Austin Revealed

(intense music) Tracor's electronics systems division. For the past 20 years, Tracor ESD has been providing high quality cost effective engineering and technical services on a wide range of complex electronic systems. Tracor grew out of a research project at what was then called Balcones Research Center at UT. So Frank McBee and three colleagues were professors out at the Balcones Research Park.

They saw a business opportunity with defense contracting research. They formed Tracor, which was Austin's first Fortune 500 company. It was sort of the only act in town up until the early 1980s, in terms of technology. The idea of doing a spin out from the university, and launching a technology company was revolutionary back in 1955.

They started with sonar research at UT. Going back decades to the '50s, but a lot of what they made when I started up was chaff. This wasn't that many years after Vietnam. US war planes needed to fool enemy radar, so they fired off these chaff canisters, and basically the tin foil came bursting out of this canister.

There was an industrial base, kind of a commercial base, if you will, prior to the time that we really kicked off the high tech explosion in Austin. IBM, as an example, was here fairly early. Now, it wasn't high tech. IBM came to Austin to build electric typewriters, and it bought this huge piece of ground out to the northern part of the city and built their facility with plans to expand.

I came on board when it was out in the sticks out there, and there were rattlesnakes around, and the rabbits around, and we were just some young buckaroos out there at the time. We're talking about in 1967. The first building was on 11400 Burnet Road, and that was the old rusty building out there, and we opened it up and the city council came out and visited, and we all had about 300 employees at that time. It was assembly line, it was just pushin' and shovin', and it was nuts and bolts and grease and grime.

But who knew they'd jump all the way into the high tech field, and start developing patents. More patents than anybody could ever shake a stick at. Obviously through 50 years plus, 51 years, there's been a lot of evolution, but in the early days, IBMers helped build some of the very early models of what we'd call big computers, or servers, supercomputers. At the height of manufacturing and all, we had 10 plus thousand people here.

Building 45 is the last building that IBM occupies that's on the west side of Burnet Road. Still today doesn't do manufacturing, but it has several big labs. IBM was a big shot for the economy. This was a big deal in the late '60s, where a company like IBM, headquartered in New York, and all coming to Texas.

It meant lots of neighborhoods got populated by IBMers. Then other companies, like Lockheed, moved to Austin, and one of my friends has told me that a key reason for them choosing Austin out of all the places that they could've gone was IBM being here. IBM and TI were the first two really big technology companies here. There were some homegrowns, Tracor, which was very important.

TI by reputation, they wanted to go where engineers were. They wanted to be in Austin 'cause there's engineers coming out of UT. They're making what in those days were called mini computers. Mini computers weren't mini at all.

They were these six foot tall computers. They cost thousands of dollars, and were bought by government agencies and large businesses. Obviously there was engineering going on, but it was pretty much a heavy manufacturing operation. I joined TI, they came to Austin in 1969, and TI was a huge company, still is.

It's based in Dallas. We had about 700 people working at TI in Austin. We were basically making this huge scientific computer that hadn't been made before. It was a pre-Cray machine.

In the late '70s, we started making personal computers and home computers to kind of compete with IBM, and all that was made here in Austin, Texas. (pleasant music) -

Narrator

The Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, a historic cooperative research venture of US computer industries. MCC, you know as we understood it then, it was this pioneering consortia, and supposedly it was motivated by US industries concern about the Japanese fifth generation computer project. They saw this as a way to do collaborative research, a pretty new thing for the US. It was a massive effort.

Pike Powers was obviously a ringleader. I took my family to San Antonio for a weekend at the Four Seasons Hotel. This was Sunday morning,

about 6

30, the phone rang, and it was Mayor Cisneros. He said, "What are you doing?" I said, "I'm sleeping, mainly." He said, "Well get up, I've got a few people "I want you to know or meet." I said, "Henry I got my Bermuda shorts on "and I haven't shaved in two days, "and you want me to go down and meet some people?" He said, "Yes, I insist on it right now." So I went in, and he had about 35 people in the room. It was the San Antonio business committee, and they said, "We know about this thing called MCC, "Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, "and we wanna go compete and win for Texas." I said, "What do you want me to do?" And they said, "Go find the governor and tell him "he needs to make a commitment to this." -

Man

about 6

Governor Mark White said to his chief of staff, Pike Powers, he says, "We don't wanna lose this. "We want to win it. "You do whatever is necessary to get MCC to come here." Bob Inman was recruited by the board that decided to create MCC, to be the CEO and founder of MCC. And he was an interesting character to do that, because he came out of the intelligence and military background.

