Reflections on Father’s Day, How I Got to the GSB And a Few Things I’ve Learned Along the Way…

Bruce Golden

This is my first Father’s Day I will be celebrating without my father. I lost my Dad in early January. He was 92 and had been diminished by declining health issues for some time. I think of him often, especially on occasions he would have relished, like sharing a meal with family. My Dad was a loving, affectionate father and a respectful and appreciative spouse to my Mother. Dad owned and managed a small neighborhood hardware store on the near north side of Chicago, near Wrigley Field, for over 42 years. My two brothers and I all grew up working alongside Dad in that store, which was open 7 days a week. The work was physically demanding (unloading truckloads of concrete mix or 5 gallon buckets of paint) but priceless in terms of teaching the value of a strong work ethic and earning customer loyalty through good service. As a business, it was a modest affair, but sufficient to help get my brothers and me through college.

My Mom just turned 92 and is living in a retirement community in Evanston (the suburb just north of Chicago). My parents would have recently celebrated their 71st wedding anniversary had he lived. It’s a bewildering time for my brothers and me to navigate how best to support our Mom in a time of COVID-19. She’s unable to visit with friends and neighbors and of course none of us can visit her now. For Mom to lose her life partner right now feels especially difficult.

In thinking about what to write about, what became clear was that I was struggling with the questions of what really matters now and what can I do with the time I have left.

As I grieve for my father and worry about my mother, thoughts of family become very circular for me. I keep thinking about my parents and grandparents and my own children and what their own children may encounter (if hopefully they decide to have children). My family history is like many others who descended from Eastern European Jews. My maternal grandparents lived in a small town or shtetl in Lithuania. They were among the fortunate few who emigrated to the USA prior to WWII. Those in their family who remained were all murdered. My paternal grandparents emigrated from Ukraine, fleeing Russian pogroms, and initially went to Saskatchewan as homesteaders. My father, the youngest of eight children, was the only sibling born in the USA, as my grandparents eventually relocated to Chicago. My maternal grandparents lived with us in Chicago and my paternal grandparents were only a few blocks away. These were stubborn, resilient people, who viscerally understood the value of raising their families in relative safety. They had witnessed first-hand how fragile their standing in the world was, and they were animated by a kind of urgency for their children and most especially for their grandchildren to achieve a level of professional and financial status that would afford them some level of protection in the future.

Needless to say, my grandparents and parents were deeply affected by the great depression. Neither of my parents was able to attend college, although both would have been quite capable of succeeding anywhere. My mother in particular was a brilliant woman who loved literature and art. For my parents, it was a given that my brothers and I would all attend college, no matter the cost or sacrifice. For my parents and grandparents, this was not just about financial success, it was about legacy and survival. The sheer notion of future generations of their family not just existing, but leading distinguished careers, multiplying and enjoying happy lives, was a not so subtle way of giving the finger to the forces that tried to literally and figuratively snuff them out.

My parents’ fondest dream was that their three sons would all go off to college and then return to Chicago to raise their respective families near them. Yet in what became a bittersweet, if not cruel twist of fate, their strong encouragement and support for us to go far and wide for college and then on to graduate school, took us all on different paths that would cause us to settle ourselves in different parts of the country, far from my parents.

Which brings me to the first step in the road to the GSB. As a Chicago public school kid with no college guidance department, fate intervened, and somehow I was accepted at Columbia University. Importantly, I was offered a big enough financial aid package that it was possible for me to attend. I had never visited Columbia or New York City prior to arriving for freshman orientation in September of 1977. I credit Columbia for actually teaching me how to think, to read critically, to take pleasure in great books, and to develop a voice. Like many transplants to New York, I had a love/hate relationship with the city. At its best, there was simply no place I’d rather be. The energy and experiences were electrifying. At its worst, for me, it felt overwhelming and oppressive, and unrelentingly intense.

After graduating from Columbia, I was offered the role of admissions officer at Columbia to focus on the Midwest. As a native Chicagoan, I was theoretically well positioned to ply the elite high schools of Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis (needless to say, I never visited a high school that looked like my own). Looking back, my two years in the admissions office was a valuable first glimpse for me into the world of elite private schools, wealth, and privilege. Access to these institutions was rarefied back then, and it’s only gotten worse. My timing in that office was especially fortunate in that during my second year (now as Assistant Director of Admissions), Columbia College, an all-male institution since 1754, went co-ed. It is no exaggeration to say that reading the applications from that very first class of women, was exhilarating. Applications more than doubled that year, the overall quality of the applicant pool improved considerably, and the women candidates were in general much stronger than the men.

