A Veteran of the Fast Track Following Her Own Path

Ballplayers and starlets are given to writing their memoirs at an early age. You know the phenomenon: Rookie catches 14 passes, writes an autobiography wondering why he and the quarterback even need those nine other guys on the field; actress stars in a hot sitcom, publishes a book in time for Christmas co-written by her nutritionist.

Business executives are different. They usually wait until retirement to tote up their achievements and settle scores in print and on the lecture circuit.

Judy Estrin is even more different. One evening not long ago, she could be found at a Silicon Valley auditorium delivering for a capacity crowd an address her sponsors at the Computer History Museum called “My Life in Technology, So Far.” In it she described how she founded three high-tech companies, served as a top executive of one Fortune 500 corporation and was appointed to the boards of three others -- all while navigating what is essentially a man’s world and functioning as a wife and mother. In other words, she has the resume of an executive about to be presented a golden handshake. But she’s 48, which in traditional business terms is the equivalent of the rookie ballplayer’s age at his high school graduation.

“I’ve spent my whole career being young at what I do,” she reflected at the outset of her lecture, which took the form of an extended Socratic dialogue with the veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur Yogen Dalal, an old friend. “Suddenly I was giving a talk at the Computer History Museum, and suddenly I felt very old.”

Estrin is one of those people who has occupied an absolutely central role in her field without becoming a household name -- at least outside high tech. But the record she has assembled with her husband and business partner, Bill Carrico, justifies ranking her as one of the most successful woman entrepreneurs in the country. (Fortune magazine has named her three times to its list of the 50 most powerful women in American business.)

Estrin and Carrico raised money for their first company, Bridge Communications, in 1981, when she was 26 and the venture finance community as we know it today scarcely existed. They are currently running their third start-up, Packet Design, which develops Internet technologies and spins them off into separate ventures. Thus far, three offspring have been sent into the world, including Vernier Networks, a maker of network security systems.

Over that time span, Estrin has raised money from venture capitalists as well as the public markets; run start-ups in which many of the decisions she made were absolutely crucial; and served a large corporation where her own vision was just one ingredient in the huge caldron from which company policy emerged.

Then there was the turbulence of the high-tech economy. Amid the swelling of the Silicon Valley bubble, she recounted, raising money “got a lot easier.... It took six months, then six hours, then six minutes.” As a consequence, however, people forgot how demanding the entrepreneurial process could be. “In the bubble, everyone thought start-ups were easy,” she told me in her office the morning after her lecture. “But building a company has to be done a brick at a time. There’s no way to not have a start-up be an intense experience.”

Estrin came to high tech with the closest thing to a blue-blooded pedigree in computer science. Her parents, Gerald and Thelma Estrin, were professors in the field at UCLA, where her sister Deborah now holds down the same position. She jokes about attending her first computer science lecture at the age of 8; it was delivered by her father, and when the lights went down she promptly fell asleep.

Her family background gave her the confidence to thrive in what was then, and largely is still, a male environment. “I grew up not questioning if I would, but assuming I would,” she told her lecture audience.

Still, being a female engineering student set her apart. She recalls the social environment at Stanford, where she earned her master’s degree in 1976 after graduating from UCLA, as “initially very hard,” in part because of her being one of only three female electrical engineering students in the program among “a group of men, some of whom were still boys.”

But she is careful not to make the experience seem more difficult than it was. “At various events you’ll hear women exchanging horror stories” about making their way in the Silicon Valley corporate culture, she says. “I don’t have a lot of those.” (One reason may be that in most cases, she was a boss.)

The same is true of balancing family and work. Estrin points out to aspiring female entrepreneurs that she established her career before starting a family, which is not possible for everyone. She manages the two worlds partially by having plenty of help at work and in the home, and partially by sacrificing almost anything that doesn’t fall into either category.

“We don’t go places or socialize,” she says. “We don’t have time for it.”

When her son was born 12 years ago, her company was facing yet another implacable deadline. “I had my son and was back at work three weeks later,” she says. “Start-ups are not for everyone.”

That she had to establish credibility early in her career arose less from her gender than her age.

In 1981, when she and Carrico were first raising venture capital, the main doubt she heard from backers was that she didn’t have enough experience under her belt. This was in the days before the only question asked about some entrepreneurs was which they would reach first: millionairedom or puberty. Any financier confronted with a 26-year-old was justified in wondering whether she was up to the demands of launching a company.

Bridge, which marketed systems for local area networks, was eventually merged into networking company 3Com Corp. A few years later, Estrin and Carrico started Precept Software to develop network systems for streaming video and other multicasting functions on the Internet. When they sold Precept to Cisco Systems Inc. in 1998, Estrin became the giant’s chief technology officer.

She found being a cog in a huge corporate machine, even if a well-positioned one, unsatisfying. “It was very frustrating to go to customers and have a vision and not be able to make that vision happen.” What was worse, Cisco was riding the dot-com boom, and Estrin’s attempts to make the company more efficient, as she put it, fell on deaf ears. “I was a little out of sync,” she recalls.

After she departed Cisco in 2000, she and Carrico launched Packet Design. But the high-tech crash has left the venture capital market tighter than it was even pre-bubble. Burned by profound losses in companies once viewed as sure things, venture firms are too gun-shy to take risks they would once have considered reasonable. “They want to see billion-dollar markets,” Estrin says.

Yet start-ups traditionally serve niches, not established markets. Any start-up that can’t raise money until its market is well under sail will be too late to make money. “Start-ups exist because big companies don’t deal with niches,” Estrin notes.

Estrin thinks that the venture community has turned so timid because it has not reoriented itself to the reality that the bubble was the anomaly -- not the slow-growth environment that bookended it.

“In general, there’s still a lot of denial out there,” she says. “People think any minute we’ll wake up from the nightmare. Those who know history are

the ones viewed as so pessimistic.”

On the other hand, like most entrepreneurs who worked in the valley before the boom, Estrin doesn’t fear that the ensuing crash has wiped out innovation; it has merely suppressed the understanding that innovation takes time to move from the research lab into the marketplace. Sooner or later, that mind-set has to return.

“The bubble wasn’t about innovation, but about getting rich,” Estrin says. “It wasn’t about building companies. We’ve lost that feeling of what the entrepreneurial process is all about.”

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Golden State appears every Monday and Thursday. Michael Hiltzik can be reached at golden.state@latimes.com.