Emmit McHenry | Lessons from Almost Becoming A Billionaire

Srini Rao: Emmett, welcome to the unmistakable creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Emmit Mchenry: Oh, it's my pleasure. What a great name. I love it. You know,

Srini Rao: I found out about you from way of your publicist and when she told me, you know, about your background, your history, I thought to myself that you're everybody listening to this.

The reason that you're able to listen to this is because of the work that Emmett did. The reason that any of you are able to even visit a website or send an email is because of the work that Emmett did. But we'll get into all of that. Uh, but before we get into that, I wanted to start by asking where in the world were you born or raised and how did that end up impacting what you ended up doing with your life?

Emmit Mchenry: Well, born and raised are multiple locations. I was born in Forest City, Arkansas, um, in cotton country, at a time, uh, Forest City is not the city it was when I was a kid, little kid at least. Because all of the farmers would come to town on the weekend and spend a lot of money. I spent time in Kansas city, Missouri, um, lived in a place called the plaza, only black kid in the plaza and, uh, grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

And that was great. That was absolutely wonderful. Yeah.

Srini Rao: So I wonder if, you know, and the reason I started with that question in particular was because I knew about this part of your background and, you know, as a black kid growing up at the time when you did in that particular part of the country, I know this is, I've lived in Texas where you're kind of shocked that racism is still as prevalent, you know, as it was 60 years ago, in some places blatantly prevalent, because I remember, you know, sitting in the backseat of some of my, uh, Parents secures and the things I would hear come out of their mouth.

I just like were shocking to me, and I think to myself, you realize I'm a minority. Right. But the kinds of things out here, so, you know, like one I'm curious. Like what did your parents teach you about what it means to be black in America while you were growing up? What impact Did race have on the way that you were raised and grew up and, and which

Emmit Mchenry: banded up doing?

Well, that's a lot of questions. You know that right? So if I had to come back and I'm well aware. but I'll play around with it a little bit. I don't recall being taught. By my parents about being black. I remember as a little kid sitting under my grandmother's kitchen table, when she would have her girlfriends over during the midday and they'd be having coffee and hearing them talk about, you know, da da da da was, uh, hung.

And, uh, Bob's father was hung back and, uh, that's what I heard about. Um, I, um, but I also heard other stories too. I heard stories. They would tell about certain kinds of snakes and all sorts of things. And I think some of the stuff was about entertaining me, but the hanging stuff was not about entertaining.

That was, uh, that was real stuff. Um, I don't even remember exactly how I felt, but there was some numbness to that whole idea. People would hang people, humans would hang each other, just, and I'm talking about now, she had about four years, five years old. Um, maybe six in the, you know, um, no, I was already reading.

So yeah, it was a little, then the next thing, um, my godfather on life, but had a janitorial job in Kansas city, Missouri, and the area called the plaza. And the plaza was really quite the place to live in Kansas city. And as a janitor of a multi building, he had an apartment and the lower level. Of that. And so I spent a lot of time with him summers, you know, um, you don't know, but, and which meant I ended up playing with, with white kids.

I was the only black kid. Some, there weren't a lot of kids in that complex at the time. I remember I established a relationship with, uh, Hopalong Cassidy's, uh, nephew. So he had all the right guns and all that kind of toy stuff. But my godfather just treated everybody pretty much the same. He was respectful.

But he was not the kind of guy who bent and bowed and scraped and any of that stuff. And so I never, I never saw that in my family, never saw it. I, um, I remember one day I was working with my grandfather and this guy came over that he was, he was building, putting in a large concrete foundation for a Multi unit, uh, and the guy owned the property or was managing the development of the property was talking to him about Jewish people, just some negative stuff.

And he would only say, uh, uh, and when the guy left, he turned to me and said, you know, if they talk about their own that way, you know, how they talk about us, big message there. Right. That one was real clear. I got that. Um, I was a. You know, I was a kid who read everything he could read, picked up newspapers on the street.

Uh, my neighbors were reading True Romance, I read True Romance. If they were reading something in geology, if they were in high school, this is when I was a little kid, I'd read their stuff. So I was always reading things, um, and I'm, I'm, I'm pretty sure that I was protected in some ways because I was, um, I do remember my first confrontation.

I do remember water fountains that said colored only, whites only, colored. It was whites only. And then one would color, color was in red letters. White was in black letters on a white background, and it was neater than color in terms of how it was written. I remember that. I remember that. I remember, uh, getting ready to go visit a relative and I was going to take the bus alone.

And I must have had a runny nose, so I went into this little place to buy some Kleenexes. Little, small, and they didn't have them, they had a box. And I didn't, uh, want the box and a customer there said, well, little N word, right? If you, if you can't pay for the big box, then just get out. I calmly turned and walked out, got on the bus and went to where I was going.

Um, I had the memory, but I don't feel any scar from it. It was the most, it's the most aggressive tone. I recall until I got to Los Angeles as a college student and I was driving my little sports car through Beverly Hills, but that's a longer term story we can talk about later. You know, I, I, I think, um, There are a lot of things you're protected from as a kid when you are a minority or stuff.

There are stories that people didn't want to tell. Um, for example, when I lived in Tulsa, we didn't talk about the massacre a lot. That wasn't, um, the focus. And part of that was protection. Part of that was not to, um, be bound by the past. Very future oriented, very, uh, oriented towards, okay, let's see what we can do now, which wasn't always easy, but it was

Srini Rao: always there.