A man of considerable international reputation, and a piercing kind of intellect. A very bright, slightly quirky kind of guy who had been around computers, I guess virtually all his adult life. In the microelectronics area, the first large scale computer built early in World War II to support cryptographic research filled almost half this ballroom in space. 100 times that capacity is now available in a desktop computer smaller than this lectern.

Within a decade, another 10 times that power will be available on a single chip the size of your thumbnail. Well I was intrigued by the idea of putting together a research consortia owned by competing computer and semi-conductor firms. Driven largely by Bill Norris, the CEO of Control Data. He'd pull together ultimately 15 other US corporations, computer and semiconductor manufacturers.

So I agreed on the 20th of January, 1983 to undertake it. I want to make sure that wherever this unique venture is placed, that the locale feels some stake in its success. So we're gonna do a public site selection. You know the entire business community got behind it, and then with their help, and the governor's help, UT got behind it.

With reason, as they were going to benefit from it. There were people at the engineering school, Streetman, who were critically important. There was a young professor at UT named Ben Streetman, who talked for just six minutes about the kind of research going on in his labs in what's now the Pickle Center. Ben Streetman was great.

He stole the show. I got a call from the governor's office, and they said they're gonna have the meeting in Chicago about this MCC project, and we'd like for you to go and help make a presentation. I went, and the chancellor was there, mayors of Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio, and of course Austin. Well I talked about our research in very high speed electronics, and so I explained that to 'em, waved my hands a lot to show how you do that.

What turned them on was that the faculty member in the microelectronics center would have the enthusiasm to explain that to 'em in a way they could understand. After the Chicago session, CEOs of the company who were on the search committee, seven of us altogether, said no, we gotta get this finished. Come down to five places. Howard Falkenberg was the president of my company, and Howard and I kind of led the deal.

We'd sit down, and plot, and plan, and decide okay, how are we gonna do this? What do we need to do in the way of showing off Austin and what it has to offer? So when the MCC crew came to town, we had 'em come in and go meet the governor. Well the governor greeted them at the back door of the Governor's Mansion in his shirtsleeves, and said, "Can I pour you a whiskey?

"Let's sit down here, and let's talk." I have to say this, not everybody saw the value in MCC to begin with. Peter Flawn was really, he doubted the efficacy of MCC's question about if it would work. His initial reaction, too much money, too risky, too much out there. This is kind of news for me hearing that Pike was saying that Flawn wasn't quite convinced.

I think he got more supportive as time went on. Pike has his own way of doing things, and his talent is bringing lots of really smart people together into really good teams. And because he had the imprimatur of the governor's office, it made it even easier. For the final presentation that we made, we held that in the atrium of the LBJ Library, and Mrs.

Lyndon B. Johnson, the first lady, came out and greeted them again, in an informal way. We had breakfast in the Johnson Library, and I got there early to make sure everything was right, and the fountain was completely off. So I said, get the damn thing on now, now, not later, now!

The day began with Mrs. Johnson hosting a breakfast in the atrium of the LBJ Library with the governor, and large delegation. We had quail for breakfast, and I said, is this the hunting season for quail? And there was a quiet admission that quail were raised domestically to be served.

I wasn't invited to that. You weren't invited? - No. -

Interviewer

about 6

I was gonna ask you if the media was involved. No. Obviously it wasn't a secret. This was a site selection that was a beauty contest.

The governor's office was definitely playing this as a statewide effort, and they wanted to rope in as much support as they could, and it won over the people like Ross Perot up in Dallas, who said yes, this is great for Texas, let's do this. -

Man

about 6

Ross Perot had approached me, and said you're gonna be in Texas. He was behind the scenes, helping the governor pull together the effort. He was a critical analyzer of what we had done, and needed to do, and was on me like a dirty shirt. He finally turned to me one day, and he said, "You've done everything "I asked you to do, and then some.

"You did a good job, thank you." And that's a compliment when it comes from Ross Perot, considering what a wild man he is. People rose above their petty differences to say hey, this is important. They realized it was their chance at a real future, and a real economy. So Austin won, going away.

I called the governor a few days later to tell him he'd been selected. People were beaming. It was kind of a back slapping kind of time in Austin. Inman had this considerable reputation.

He was also a UT guy, which obviously everyone loved that. It was someone with an international reputation who is kind of anointing Austin, or choosing Austin. There were other issues that clinched it for Texas with MCC. Because if UT had gotten to the point of being the Stanford in the world, I don't know that MCC would've picked UT.

