Lewis Cirne (New Relic) - Life is Too Short for Bad Software

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
You are listening to the DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, brought to you weekly by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. You can find podcasts and videos of these lectures online at ecorner.stanford.edu.

**Tom Byers** (0:15)
It's my sincere pleasure to introduce Lew Cirne. And on his insistence, we're doing a Q&A today to start the seminar. And then the two of us, he's going to ask me questions.
No, I have the honor of asking him questions. And we'll do that for about half the time. And then the last half, we'll do our traditional Q&A with the audience. But hey, Lew. Welcome.

**Lew Cirne** (0:47)
Thank you.

**Tom Byers** (0:48)
You have been to several of our classes, which we greatly appreciate, but we've never done this before.

**Lew Cirne** (0:54)
Yeah. It's been an honor to have a chance to come and cover a case study that you do very well here on entrepreneurship. And I've always enjoyed it. I've been super impressed with the people and the questions that have come up in these classes.

**Tom Byers** (1:09)
Well, let's get started by just talking a little bit about how you got, not how you got here today, but how you got to this place in your life. So you went to, you grew up in Canada?

**Lew Cirne** (1:21)
Yes, now I'm in East of Toronto.

**Tom Byers** (1:23)
And where did you go to school?

**Lew Cirne** (1:24)
I went to school called Dartmouth College.

**Tom Byers** (1:26)
Yes.

**Lew Cirne** (1:27)
It's an awesome school.

**Tom Byers** (1:30)
Someone's got to do a shout out. And tell us how else, how your path led you to here.

**Lew Cirne** (1:35)
So yes, I grew up in a really small town East of Toronto. And I think I was looking for a school that also had a small town feel, so Dartmouth felt right for me.
And when I entered Dartmouth in 89 as a freshman, it was one of a very small number of schools that standardized on MAX, and everybody had email when they came in. I'm sure Stanford was probably at that stage too. But because of the ubiquity of MAX in the undergrad population, there's a pretty steady pipeline of undergrads that got recruited out to Apple. So I had an opportunity to work as an intern at Apple in the summer of 92
And then my first job at Dartmouth was working in the dining hall to help pay down the student debt. And it certainly was a much more fun job when Apple sent me back with a bunch of computers to write code for them. So I did that my senior year and then came back out here full time when I graduated in 93 So I wasn't founding a company until many years after I got to the Bay Area.

**Tom Byers** (2:40)
So 20 years ago you came this way. Did you ever think you'd be here today as CEO of New Relic and having started another company that was sold successfully? I mean, what did you think you'd be 20 years later?

**Lew Cirne** (2:54)
I mean, you have dreams, but then you also have doubts and all sorts of things. So no, I certainly, I didn't think I belonged as a student. I had serious imposter syndrome, so no, I never imagined...

**Tom Byers** (3:13)
So you saw yourself as an engineer, but then how did you all of a sudden start a company? This is Wiley and then...

**Lew Cirne** (3:21)
Yeah, so I founded a company called Wiley Technology. How did that happen for being an engineer? So I've loved building software ever since I discovered my first computer and that was in, my parents gave me a computer in 1982 It had three kilobytes of RAM. So what is that, like one one thousandth of a single MP3 song.
But I discovered what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I mean, the joy of creating software was just something I couldn't resist doing. So it was easy for me to pick a major at Dartmouth, although I also minored in Latin and classical studies and I guess that kind of is part of the story might be that I had a broad set of interests and I wasn't just, I loved the art side of creating software, not just the science side of it.
So I couldn't believe that I could get paid to do this, to write code and build software and so it was an easy yes to come out here and work for Apple.

**Tom Byers** (4:14)
That's a really significant point because we celebrate that here at Stanford. I think we use the term humanist engineer.