Well, I, you know, the reason I felt that it was so important to talk to you about race in particular, just, you know, having read your background, there's part of this plays a role because I remember reading some of the articles about this as well, and we'll get to that in a second, but, um, you know, as somebody who grew up when you did at the time that you did with relate race relations, the way that they were.

And looking at where we're at now, particularly in the United States, you know, like I'm here in Brazil and it's just this like gigantic melting pot and racism is there here. It's just not as blatant. Um, yes, but the, the thing that strikes me so much is it, it's almost like we have, you know, made all this progress up until a certain point and in like the past three and a half to four years.

We've become a country that's so divisive that it's almost like we've, you know, gone backwards 50, 60 years in terms of social progress. And I distinctly remember we had a, um, podcast host named Sean Dove, who was the founder of the campaign for Black Male Achievement, and, uh, And the thing that he said that struck me most he was said, you know, I'm paraphrasing here in the words of James Baldwin, but he said to be black in America is to live in a constant state of rage.

Um, and you seem to be kind of opposite of that, but I'm just kind of curious what you make of where we are today because Trevor Noah did this entire monologue, which we ended up putting into that episode. Um, and conveniently, you know, Sean, Sean Dove, actually, you know, we told him we wanted to use this monologue and I was like, is there anybody who could help us fund this?

And he actually just, you know. Went to Viacom, paid for it and paid for the license for us. Well, let's, let,

Emmit Mchenry: I don't want to, um,

you're bringing up things that I've not thought a lot about. I don't want to say that I was, um, I didn't feel particularly privileged, but I started, um, I started meditating very young in part because I had to deal with tough stuff and I just didn't want my mind and my person responsive to tough stuff.

I wanted to respond to stuff in my own way. Um, so, you know, I led demonstrations when I was in high school, led voter registrations, a bunch of stuff around that we can talk about later. Uh, but, um, I was aware of the environment. I just chose not to be a victim of what was going on. And when I say victim, I don't mean physical, but I mean psychologically a victim of, of, of what was going on.

You know, I had to make decisions about plowing my own way. And um,

if you're letting, when someone curses you and you respond to that emotionally or whatever. They're in control. I choose, chose to be in control of my own being, not about destiny. It's just my own being that that's, this is me. I'm not, I'm not giving you the authority or power, uh, by your look. I was driving across country as in college again, and I stopped at a Dairy Queen to get my strawberry shake, which I always like it there because they use real strawberries.

And this little kid, maybe three, four years old with. With her mother looked at me and turned to her mother and said, mommy, mommy, there's a, you know, the N word again. Right.

And I felt sad for the little girl that her family was beginning to shape her in a way that she'd have to find a way out of that prison. And I just chose not to be, have people put me in a prison. I know a lot of people who operate similarly, by the way, it wasn't just me.

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Srini Rao: optimize.

Emmit Mchenry: Yeah, well, it makes sense to you. You

Srini Rao: get it? No, it, it totally does. You know, the thing that I think has, you know, always struck me about this is like, and I've shared this story on the show before, I remember, I think it was probably a couple of weeks after, you know, Trump was elected and.

I was traveling to, uh, Montana and I, you know, I was at the beach surfing and my dad called me and he said, Hey, um, where are you? And are you going somewhere this week? And I was like, yeah, I'm going to Montana. He said, well, if anybody says anything to you on a plane, don't say anything, just ignore them.

And I'm thinking to myself, like, you know, we lived in this country for over 30 years and in 30 years, and we lived in Texas for God's sakes. And my dad never once had a conversation with me about race. But to your point, like, I remember sitting in the backseat of my friend's mom's car. Um, a kid that got stabbed at school, he was a black kid, and his mom was like, now that that N word got stabbed, you know, we can go to the country club.

And I'm thinking, you're going to the country club, and then a black waiter served us. And I'm like, wow, this is, to your point, exactly like that little girl. This friend of mine was just conditioned into that. That was his narrative. And what struck me most was that these were not sort of, you know, ass backwards country rednecks.

They were some of the wealthiest people in town. And they came from highly educated families. And I just couldn't believe that that sort of narrative was prevalent in, you know, such a, um, you know, well educated group of people.

Emmit Mchenry: Well, so let's go back to the beginning of the question that got us to this piece too, because you said, what do I think about the now?

Look, man, there's some kind of crazy virus that's gone on in our country. And that virus is built on top of poverty. Yeah, you got white folks with lots of power, lots of money. Yeah. You've got black folks with power and money and you've got Indian people with lots of money and power, but the society that we live in, in large measure is built on the back of working people.

And we develop a scheme, a schema. We talk when, when, when, when I say this to my friends, I said, look, we need to stop as black people, always talking about black people. We need to start talking about poor people. We need to be inclusive in poorness because there are more poor white folk than there are black folk in the whole country.

And we need to acknowledge them with the potential that they will understand that we're not the enemy, that we're not getting stuff that they're not getting. Because anytime any program has been developed to support blackness, everybody's benefited from it, even more so than the black folk it may have been designed to, uh, to provide something for.

So I am very sensitive to good people doing bad things, rich people doing bad things. I mean, sometimes what power does for you is simply make, gives you the right to be an ass. Yeah. No.