They wanted a university that they could grow with. And Austin was not thought of as a tech center, or even an industrial center. But the key to it was the University of Texas. So the university had a tract of land out to the north that was an old wartime facility, a research facility called the Balcones Research Facility.

So the university built a building to MCC's specs. Our first knowledge of MCC was in the first couple of years when they were in the Echelon building. Then they moved to the rather larger and grander building. If you go looking in the building, in between those stove pipes were, at each level, sort of galleries.

A lot of ideas were generated out of that cross feed. Made some of the shareholder companies nervous when they saw how much exchange was going on, but it was key. This was the boardroom, and it's a circle on purpose, because Admiral Inman wanted to make sure that everybody felt equal and welcome. On this wall here, MCC put all of their patents.

Every time another patent went up, it just got row after row after row, and by the time we were done, that wall was full. There were initially 16 of the major corporations that were looking at being a part of MCC. Value of MCC to Austin? The prime one was to get the country to focus on Austin as a place to do high technology.

I've got a picture here that I just love. It's got me on one side, and Pike Powers in the middle, the chief of staff for the governor, and Howard Falkenberg. The three of us were kinda the three musketeers, and it exemplifies the collaborative spirit here in Austin. I would just say, on behalf of everybody that had to put up with me, it was a terrific ride.

(pleasant music) -

Narrator

about 6

Renamed in 1994, the research campus commemorates the life work of Jake Pickle, a Texas congressman for more than 30 years, and a tireless advocate for education and research. Got a call from Congressman Jake Pickle. He was looking to try to earmark money for this future semiconductor enterprise. Those who were putting together Semitech said, "If Jake Pickle would do that for us, "and we aren't even in his district, "what would he do for us if we went there?" That was the key element in moving the decision to put Semitech in Austin.

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Narrator

about 6

In 1987, the Montopolis campus of the University of Texas became home to Semitech, a joint venture of the federal government and US computer chip industries. Semitech coming in 1988 was soon after the MCC win, and a lot of the same people were involved. The reason for MCC and Semitech as similar in many ways is Japanese competition. The fear in the federal government was we can't let the research excellence in those fields go to Japan in terms of national security.

Create technology, but commercialize it at a much faster rate. That's where we've repeatedly been losing to the Japanese. The Japanese were doing a lot of really interesting things, but with hardware and software. But they didn't have nearly as much software capabilities we had.

We were not quite keeping up on the hardware side. Part of what Semitech did was to keep refining clean room technology. It was done by mechanical engineers who were able to build clean rooms with zero dust particles, or one part per billion of dust particles. You could have bigger and bigger integrated circuits.

Semitech was funded with money from the federal government as well as membership dues of the major companies such as TI, Intel, Micron, and many others to try to sort of stem the loss of jobs and business, and I think it worked amazingly well because within a few years, the US regained and increased their leadership in the field of microelectronics. Myself and my team interacted with Semitech a lot. I think the biggest thing that they contributed was to alter the culture of semiconductors. At that time, companies like Motorola and others would not really chat with the people that made the equipment.

Everything was a secret. And everything was special. Each piece of equipment was uniquely made for a company, incredibly wasteful. The idea of getting these various companies together, and share what they needed, was really almost an impossible task.

We pulled together people from Motorola, Intel, AT&T, IBM, AMD, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So the idea with this team was to come up with a road map of what kind of sizes, features, would we aim for for the next several generations? Nobody said a word. We said, let's take a break.

So what we did, we took a chart and we took these critical dimensions from Motorola and Texas Instruments for the next three generations, and we wrote it down in a chart. It was the transistor size, the contact of the transistors, details associated with the structure. Well we walked back to that meeting, and everybody's eyes bugging out of their head, and scribbling down, trying to take notes and so on, so then we started stimulating, what are you guys gonna do? But that was the first road map that I'm aware of in this country of plans for dimensions and feature sizes for integrated circuits for the next several generations.

At the time, Austin had, Texas had many semiconductor plants. We were I think one of the leaders in semiconductor production. Austin is still a leader in semiconductor design, with many of the companies we have in town. Motorola was, in those days, a massive electronics company based in the Midwest.

They already had three or four chip factories running in East Austin, and had announced plans to start building at Oak Hill in their West Austin campus. The vision was to create a mini Bell Labs in a business environment. So we went for the best folks we could find. Fresh outs, PhDs, experienced people, and the most difficult thing was to convince them to come to Austin, Texas.

