all the market the way it had been. As a result, the company's earnings were lower than what they had projected previously, and so Cisco had to look for ways to cut costs. And if you've worked for a big company, you probably anticipate what happened next, because one way companies cut costs after

a rough financial year is by laying off employees. John Chambers essentially said, I've done goofed up the Really he was more professional than I make it sound, and it wasn't like it was an obvious mistake on the face of it. The problem, as Chambers admitted, was that Cisco had tried to compete in too many markets, many of which had entrenched players, like the home consumer market, for example.

So the company was fighting a war that had too many fronts, and so Chamber said it was time to simplify Cisco's approach to narrow its focus, and unfortunately that also meant cut some jobs in the process, because those jobs would no longer be necessary for the company's mission. Chambers wanted to cut expenses by about six percent, but

six percent meant one billion dollars. Some analysts estimated that could mean the company might eliminate as many as ten thousand jobs, which would be about four percent of its workforce. Others said it was probably going to be closer to four thousand. Now, according to Cisco's own timeline, it looks like the real number was somewhere in between four thousand and ten thousand. At the end of fiscal year eleven,

the company had seventy one five employees. At the end of the following year, it was down to sixty six thousand, six hundred thirty nine. So, assuming some folks were brought on throughout two thousand twelve, either through acquisitions or through hires, that would mean around five thousand people were let go. It wouldn't be the last time Cisco would have to

lay off a lot of people. In August, the company announced it would eliminate five thousand, five hundred jobs, and the following year it announced another eleven hundred positions would be on the chopping block. Now. That was probably because Cisco has pivoted. In recent years, the network infrastructure market has slowed down considerably because eventually you've got enough super highway laid down right. Internet service providers have built out

their infrastructures. They might continue to UH implement new material into those infrastructures, but there's no longer this land grab. There's no longer this very fast expansion of Internet infrastructure. It's not necessary. A lot of of of organizations already have the equipment they need. So for the last couple of years, Cisco has had to look at a different

source for revenue, something some other area of growth. They could still do business with network infrastructure materials, but it's not gonna have the year over your growth that investors want to see. So the company has switched to concentrate more on software and cloud computing services as well as

the Internet of things. In fact, there's a pretty good chance that the Internet of Things got its name from Cisco, which was the organization that really recognized when individual uh network connected components were out numbering the number of people on the planet, saying well, we now have more devices connected to the Internet than there are people in the world. That happened, by the way, around two two thousand nine. One person who left his job was John Chambers, but

that was his choice. He didn't get fired. He actually retired as CEO in twif As I mentioned earlier, his replacement was Chuck Robbins, the current CEO of Cisco. He had worked for Cisco for nearly twenty years. He had

previously been the senior vice president of worldwide Operations. Now, if you listen to my last episode, you heard me say that a one thousand dollar investment in Cisco when it first went public wouldn't netted you fifty five point five five shares, which means they're around eighteen dollars per share, which made me wonder how much would they be worth today? So since that time, the company's shares have split multiple times,

so you have to take all that into count. Fifty five point five five shares from would be more shares today because they kept splitting. So how many shares would you have today? Probably somewhere around sixteen thousand, that's how many times it splits. Now, keep in mind a split typically doubles the number of shares you have. Sometimes it can be more than that, depend upon the nature of

the split. At the time I am researching this episode, Cisco shares our price at about forty two dollars eighty six cents per share. So if you do some multiplication, you take your sixteen thousand, you multiply by that, that would mean you're one thousand dollar investment way back in nineteen nine would be worth about six hundred eighty five thousand, seven hundred sixty dollars today. But hey, let's let's be fair.

Let's sudjust that one thousand dollars for inflation, right, because a thousand dollars in nineteen ninety is worth more than a thousand dollars and twenty eighteen money, So in today's cash it would be worth about one thousand, nine hundred seventy seven dollars ninety four cents. So let's just rounded up to two thousand dollars. So a two thousand dollar investment in today's buying power back in nineteen would net

you more than half a million dollars. That's after Cisco's struggles during the dot com crash and the two thousand eleven crisis, so that's not bad, though the company is still a far cry from its peak you have five billion dollars. In fact, as of the day I'm researching this, the company has a market capitalization of one nine point ninety three billion dollars. Still really impressive, but that's less than half of what it was at its peak, even

before you adjust for inflation. Now, I've got another question for you. What if you had made that one thousand dollar investment back in nine, but then, you know, just at the very peak of Cisco's value, you sold off all of your your stocks. Let's say you just get this feeling in your bones. You're like this, this is about to take a downward turn, so I'm going to

get rid of all my stock right now. Well, if you had done that, if you had taken that fifty five point five five shares of stock that you bought for one thousand dollars back in nineteen nine, and you sold it at its peak, you would have netted one million, two hundred sixty four thousand dollars more than a million dollars on a thousand dollars in ustment. That would be pretty darn suite. But that's hindsight, and hindsight is always

twenty twenty. At the time, you would not have known, maybe you would have thought, Nope, it's on its way to a trillion dollar company. I'm holding onto these stocks, yes, sirree. Now, ultimately, the story of Cisco is a complicated one. It's a company that was founded on a collaborative effort that left a few of the collaborators upset at how their work

was leveraged for commercial products. The technology from Cisco and the companies that acquired has made it possible for countless other businesses and organizations to adapt the requirements of the twenty first century. And while Cisco was blasted by the dot com bubble bursting, it's not like it was responsible

for that mess. The company was investing billions of dollars and acquisitions, which likely helped fuel some of the speculation around the dot com bubble, but it wasn't engaged in the same sort of shenanigans that ultimately led to the bubble collapsing. They were more of a victim of that than someone was perpetrating the mess that caused it. So I'm not trying to lay blame at Cisco for the dot com bubble. Far from it. Well, that wraps up these two episodes about Cisco, where it came from what

it does and where it's headed. It's very much in the cloud computing space and and software as a service space these days, so very different from building network cards and routers way back in night And of course the co founders haven't had anything to do with the company since nine so it's a very different company than what was formed out of a living room in San Jose back in the early eighties. Interesting story, lots of controversy there.

I am curious to read more about a lot of the stories here, and maybe someday do another update, but for now, let's close the book on Cisco. If any of you have suggestions, like Gauge did, for any topics I should cover on Tech Stuff, whether a company, maybe it's a person in tech, maybe it's a specific technology. Maybe there's someone you want me to interview or have on as a guest host. Send me a message let

me know. The email for the show is tech Stuff at how stuff Works dot com, or you can drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle at both of those is tech Stuff H s W. Don't forget to follow us on Instagram and I'll talk to you again. Release it for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works? Dot com