Srini Rao: So growing up with your parents, what was the narrative about making your way in the world and sort of, you know, thinking about careers and futures

,

because, you know, like as I've joked a hundred times on the show, like most Indian kids, it's like doctor, lawyer, engineer, or failure.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Emmit Mchenry: Um, my mother thought I was going to be a preacher or a school teacher. My father wanted me to be a doctor, a surgeon. My godfather was a business person with a vertically integrated business. Started as a janitor, bought a, took stuff that people threw away and converted to money, whether it was newspapers or metal, metal, metal.

Or old things that were broken, fix them up and reselling them. And from that, he bought a trash collection business and the trash collection business grew, he had big trucks, et cetera, and did it in two States in Missouri and Kansas. Uh, one of my delights was standing in this road with one foot in Kansas and the other foot in Missouri.

I thought that was so cool as a little kid. Um, then in his trash collection business, he had lots of restaurant and he had grown up in, in the agricultural region of Arkansas, obviously. And he knew something about pigs and feeding pigs and feeding pigs slop, which was. Leftover stuff. And so he worked a deal with some restaurants on his route.

He gave them these special containers that if they would put their foods with no, no metal in these containers, they'd get a discount. He did that after having bought some land in Kansas with a little farm and starting to raise pigs. He raised pigs, um, to a certain size, sold them off, et cetera, et cetera.

But it was a vertically integrated kind of business, right? And he ended up investing in things like. You know, uranium mining, et cetera, et cetera. But I saw that, and I, and I spent, I, that appealed to me more than any of the other things I saw in my family. My father was a fantastic mechanic, and a preacher, and a saint.

Um, and until I, yeah, maybe even later. I used to do mechanical stuff, really, that's kind of from, I love, I've always enjoyed science, you know, science was always my big thing, physics was my big thing, and engineering, you call it being a mechanic on a car, but it was kind of like engineering for me because I had to figure out what, what the problem was, which was not always so clear to me as a young kid.

I did that work with him. I think, um,

mostly they let me have my head. They exposed me to stuff, but it was all about let this kid look. So this is an example. The summer between my 8th and 9th grade year, I, I, I read, I was sitting on the porch reading, um, the biography of Albert Einstein. And as you know, in the initial volume, there's a lot of science, a lot of science.

And I really got off on that stuff. And some adults said, Emmett, why aren't you out playing? And my grandma said, he knows what he's doing. It almost brings a tear to my eye, but she defended the fact that I didn't have to play. I got enough playing in sports and stuff. Right. That whatever I was reading, she didn't know what I was reading, but it was cool.

So they gave me my own head. He go for my head, took me.

So,

Srini Rao: how in the world did your head take you to effectively being the guy who's responsible for the entire concept of dot com and apparently, you know, the ability to send email because um, I still remember the early, early days of the internet. You know, you probably are all too familiar with this because, um, you know, this was when Marc Andreessen's project was Mosaic.

And Mosaic was primarily available to academics. And my dad's a professor. And I distinctly remember, I don't know why this was, you know, any teenage boy's instinct. I've asked a hundred friends who are around my age. I was like, what was the very first thing you ever looked for on the internet? And you know, if they were telling me, if they don't say porn, I'm like, you're lying.

Cause I still remember this is like, you know, pre browser history. And, uh, you know, I, I don't know why this was my first instinct and my dad, you know, goes in back to his office. He's like, were you looking at naked pictures of Pamela Anderson on my computer? And I was like, shit, yes, I was like, that was my first instinct when I found the company.

I mean, you're like, I don't think any of us saw what this was going to become, but clearly you had some foresight into all of that. Even it sounds like, like before, uh, you know, like mosaic became,

Emmit Mchenry: that's, um. So something that needs to be clear, look, I, um, I was a science fiction guy, right? I still pretty much enjoy science fiction, except sometimes I, I'm, I've noticed if I've gotten older, I have this kind of sense that there's something else here that I'm not seeing.

There's another dimensionality or whatever. I mean, something's going on. And, uh, sometimes it bothers me. That's crazy, I know. But maybe I'm just at an age where being crazy is part of the, part of the story. Um. Well, what happened was,

uh, you know, my first job was my, not my first job. I had many jobs, but. My career job was with IBM and I was a systems engineer. I was there when we had unit record equipment and there when we, when we, we introduced the digital equipment, the, um, the 360, particularly computer. And systems engineers in those days were problem solvers.

Yep. They gave you books about all the things you could do, but quite often customers wanted things that no one had written anything about. So you had to, and the sales guys, often they were guys, mostly, sold stuff were not in the books that we could do. And so systems engineers had to go in and figure out how to make things happen, make things work good experience, great experience.

IBM was, um, was a master's degree in, uh, in computer engineering at the time. I mean, just the, and, and in finance, all sorts of things, the training they gave us was just, oh, and, but it was long hours, by the way, I might tell you, um, yeah, wow. The work, the work hours you put in, uh, in the training programs was just amazing.

And some, some of the folks who've been around that will, will recall the singing songs at seven o'clock in the morning before you started your day, finishing your day, going to dinner and then coming back for labs at night. And depending on whether you've got stuff done, you'd be in the lab to 11, 12 o'clock at night when they close things down.

Um, I, yeah, I, I, I, I went through the Marine Corps, did some stuff and then I decided not to go back to IBM and to, to become a internal consultant, uh, in an insurance company because I, like I had only gone to grad school, I knew some things about human relations and had some ideas about integrating. Uh, uh, compute technology into the workplace as a form of redesigning how people did what they did in terms of work.