(pleasant music) So that was late '80s, early 90 that it really changed dramatically, 'cause word travels. Plus, we recruited a number of folks from UT. All these high tech research folks are living here. Many of them kept their families here, and many of 'em started companies here, and began to work with other companies that were here.

It really is Pike Powers who was the key in putting together proposals that got us here. He was really the driver for Semitech, and it was his ability to pull together competing players that made the difference in it being a success. I had no idea that the breadth and scope of what we would do would have that big an impact. (gentle music) George Kozmetsky with IC2 was sort of the godfather of this whole endeavor.

George Kozmetsky was recruited to University of Texas to be the dean of the business school, and as the dean of the business school back in the '80s, he had a vision around entrepreneurship. (dramatic music) What do you have for creating wealth that provides a meaningful life? And I'll ask that for every human being. What you quickly find that it's science and technology.

In '77 he formed IC2 Institute. Innovation, creativity, and capital. We called ourselves Koz's kids.

Be 4

30 in the morning, for corn flakes and orange juice in my office. So I said god, that's awful. But I got up and did it every time. He would accept young people, or old people, or whoever that wanted his advice.

The general framework was come by my office and throw a pebble at the window, and I'll let ya in. Behind me, 'cause I couldn't erase it, are his writings from 1980s. Whenever he would get a young entrepreneur or a visionary come in his office, he'd say, well draw me a picture. He was established as a successful tech entrepreneur out on the West Coast.

He was in love with shaping future business leaders, and he wanted more research done on how technology businesses got formed. George was amazing. A real friendly guy who liked to get his hands dirty in terms of wanting to know what was going on, and how it was done. But I think more importantly it was him giving advice to Michael Dell who was running that company in his early twenties, and trying not to make mistakes.

He would come to George's office. Directly there was a hard phone line from George's office to Michael Dell in the early days of Dell Computers. As Michael succeeded in the world, UT wanted more and more of the attention, and the ties that he made to UT and Kozmetsky became stronger. He was basically a sharp kid who even then in the early '80s was a computer whiz, and hanging around a company called CompuAdd.

For most of the 1980s, it wasn't totally sure which company was gonna grow bigger. Was it gonna be CompuAdd, or was it gonna be Dell? His great insight was hey, I can do this. I can get software from Microsoft, and I can sell it for twice as cheap, and still make a lot of money.

-

Man

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I moved here in 1989 to go to work for Dell. Dell was probably 1,000 people when we started. -

Narrator

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This month, Dell Computer Corporation in Austin, Texas releases its new PC's Limited Personal Computers. Manufacturing facility was a few miles away from the headquarters up in Northwest Austin, and at the end of the quarter, because we were a public company, and we're trying to pump out as much as we can at the end of the quarter, we'd bring over sales executives and marketing executives, and high end sales people to go over and help wherever we could. I remember feeding the manufacturing people. So we'd get these huge sandwiches and we'd cut the sandwiches for them and feed these workers, 'cause they're working 'til midnight.

It was a young company. The smart thing that Michael did was he brought in people who had experience building companies like this. I'd gotten very interested in venture capital, and Dr. Kozmetsky was absolutely adamant that I had to join him, put a little money in, serve on the board of a IBM PC clone maker named PC Limited, and we changed its name to Dell.

I was director of IC2 for 14 years. Most of the creative stuff that's been done at the university was done at IC2. George was a very, very different kind of person. He was a traditional professor.

He wrote hundreds of articles, and lots of books, but he also had done Teledyne. So he understood that the relationship between academic and business, and wealth creation. A technopolis is a city based on technology. It's commonly associated with Silicon Valley, or Boston Route 128, but Austin is now a technopolis, and IC2 helped to build that.

In the early '80s, George realized that there's a lot of talent that came to Austin. There was 400 software engineers, and he wanted to keep that talent in Austin. There was a sense that Austin had something special, but what we didn't have was entrepreneurship activity. Part of IC2 is the Austin Technology Incubator.

Really the first of its kind in the country founded in February of 1989 to be a resource for entrepreneurs both on campus, and off campus. The city initially helped fund the Austin Technology Incubator, and continues to be a supporter of ATI. -

Reporter

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That's why the technology incubator is critical to Austin's high tech success. It gives startups the tools they need to launch an idea in Austin's competitive technopolis. Over the 30 years, we've had probably close to three billion dollars worth of economic impact for the city. There's a company that was getting into the 3D printing market very, very early.

