<story><title>The Stanford Academic Who Wrote Google Its First Check (2012)</title><url>http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2012/08/01/professor-billionaire-david-cheriton/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>fightthehypo</author><text>I took a Distributed Systems class with Prof. Cheriton in 2007 for my Masters degree. In the first few classes, I remember being awed by the wealth and legacy of the man, and wanting to glean everything I could from him. It quickly became apparent though that he hadn&amp;#x27;t updated his course materials or lectures in over a decade, e.g. the pros and cons of distributed shared memory vs COBOL RPC. The core topics were there, it was just presented in such a dry manner.&lt;p&gt;Worse though, was that he would needlessly inject his very conservative politics as total non-sequiturs. Test questions like &amp;quot;Hillary Clinton wants to build [obviously unscalable system], explain why it won&amp;#x27;t work. I found it very unprofessional.&lt;p&gt;Stanford records a video of every lecture, and enrolled students can then watch them whenever. I remember sitting in my dorm room, watching one of his 75 minute lectures where there was literally 3 students in a 150 person auditorium. It just floored me that this was how a billionaire was spending his time. I do genuinely like the man, you could just tell he was capable of so much more.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Stanford Academic Who Wrote Google Its First Check (2012)</title><url>http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2012/08/01/professor-billionaire-david-cheriton/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>denzil_correa</author><text>Interesting thoughts. Social Networking is a &amp;quot;market whim&amp;quot; according to Cheriton.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Cheriton says he avoids pursuing market whims—he considers social networking one of them—and stays focused on breakthroughs that make measurable improvements to human life&lt;p&gt;I wonder at what time does he think it would be out of fashion.</text></comment>