Right. All that jazz. And so had a decent run at that. And then I went back to graduate school again. Got recruited to do a corporate turnaround up in Portland, Maine for a company called Unum today. It was called Union Mutual then. They had lost money for the first time, I think, about 120 years, 22 something.

And, um, they were open to new ways of thinking about, uh, productivity. That's what the term was used at the time. And so this crazy guy, I had a consulting practice when I was in grad school, cause I became an assistant dean and associate dean. And so I had all of this stuff I was doing and someone who knew what I had done at, um, Connecticut general told them about me and they invited me up.

Of course, you know, if you're at university and you're teaching and you're trying to write a dissertation and stuff, you don't have much time to breaks in your calendar. And I could only meet on a weekend on Saturday. And so I flew up on a Saturday, CEO and the executive VP both came and met with me. And we talked and seen, I wasn't looking for a job.

I just future talk, talk about the things that if I could, this is what I would, that after that being bang and they bought into it, invited me back up, had me bring my family. to Portland and made me an offer, uh, which I could not, I was excited about it because it was going to give me freedom to do some things I thought about.

So I, uh, went there, spent five years, great time, thoroughly enjoyed it. But in that process,

when you're dealing with, with, with, um, people, when you're dealing with culture, when you were trying to reshape how people see their jobs, realizing that senior manager has no cotton picking idea about what these people really do, because a lot of senior managers was recruited from other places. The CEO had come down from New York.

He's a good guy. I had never done any underwriting, never done, et cetera. When you're doing that sort of thing, you really get close to the fabric of how things really get done. And, and they get done, not necessarily the way people talk about them getting done. They get done the way the people who do them do it until they learn a new way to do things.

Right. So that was kind of a background when I was in Maine and I read, um, it was Forbes of fortune. I tend to think it was fortune magazine. Could have been a piece on AT& T and IBM, and this was the voice data universes, right? Collapsing what's going to happen here. Who's going to be the big winner. And then the New York times ran a huge piece on the same subject.

And it just clicked in my head. What they were all talking about was wrong. They were seeing separate companies going in separate directions. And I was seeing convergence that voice and data is going to run over the same infrastructure, ultimately. You don't need all of this stuff, you know, bang, bang. So I got, I was really clear about, uh, amazingly clear

and not a lot of black folk in, in May and every year, I think Labor Day weekend, we would have a party. A big thing with local Mainers and folks from New Jersey, New York, Washington, DC, huge party people would come up and we'd have a long weekend. And after I finished reading that piece, I was sitting on my porch and one of my guests showed up.

His name was Tyrone Grigsby. And he said, what are you doing? And I said, man, I got this idea. And I started spouting about the idea and he challenged me to do something about it. That challenge. Cause you know, I was making, I was making Fuku bucks. Um, but I never really worked to just to make the money. It was the other stuff that got me there.

The challenge, the, the work, the, the solution piece, the solution and network solutions. He introduced me to a couple of guys, you know, and they were special. They were special systems engineers. Uh, Gary Dessler and Ed Peters, and Gary had worked on submarines doing that work. Ed had worked at DARPA. I hadn't even saw this idea as a government thing to talk.

I was thinking about how to introduce it in the commercial marketplace, this convergence piece thing there, and they got it and we, we started a company. We started the four facility network solution. That was two black guys, two white guys. Who, um, in retrospect, I'm not sure what kind of friends we were, but we were a great part.

We worked together. We solved problems together. We spent the first, before we formed the company, we probably spent three months of me coming to Washington from Maine, developing a, um, let's, a set of principles that we could work together and live by. We didn't do policies, any of that sort of stuff.

Policies came years later. But, and on those business principles, we founded a company and then we started the hard work of, um, trying to take this, the beginning of a vision and build it into something. And it took a, took a long time. It didn't, didn't happen overnight because we had to make money to keep the doors open.

But we also remember, I talked about culture a few minutes ago. Our culture was such a collaborative culture. You know, we'd have meetings on Saturday morning. And whoever showed up would show up and we'd talk about whatever they wanted to talk about, including what we want to talk about. That led to us doing TCP IP, the protocol the internet runs on.

A professor at UCLA, unfortunately, I can't think of his name now, had done some code and one of my guys who had been in the military, in the Air Force, I think, knew something about what he had done. And so we looked at that and said, we can do this. And so 2 million lines of code later, we had an interoperability software package.

And we sold the first interoperability software called package called open link. We sold it in the U S we, so I'm rambling on, I'm sorry about that. But you had me going here thinking we sold that in Europe, probably more than in the U S and what that was all about. People don't realize that all of these devices that we have today that we use.

In 1979, 80, 81, they wouldn't have worked together. You needed a protocol that was common enough that they could all ride and have a community integrated communication. So that's what we built. That was our, that was our first big thing. Then we parallel, we were doing SecureNet for the Intel community. And we won a, um, a competition with Stanford Research Institute, General Atomics, et cetera, et cetera.

That was the first time the partners didn't fully agree because they didn't think we could, um, compete with Stanford. Stanford Research Institute was a great place. But when I was in graduate school at Northwestern, I was a research fellow and I researched team with the league actually. Dr. Gilbert Crooley, Gil Crooley in the 1960s, 70s, he was doing, working on what we now call artificial intelligence, different way of working.