It was a technology that came through the Austin Technology Incubator. -

Narrator

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DTM Corporation entered ATI in October 1989. DTM Corporation is pioneering a new technology called desktop manufacturing. The process is very, very rapid on the order of minutes or hours, depending on the size, complexity of the object. Company was actually founded in late 1987.

It's pioneering in the sense too that the University of Texas is a shareholder in the company. The inventor could get equity, and the university's gonna hold equity. And so the first one that we did actually came out of UT, and it was a master's student, Carl Deckard, who did the first 3D printing technology. Carl came to talk to me, and I said that sounds kind of interesting, so let's see if we can make it work.

This is the first part ever made, basically. We built a machine on campus called Bambi, and we brought it to a big show in Detroit. We hadn't built any parts yet, and so we made a film of it sort of working. (dramatic music) -

Narrator

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The Sinterstation 2000 uses two powder feeding cartridges, and a cylinder for part building. A roller transfers and levels the powder in layers, and the object is built vertically. Layering in three to 20 mil steps progresses rapidly. So we actually turned the machine on on the show floor, and it started making parts from day one.

It actually worked. People that left DTM after it was acquired started other companies. One of the reasons co-delegations, foreign delegations come here, and other cities from the United States come here, and look at this Austin model because Austin has become this amazing entrepreneurial ecosystem around incubators and accelerators, and venture capital. George Kozmetsky drew Austin, Texas out in the late 1970s, and it looks just like it is today.

A city of business enterprise, a city of startups. And when you get stopped in traffic here, blame George Kozmetsky. (gentle music) What we had in the late '60s and '70s is a city that was a shell of itself. It's a city that was built for the 1910, 1920s.

We had a lot of university kids, but once they graduated they either worked in a bar, or they left. And now a lot of those people are starting their own companies. Venture capital, angel funding, all that's a big part of Austin that wasn't here in the 1970s. In 1970, Austin was a four billion dollar economy.

Today it's 140 billion dollar economy. But Austin was picking up steam in the early '80s, companies were showing up. Frequently, manufacturing operations. There was a sense that hey, we are starting to attract these companies coming in, and they all have a technology bearing, so maybe something's happening here.

When Governor White was elected, he set out to address diversification. He wanted to get more research going on in the universities, and do everything that he could to support the economy with technology. But we didn't achieve these goals by cutting taxes. We went forward, we moved forward.

Raised money, make the commitment, but for the University of Texas and the ability to bring these people from both sides of the line, Democrats and Republicans, to get them to contribute to this effort, it wouldn't have occurred. Governor White created the Science and Technology Council and we had Sally Ride on the council. It was a call to action. What they were trying to emphasize is that Texas was not just a real estate and oil state.

My surmise is that Pike Powers and the governor wanted, and were operating on the principle that Texas needed to diversify its statewide economy, and needed to get stronger in electronics. In Washington, they passed a bill in the beginning of the '80s to commercialize research that was publicly funded. And when that happened, all the research universities, UT included, started to take on that role. For the first time, universities and research institutions could actually own the intellectual property.

The first license that I could find in our archives was from our Center for Electromechanics, which is still active over at the Pickle Research Campus, and it was a technology around electromagnetic energy storage. I think the most iconic thing that happened that really put Austin on the map was of course the decision by the United States to create a consortium. It was an event that had never happened in America before. But along with that particular event, Michael Dell was over in his dorm, working on PC Limited, and Lou Lehr was upset with the taxes that he was having to pay in Minnesota, and brought 3M's R&D here.

So you had a confluence of MCC, PC Limited, and 3M's 14 divisions of R&D all coming to Austin. That really began to set the stage. The tech boom was to some people a complete mystery, but I don't think so. TI had 2,000 software developers in North Austin.

And those were the cream of the cream. If you look at the tech boom in Austin, and you scratch the management teams in almost any single one of those startups and you would find Tier in there. Austin really developed with a lot of entrepreneurial agency, but we did not really know how easy that Austin become the number one entrepreneurial city in the United States. After Semitech and MCC came to Austin, that trend actually exploded.

Bob Fabbio, an engineer that was working for IBM got frustrated, so they decided to create Tivoli. When we started Tivoli, we were this teeny little company in Austin, Texas, and we were competing against IBM and at the time AT&T and DEC and HP, and Sun, and all these gigantic computer manufactures. And Tivoli, six years after it was a startup, it was bought by IBM for about 700 million. The people that work for Tivoli have created new companies, even until now.

