Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–264
TOMBRELLO: One of the best—I’m going to give you the ones that make me look good,
obviously, that’s the way things go—is about a company run by a Caltech professor, and he
didn’t have a clue.
ASPATURIAN: The name?
TOMBRELLO: No. Yeah, it was Harvey Newman [professor of physics], come on. It was a
beautiful little idea in teleconferencing. Very efficient teleconferencing. Developed with the
taxpayers’ money for CERN. But Harvey is not a natural businessman. In fact, you might say
he is an unnatural businessman. He started a small company based on this idea, and basically it
created such a mess that there was a chance of a lawsuit with some of the other investors. Larry
and Rich asked me what I would do. I said, “I know what you’re going to do. We’re going to
give our stock away—all of it. We’re going to give it to some of the other people who’ve
invested in the company—all of it, every bit of it.” They said, “Why?” I said, “If we don’t have
any stock, we can’t be sued.” So it worked like a charm.
Here’s another very interesting case. There was a patent on an asynchronous
microprocessor from campus. It was being willfully violated by Intel Corporation. And we were
told quite specifically by somebody at Intel that we wouldn’t dare touch them because it might
bother Gordon Moore. We sort of accepted that argument. Rich said, “What are we going to
do?” I said, “I know what I’m going to suggest. I want you to find a predatory firm who will
buy that patent.” He says, “I assume you mean license the patent.” I said, “No. I don’t want to
license. I want all my fingerprints off that patent. I want to sell that patent.” Rich did his
homework and he found Nathan Myhrvold, who runs this company called Intellectual Ventures.
Nathan was first chief scientist at Microsoft, and one day at lunch, up in Bellevue, Washington,
Rich and I sold the patent for $600,000. Somebody said subsequently, “Well, what did he do
about Intel?” I said, “I don’t want to know.” Whatever he did, that was Nathan’s thing. There
was no way we could make money out of it, because we weren’t going to hold Intel’s feet to the
fire. If Nathan did it, hey, that was Nathan. I don’t want to know about it. [Laughter] So there
were some very interesting things where having a Sicilian heritage was not exactly—
ASPATURIAN: A liability.
http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Tombrello_T