It was really highly mathematical that I didn't have the tools we have now, didn't have the speeds, the computational power, et cetera, et cetera. But he was also a computer scientist and a linguist, um, winning that contract. And we won, by the way, my story to the guys was, I know these guys, they're smarter than you can imagine.

They're the kind of guys who you walk into a room and they asked you a question to see how smart you are. Um, and, but they're much, they're casual. They're not going to put in the effort, et cetera, et cetera. We're going to put in, cause we've got to work butts off. And so with the reference of DARPA work, with the reference of, uh, some of the national security stuff that our team members had done and the kind of

,

architecture we sketched out, we won.

And that's how we became. We, we control the, the global domain registration. We control it for the world, not just the U S. And one of the things that president Obama, I was so upset with when we let that piece of our history become more open and general to the, to the world that you no longer hold the root domain, but, uh, for the web, you know, things happen and things change.

It was a good, yeah, but we did lots of stuff, lots of stuff that was really fun. Relatively, we're pretty young dudes and hadn't gotten caught doing patents and all of that jazz, but we were also, remember that was a time for open that we had this whole new move towards openness that real creativity should not be hindered by someone owning a patent to something.

Uh, that we kept other people out of the dance. So we were very committed to that. Ergo, we did not make the big bucks. This ACAST podcast is sponsored by NetSuite, 36, 000, the number of businesses which have upgraded to the number one cloud financial system. NetSuite by Oracle, 25. NetSuite just turned 25.

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Srini Rao: com slash unmistakable. Yeah, we'll talk about that because I knew about that part of the story. I think that there are two things that really, um, struck me, uh, in what you shared with me. One was that just sort of moment of clarity of, you know, sort of being able to see something. But the more important thing is when your friend challenged you to go and do something about it.

I think that everybody has those moments in their life when they're called to do something. And then there are people who do, and then there are people who don't. What do you think it is that separates those two groups of people? Like, why are some people so driven to do something when they have like that moment?

And why are there people who don't and how do the people who don't become the

Emmit Mchenry: people who do? Now, you know, I want to turn the question around and say, what do you think? Cause I'm not sure. Well, because you've experienced a lot of folk. Yeah. I'm thinking

Srini Rao: about it from my own experience. You know, I, you know, and I'll share the story with you.

So like how, how the podcast started, um, I started a blog, uh, cause I needed something to do while I was trying to find a job after business school. Cause I graduated in 2009. And, you know, I started this little weekly series and about 13 interviews and, uh, the 13th guest, I emailed him and said, Hey, you know, I'm thinking about starting a multi author blog, um, and, uh, you know, I want you to be a contributor.

And he replied back and said, no, he said, you're not a very good writer, which we still joke about that to this day. He said, I think you're an average writer. But he then gave me another piece of advice and this email made it into my first book and I still to this day have that email. I really should just get a print frame, but, um, And he said, you know, here's my soapbox.

He's like, I think you should, you know, take this little interview series and spin it out into a separate site. I think an hour later, you might, I had very limited design skills, barely knew how to use WordPress. And, you know, I, you know, sent him a mockup. The site that I designed and said, you know, it was called Broadcast fm.

It had a few of our interviews, and I was this what you had in mind? When do you wanna start? And he told me to this day, he was like, he said, man, he was like, I literally had no intention of this. He said, suddenly I was in your, you know, the screeny reality distortion field. Uh, and uh, that's how it started.

And I mean, yeah, so for me, I felt like I, there was this part of me that just felt like I didn't have a choice. Where even when I went into the first job I had post-business school, I went in knowing damn well that I had one foot out the door already, and my boss knew it too. Mm-hmm. , you know, he knew that I had all this, this stuff going on the side.

He's like, this is why he hired me. Mm-hmm. , that's also why he ended up letting me go, um mm-hmm. and I had been fired from every job I ever, ever had. So I was like, this is, there's no way I'm, I'm gonna make a career out of, like, working at somebody else's company. Clearly that hasn't worked. I've tried that for 10 years.

Uh, um, but I, I think part of it is like, there's this, like in one way, a chip on your shoulder that you just. You know, you have to go do this, not just to prove to other people, part of that was for a long time. Then it was like, okay, now I need to prove to myself that I'm capable of, you know, this just, you know, the ambitious accomplishment, at least that's my take on it.

Emmit Mchenry: Well, you know, I,

I've always had multiple things going. In college, I had multiple jobs doing stuff. Um, when I went to corporate, I became, uh, what's called a intrapreneur. I was always bringing new stuff to the table to get done or new ways of doing something and could find someone who kind of bought into that idea or gave me the, whereas there were other people who look at me like I was fricking crazy, is this kid, right?

I got a lot of that. They didn't say it to me. But the look on their faces and that's what they were saying, who is this guy? So I was not afraid of doing new stuff. One of the things that, um, that happened along the way, I realized that I was fulfilling other people's legacy in the businesses that I was in.

I didn't start an IBM. I didn't start a union mutual. I didn't start, I didn't start those companies. I was fulfilling the legacy of someone else. And one day I just realized I want to have my own legacy. And it's just that it was pretty much that simple. I mean, I had an idea. I wanted to have my own legacy, make it a break it.