I knew the admissions office was just a place holder for me as I figured out my career. But now my lens on life had broadened considerably. I had friends with professional parents, with careers in law, medicine, and finance. Their lives and expectations were very different than what I had grown up with. Given my not inconsiderable college debt, and my growing comfort with NYC, and being in an important relationship at the time, all roads seemed to lead me to law school. The path of least resistance was to remain at Columbia for law school with the goal of eventually joining a firm in New York.

The only problem with that plan was that I didn’t know any happy lawyers, and in my heart, I didn’t think I wanted to be a practicing lawyer. This came to a nerve wracking head after I spent weeks studying for the LSAT. I did well (I had learned how to take standardized tests by that point) and was now beginning to work on applications. It all just felt wrong to me. My boss at the time, the Dean of College Admissions, suggested I consider business school. He and other mentors told me that business school would prepare me for many more options than law school.

Motivated by the terror of either remaining in the admissions office or even worse, heading back to Chicago to work in the family hardware store, I got to work on business school applications and the GMAT. I had an advantage in writing my application in that my day job was literally readying thousands of applications. My first sentence in my GSB application essay was, “My mother didn’t want me to be an admissions officer. She knew it was a rough business.”

This time, I was not going to attend a school without visiting, so in the spring of 1983, I flew to California for the first time, rented a car, and drove to Stanford. Do you all remember the first time you saw Stanford? For me, driving up Palm Drive, on a sunny day with piercing blue skies, the palm trees standing at attention as you drove past them, was a revelation. As a friend said to me later about northern California, “Has this place always been here?” I sat in on a few classes at the GSB. The dress code was shorts and sandals and everyone seemed decidedly chill. By comparison, I was anxious, over-dressed, and felt decidedly out of place.

But for a Jewish kid from the streets of Chicago, coming off of six years in New York City, landing at this mecca of bucolic splendor felt like winning the lottery. And it turned out it was.

The act of applying to graduate schools outside of New York effectively ended my relationship with my long-standing college girlfriend, who was a New Yorker through and through. I arrived to the GSB that fall knowing no one. I didn’t own a car and commuted from my apartment in Palo Alto to Stanford on a used bike I bought shortly after arriving (eventually adding fenders when I discovered that the back of my pants and jacket would get splattered with mud once it started raining). I look back treasuring that time period. There was a fantastic alchemy of friendships, interesting coursework, discussions, socializing, and the potential of whatever might come next.

I’m not sure how you, my fellow GSBers, feel about how well you choreographed your own careers and personal lives, but I would characterize my path as trying to do the best I could with whatever was offered at the time. I only had one job offer when we graduated, which was to work for the relatively small early stage company Sun Microsystems. In one of many twists of fate where divine intervention seemed to help me fill an inside straight, I had landed a summer job between first and second years at Lucasfilm. I loved film. I loved computer graphics, but literally knew nothing about it. I had no technical degree and had limited to no computer science skills. Yet, in a stroke of luck, I talked my way into working at the computer division at Lucasfilm. My job was to try to hawk some of the technology that George Lucas had been developing to facilitate special effects for the Star Wars films, to other companies. George did not feel these tools were proprietary to Lucasfilm and he had invested massively to develop them and wanted to recoup some of his investment. As a “summer intern,” I was given an office with a DEC mini-computer in one part of the room and a shiny new Sun 2 workstation, recently off the manufacturing line, sitting on my desk. With careful tutelage from some patient engineers, including the unspoken but understood question on their lips of “how the heck did this idiot get hired?”, I learned enough to give demonstrations on the Sun workstation. That brought me to the attention of execs at Sun, who were desperate to find “real world solutions” running on Sun to drive sales. They mistakenly thought I was competent, kept tabs on me through second year of the GSB; and unbeknownst to them, Sun was my one job offer.

So in the school of “better to be lucky than smart,” I became an early employee at one of the great tech success stories of that generation. I was a little boat in a rapidly rising tide, and in my eight years at Sun, I was offered seven different roles and eventually managed a sizable part of the marketing organization (I can feel Lynn Phillips shaking his head). One of those roles took me to Asia for three years.

At this point I need to include the moment in time when my life was unalterably changed. If ever there was an event which was kismet, or as is expressed better in the Yiddish word “bashert,” (which means destiny, usually about one’s spouse or beloved), it was Thanksgiving dinner 1984. I shared a rental house in Woodside with David Edelson, John Pasquesi, Kat Taylor, and Susie Burris. It was a great home for parties and entertaining and that Thanksgiving we invited a big gathering to come over for dinner. There were approximately fifty people that night sitting at a number of tables. Kat’s family was local so they were there, and we had several of Kat’s friends from the law school in addition to a number from the business school. I sat at a table at the far end of the living room next to Amy Beringer. There was an empty seat to my left. While I was speaking to Amy, a friend of Kat, who I had not met, came to our table and asked if she could sit with us. We encouraged her to join us and she sat next to me. Her name was Michelle Mercer. There was no thunderbolt per se, but I was keenly drawn to this woman and spent much of the evening trying to get her attention. Michelle thought I was romantically involved with Amy, and she was not giving me the time of day. I asked a mutual friend for her phone number and called her the next day to ask her out for that night (Friday night). After reminding her that I was the guy she sat next to the day before at dinner, and assuring her I was not involved with Amy, I suggested we go out for drinks that night. She told me she could not go out that night (cue sounds of my heart ripping) but then said that she could meet me on Saturday night. We’ve been together ever since and Thanksgiving is the official favorite family holiday of the Mercer-Golden clan.