The high tech sector that we call the technopolis, it was not invited by everybody in Austin. The city played no role, essentially. Either time. In fact at one point, subsequent administrations wrote letters to corporations, don't consider coming to Austin, unless you check with us.

(pleasant music) I wrote the letter. I sent a letter to all the Fortune 500 companies, and the letter said, we welcome you to come to Austin, but we need you to follow our water quality rules. The Austin Tomorrow plan had just been passed a couple of years earlier, and it spoke of a growth quarter in the center portion of the city, so running down I-35. So we passed development regulations designed to make it more expensive to grow outside the growth quarter.

It didn't work. One of the biggest things that happened that reflected the tension between the council and the chamber of commerce and the business community was the 3M location. It was kept completely secret from the city council members. We heard the announcement of their location that they were coming to Austin at the same time as everyone else did.

I wanna emphasize the battles were over land use, and the location. We were not anti-technology or anti-business. I think the environmentalists learned from the business community, and vice versa. A lot of this has been sheer luck.

(gentle music) When IBM came to Austin in 1967, I said wow, that might be an interesting job to have one of these days. I was interested in maybe finding out what IBM was all about, and I went out and I signed up the application, and the next thing I knew, they were sending me a letter saying hey, you've been hired. (pleasant music) And on the assembly line is where I started. IBM made it possible for me to go ahead and complete some education, and next thing I know, I was in management.

Well I actually got hired on in December 31, 1973. IBM was diversifying, so they were looking for minorities and women, and I was fortunate enough to have gone after school, and to night school, and learn how to program a key punch that punches holes through a card, and that's where all the data was on everybody's information. Back then, we had an organization that actually went out and reached out to all the corporations here in Austin and asked if there were hiring opportunities for minorities. There was an economic development corporation, and they announced to the public through the churches and all that that there was openings at IBM.

A lot of my friends, and people that I grew up, they all got hired at IBM. During the summer when the UT students went, the economy didn't go nowhere. There were no jobs. The high tech companies had a big impact here in Austin, and it transformed it.

IBM has always been a champion for decades, and decades, and decades on diversity and inclusion. We give a lot of people opportunities that perhaps they hadn't seen before in other non-technology companies. I had interviewed with IBM several times, but the only jobs available for me at that time were secretarial, so back to school to get a PhD. I was told not to use my title of PhD, and here I was brand new, I had it, I was excited, but not to use it because it would scare the people, a woman coming in with a PhD.

There weren't very many women working in the field of science or technology, but we succeeded in finding some. I knew that if you were gonna recruit really smart guys, most of those guys, having known a bunch of 'em, were gonna be married to really smart women. (Meg laughs) And so, we set up a program through the Austin Women's Center when we proposed that we would work with them to help orient them to Austin, to introduce them to employers, and then meanwhile, Admiral Inman and his team were interested in finding just the best of the best, whether it was male or female, and in fact recruited some really, really bright women. Kay Hammer working in CAD technologies, and in fact she did the first official spin out from MCC, and so we were really proud to have that done by a woman.

Kay Hammer was a professor of medieval linguistics from Shreveport, Louisiana. She was important because she really enhanced our understanding of the incubation process. She's one of the forgotten founders, if you will, of the high tech boom in Austin, Texas. At the end of the day, you gotta have the best talent.

You can't compete it, and I have really bright people. I did have several offers when I graduated, and then when I was planning to leave TI, I was also offered positions at other schools, but I saw that UT, and UT was always top tier, but not as well regarded as it is right now, and I could see the trajectory of UT engineering especially, and I wanted to be part of that story. So we moved here in '87. The scene was tiny compared to what Austin is right now, but even then it was such an amazingly welcoming place for me and my wife, and my six month old son.

The Indian community was very small in those days. I think the entire community could fit into one ballroom, but I'm not sure it's grown quite as much as we all would like it to. But it's certainly a lot more diverse than back in the mid '80s. Yeah, all these groups have enriched the city.

The beautiful thing about these high tech companies that they had seen that they needed to change the social environment here, 'cause Austin was a segregated city. I truly believe that it's really opening the eyes of the old Austin, you know? Where we're finally integrating this city. (upbeat music) We like people being who we are, and if somebody fails or flops, we pick 'em up, dust 'em off, put 'em back in the game.

And we're a supporting, nurturing place. You go countrywide, worldwide, and you don't see that very often. (upbeat music) (gentle flute music)