Um, I wasn't afraid of, uh, It not working, didn't really think about that, which you could say, that wasn't very smart. You should have considered that, but I never did. Um, the big thing was

the things I had to stop doing so I could just do that. So I had to stop doing a lot of stuff that I was interested in to do that. It took, uh, everything we had.

So my answer is. Some of us, I say us, you, me, others, we're wired that way. It's not about fear. It's about, um, the freedom to, to create, to build.

So

Srini Rao: when I was reading some of the articles on you, because like I said, it was kind of interesting given what you've done, you'd think that there would be way more search results. Ironically, it was like by the end of the second page of Google, I was like, wow, you know, cause you hadn't written a book. I was just like, okay, I think I've found everything I'm going to find on Emmett.

But, um, there are a couple of, there are two things in particular that struck me, uh, in one of the articles that I was reading, it says, I remember somebody referenced the fact that. Um, the fact that you were black actually, you know, ended up impacting your ability to raise funds. And it was actually a struggle because of that.

And then of course there's the, the billion dollar question, which I think you know where I'm, what I'm, you know, hinting at. So rather than giving it away for our listeners, I'll let you tell the billion dollar question story.

Emmit Mchenry: Well, it was difficult.

It could be any number of reasons it was difficult. I remember going to New York, making a presentation to a guy who was watching his trading. More than listening to me and someone had taken me in. I didn't do this from scratch and I just said, obviously that's not going to work. Turned around and came back home, came back to Washington.

And so my, is it that my communications isn't clear? Is there something I need to do in how I communicate? Because I didn't want to have there be, it's because you're a black dude. What I concluded was what we were doing was. It was new, new and unique, and no one had done it before. B, black guys, not all, with two white guys, who were doing stuff that was new, unique, that hadn't been done before.

And, I was the leader. Um, not easy, not, it's easy to be pleasant, but not easy to, to buy into. Um, I look at AOL, we were so blessed those guys, they made a bunch of money and they did well and they've gone from that to amazing stuff, right? I often think about making a phone call and say, Hey guys, I got this idea.

Do you like to give back? In fact, I'm working on something now that that would be a good deal. We can do something. I don't know how hard their road was, but it wasn't like our road. And when they first started, we looked at what they were doing and go, well, you know, that's not that complex. Technically. Oh, but it's not about technical complexity.

It's about being able to position yourself in the marketplace. And you don't get all the right ideas. Some of them are not. Well, while they were doing their registration stuff, we were doing monitoring all pipelines, creating networks around, uh, gas flow and stuff. Right. Taking the skills that we had developed with the.

Uh, network phase and the internet and applying that to, uh, physical objects. Um, physics is physics, right? Whether it's liquid or solid, the stuff still works the same way. You have the tools to deal with it. So now let's get to the big city. We were, uh, several companies offered to buy us. Why would we be in a position to need to buy?

We had a grant, we were doing work for the National Science Foundation and we were spending more money doing the work building out the internet than we were getting paid by them. So we wanted, we approached them to let us charge for registration, per registration. By that time we had probably about 2 million internet registers.

Uh, we had uh, commercial companies going crazy with the stuff. Uh, we were, we were doing cyber security. Talking to companies about their security on the internet and stuff that could be done trying to get, we had a bank in our office, by the way, one day they came down from New York to see what we were doing and we did demonstrations and we talked about security.

And one of the vice presidents said, well, you can't get into my, I got a unique, uh, name and stuff and you can't get into, into my mail. And so the guy at the time who was writing that piece asks, would you, will you give me permission to see if I can get into your email? He said, sure. And we continued to talk in the demonstration.

My guy said that I did, I did that. He said, how'd you do that?

I think we scared him away because we didn't get any business with, uh, with that, that I, that stuff. Um, so a lot of companies were trying to buy, several companies were trying to buy us, not a lot, several, less than a dozen, four or five.

We chose to go with SAIC. SAIC was a serious government contractor, had great relationships in government, um, Peered to us with our research, they had hired a number of assistant secretaries in various agencies. So. They had relationships that we didn't have, and it would have taken an eternity to develop unless we hired some generals and folk, and we had looked at that.

I, there's a general's name, blessed guy, Emmett Page, of all things. I tried to hire him, I took him to lunch. He had just accepted a job with another company the day before. So here I was a day behind after all the time I spent pondering it. So SAIC, why SAIC? Relationships in government. Bob Byster and I had good chemistry.

I laid out in my thinking, this business should be a separate company eventually, but you can take your company public based on what we're doing. You got the cash. And so we sold to them for a pittance. But it wasn't just cash. We really took stock in SAIC. At one point I was the second largest

,

shareholder of SAIC.

Bob Byster was one and I was second, some distance between us. I might add second largest individual shareholder. Um, we saw they had an internal trading system for their stock. We thought bringing us in that, that internal system, if they didn't go public with, we'd get a multiple of a hundred times what we've.

They paid us for the company. That was what we felt very strongly what we had was that powerful. So we sold s I c I stayed around for a while, but, um, I'm somewhat idiosyncratic and I didn't wanna put up with any,

anything that, that was less than use that term for lack of a, I have a better term, but I'll use it. Um, SS a I c took the, the model that he and I talked about. Went public with it. What was it? How many billions was it? I think if I remember it being,

Srini Rao: that's what it was. I think it was 21, 22 billions.

Emmit Mchenry: So I left a lot of money on the table,

lots of money, not just, uh, so, but I'm not, it's also my nature not to look backwards. We created another company that comes solutions international. And in six years, we were doing 282 or 86 million. But then the tech, the markets crashed for technology, tech companies, et cetera, et cetera. And Worldcom kicked us deeply, deeply ended up, uh, Worldcom, one star north for intelligent.

We ended up laying off 135 people moving from 250, 000 square feet around the country to like 35 or 45. A thousand square feet. And our people had a Rolls Royce benefit plan. So at the end of the day, it costs a lot of money. And I refuse to file bankruptcy as some of our clients had.

Philosophically, I believe I did the right thing. Prudent, um, practically it was a horrible thing. I should have filed bankruptcy, protected my cash and use it to buy other company. But I've learned. Two very important lessons with the SAIC, I in part left SAIC because

anger, I became angry about some things that were happening, no reason to do anything, you might add. The other piece was pride, I'm a former Marine and all that jazz. I was not going to, quotes, at the time I looked at bankruptcy as a failure. Failure, but it wasn't failure on our side operationally, it was on our client's side.

And I should have, should have, should have done that. The third piece is make no critical decision that you can't sleep on overnight when it comes to business.

Don't. If I had, I should have gone on vacation when I was angry. I may have come back with a different set of decision. So be it. That's the billion dollar deal, multi billion dollar deal. Yeah. And by the way, what they took public was less than we sold them. We sold them stuff that never got into the marketplace.

And we couldn't do it because the non compete. They had one guy from our shop. They had some guys from our shop that were really special. James Walker was one of those. James, I hired when he was at, um, Prairie View University, College Road, teaching math. Uh, he was an ADA expert and we wanted, we needed, going after some contracts that the DOD was using ADA at the time.

Amazing guy, sent him all over the world, training on military bases, folk on the internet and how to use it, et cetera, et cetera. Great guy. He was, uh, several people that ended up getting real stars with SAIC. But they too eventually love.

So

Srini Rao: based on, on this experience, I mean, at this stage in your life, um, how has your definition of success changed as well as, you know, your perception of the value of wealth and money? Because I've, I've interviewed billionaires on this show, uh, and you know, the, the, the the billion dollars is going to make you as happy as you think it will.

I think that was Jim McKelvey, who was a co founder of, uh, Square with Jack Dorsey. He was like, yeah, he's like, I'm a billionaire. He said, but you know, he was like, you know, I still drive, you know, I still have the shitty plane. I live in a two bedroom apartment like every time we hear that story, I think that every single person is like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that sounds that's great.

But that, you know, it's easy for you to say that. Um, so I'm curious, you know, how has your perspective and all that changed, particularly as somebody who effectively like, you know, it sounds like damn near a billion dollars on the table.

Emmit Mchenry: Um, hi. Never taken a job, never started with focus on how much money I'm going to make.

Just not saying that smart, just me never did that. Um, I am not a backward thinker. That is, I don't get emotionally locked into what happened yesterday. My head's. Leads towards the future. I try to learn from things that happen. I'm trying to learn in real time. These things were when the message that I should have learned this, I want to learn now, I'm not going to put learning that off, uh, for a month or a year or something.

My, you know, along the way, I've had decent amount of money and I've had lost basically all of my money and made it again and et cetera, that doesn't define me. What defines me is the kind of relationships I am blessed to be able to develop, the kinds of people I am blessed to be able to work with, and that now and then I have an idea.

I really get off on ideas. Some of the ideas, most, many of them just never see the light. You know, it's like thought experiments, you know, you go inside you, you know, that was one of the things I, as a, as a kid, I got from Einstein's way, that whole thing with thought experiments. You've been You don't have to, once you understand the fundamental principles, you know, and you can do them, you don't have to do it necessarily.

You got to prove it, do it by proving it, but you can get the confidence of it. And so as I ramble on, I have no regrets about those things. And I have a sense that my best stuff may yet be to come. I don't know. Why not? I read an article thousand years ago about. A group of 70 year olds who had individually had made their fortunes after 70 in a world where most people are making their fortunes before 30.

At least that's what we read about, right? Those people are still, people are still making fortunes after, after 70.

Srini Rao: That reminds me of, uh, I don't know if you were familiar with Paul Gerd, he wrote a book called late bloomers, uh, which was all about this and he's been on our podcast. That's probably one of my favorite books I've ever read.

Emmit Mchenry: Keeps you going. Well, but I, you know, you go because you have a passion for stuff, but passion is what drives you.

I had, um, this fellow we talked about, I just mentioned James Walker before and James and his, we had a 30th anniversary of Network Solutions here in DC. A lot of folks came and James came in earlier, Brian, and we were talking about AI. And running through all of that stuff, right? We were just really, we spent an afternoon and an evening prior to the event, just going with ideas.

It was, it was one for me. I mean, I got off on, I, I was fascinated. People learn differently. And, um, James song was saying that he always had, um, attention deficit. It always got in the way. When he was a little kid, people would, you know, and one day at some point he decided. Ever my brain wants to attend to, I'm going to learn everything I can learn about it.

Sounds so kind of obvious, isn't it? If I'm, that's, what's getting my attention, let me learn about it. Brilliant dude. Brilliant dude. Knows a lot of stuff because his mind is just around, you know, as he says. Um, and in doing that, I think he's mastered elements of his attention deficit because it's not a deficit for him.

It's an adventure in learning. I can really, you know, things meeting folks who have these kinds of that kind of unique experiences, whether it's in China or wherever I am at the time, I really tend to enjoy that, which makes for, uh, for me a joyful life.

Let me think. Well, I have

Srini Rao: one last question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews. The unmistakable, unmistakable. What do you think it is? That makes somebody or something unmistakable.

Emmit Mchenry: Unmistakable is unmistakable in the doing or in the eye of the beholder. Um, you know, there are brilliant people who walk by and nobody notices them.

Uh, and yet somebody walks by and really sees it, gets it. I have not thought on the side of the question you've asked, what is it about them? Um, I mean, I could ramble, you know, my brain will, goes to stuff, but it's not holistic. I have a, I've gone through, I'm having, at the moment, a very brilliant friend of mine has dementia.

And I'm brought to, how did, when did I first recognize his... Can the unbrilliant recognize brilliance? Um, but I recognize that he knew stuff I didn't know. And that got my attention and he knew it, uh, at a deep level. And I watched that decay, not having language to talk about it at the time, what was going on with him.

Until finally, one day he said to me, you know, I used to be smart. And then I had to start. That had meaning for me. So I had to go back trace and say, yeah, I mean, the last song you wrote, that piece you wrote for me, I thought it was either genius or it was horrible. This is my internal dialogue, but because it was brilliant, I was predisposed to make it something that I found interesting.

I think often it's a unique way of presenting. It's a new presenting ideas, presenting self. Um.

I have in my mind, as we talk about unmistakable, I can see the way certain people walk and how they take that walk and how that walk represents their personality and it can come out unaccompanied. Because it's unique or the way people dress in a certain way, it doesn't matter what is high style or low style, it can make a statement.

Unfortunately today, I get very few statements from some dress, but that's probably a function of me. I don't have the answer to that. But ultimately it's in the, it's in the beholder, because I'm sure people see me walk around and think I'm a, whatever. They're, they're as right as someone who thinks I'm something else.

Well, what do you think?

Srini Rao: It's funny because I've asked that question to probably seven, 800 people at this point in my life. And, you know, I even wrote a book called Unmistakable, you know, and of course, when you write the book, you have to define what it means. And to me, it was always something that is so distinctive.

That, you know, is immediately recognized as something that you did. It's what you know, nobody else could do in the way that you do it. Um, and yet, you know, every time I asked that question, the answers are different. And which I think is very telling, like that there is no one answer.

Emmit Mchenry: And it's also, yeah, I was, you know, I mentioned this week, we were, we were together, this talk, I asked you whether you like jazz music and we talked about music and I...

You told me about your adventures in music and I was just beginning to tell you something about mine. The reason I'd asked that question, I was listening to Evident. It's a Thelonious Muck group with John Coltrane. You hear that, you hear them play. And if you have any musical sensitivity, that's brilliant.

Nobody can do it quite that way. No one could do what Coltrane did the way Coltrane did it. I've heard people play Coltrane. But they're not Coltrane. I've heard people try to play Monk and I say, try to play Monk. They're not Monk. That's so now we get to root stuff, right? We get to root. Um, yeah, there are things that are evident.

Unique that maybe even the average person knows it's unique. Um, never played the piano, may not know how difficult that is. Never played a sax, how difficult that is, but they know things stands out. Uh, I had a buddy, um, who's no longer with us. Tall, gray beard, wore Yakamoto clothing. A black guy in Yakamoto, tall, gray beard, stood out.

You'd have to notice him, right? At least I think that, but that's how I see. I don't know how other people would do that. So I'm still putting it on the hot. Yeah. You are unique to yourself, but when it comes to judgments, you're making the judge, you're just being other people are giving language to it. It appears to me.

Srini Rao: Well, um, this has been incredible. Uh, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story, your, your wisdom and your insight with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you and your work and everything that you're up to?

Emmit Mchenry: Right now I'm really focused on, on cybersecurity and in communication security in particular, working with some folks in those domains, I think, um, I am.

Communication security in this ubiquitous, uh, world of technology and sensors is more important than most of us recognize. So I think this is the big play play. So there may be our website at Cycurian. com. They have some stuff about that, which will let you know some of the things I'm thinking about. in the process of working with a group to do a movie.

It's about a husband and wife who happened to be black, who he was a systems engineer. She was a genius software engineer and they developed stuff that we see today that the jet plane that shot down the, uh, the spy code spy below those systems, those control systems on that plane was their software.

It's behind all of that. Really brilliant. Brilliant. There's going to be a story about a couple. Their lives as a couple, their lives is creating a company, raising a family, the challenges they went through and the genius they produced. So I'm really excited about that. And we're just in the early stages of getting directors and screenwriters, et cetera, around that.

So a lot of exciting

Srini Rao: stuff is happening. Amazing. Well, thank you again for, um, you know, taking the time to join us and share your story with us and for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.

Emmit Mchenry: This ACAS podcast is sponsored by NetSuite, 36, 000, the number of businesses which have upgraded to the number one cloud financial system, NetSuite. By Oracle. 25. NetSuite just turned 25. That's 25 years of helping businesses streamline their finances and reduce costs. One. Because your unique business deserves a customized solution.

And that's NetSuite. Learn more when you download NetSuite's popular Key Performance Indicators Checklist. Absolutely free. At netsuite. com slash optimize. That's netsuite. com slash optimize.