Now back to Asia. In early 1988, the head of international sales at Sun asked me to help open the Sun Asia subsidiary, which would be based in Hong Kong. It would cover all countries in Asia except Japan, which had its own subsidiary. I was living with Michelle at the time and asked her if she would be open to moving to Asia. Without hesitation, she said “When do we go?” We were married in October of 1988 and had our first child, Zoe, at Matilda Hospital in Hong Kong, in January of 1990. Michelle and I share a love of travel and while Zoe was an infant and breast-feeding, we took many trips together all over Asia. It was a wonderful beginning to our marriage and to being parents. This period in time was formative both professionally and personally, as we had to create community for ourselves, and as we knew no one at first in Hong Kong. We were very far from family and friends. After three years, I was offered the opportunity to move to Japan or to London; however, Michelle really wanted to return to the Bay Area for her own work. We both were also beginning to tire of being expats.

We returned to San Francisco, and in November 1992 our second child Benjy was born. I was now in a senior marketing role at Sun and went to Scott McNealy to ask him if I could take a paternity leave. I wanted to spend two to three months with my son, Zoe, and Michelle, as I had spent the prior few years literally living on airplanes. Scott initially asked me what a “paternity leave” was. Believe it or not, I was told this was the first time in the company’s history that anyone had asked for a paternity leave. I patiently explained that this was like a maternity leave except where the father wants to be home with the family. Scott did not have children at the time and was surprised and irritated by the ask. In very clear terms he told me that taking a paternity leave was “a career limiting move.” Don’t go there.

I was not a direct report to Scott (who was CEO). I reported to the CMO, so was one level away from Scott, but I had a relationship with him as I had been there for many years. After conferring with my boss, who was more sympathetic to my request but also aware of how ill-advised it would be to cross Scott, he told me to do whatever I felt was right. So I took an unpaid leave of absence, with no guarantee of a job upon my return. I ended up taking off six months with the family and never returned to Sun.

Being on leave from Sun was very clarifying for me, and I decided to find a role where I was more of a principal decision maker. This led me to a very early stage start-up, where I became one of the founding execs and head of marketing. This new start-up (Illustra, a pioneering database company) had a luminary founder who was one of the fathers of the relational database. He was a quirky academic but a brilliant visionary. Like so many tech companies, Illustra was long on vision but short on tangible, easy to use solutions that solved important real-world problems. My job was to help define what opportunities we focused on, whom we could sell to, and how to build a repeatable sales model (and in doing so try to create a distinct category for our class of database). As part of the experience this time, however, I was speaking regularly with the investors who backed this company. For the first time, I was engaged with partners at venture capital firms. These relationships would prove to be pivotal in the next evolution of my career.

Illustra was able to parlay its bleeding edge technology and “illustrious” founder into a larger than life image. We were no threat to any of the incumbent database companies (Oracle, Sybase, Informix, IBM, and many others), but we became the focus for some of them as the next-gen database platform (i.e., “the database for cyberspace”). And in early 1996 Informix made an offer to acquire the company for what at the time was a crazy valuation in an all-stock transaction. I was going to have my first big payday! It was through this journey that I learned another very painful lesson, that if you are going to be acquired by someone, you better know as much about them as they know about you. A few months after the acquisition, we all learned that Informix had been inflating its financial numbers and had to restate three years of financial statements. The stock price plummeted and almost all of the equity value I and my colleagues from Illustra had received instantly vaporized. To add insult to injury, a number of the Illustra team had leveraged their equity position to buy homes and many had exercised their stock options but not sold the stock. Not only did they no longer have value in their equity, they had to pay taxes on the paper gains they received, and cover margin calls on the collateral they had used to apply for mortgages on their homes. Some people lost their homes in the process, and many spent years working out payment deals on their taxes. The CEO of Informix went to jail (one of the only white collar prison sentences I’ve ever witnessed). I came away bruised and deflated by the experience, questioning my own naiveté as to why we didn’t investigate the buyer more, but also grateful that I was at least financially solvent. My family and I would be okay. In fact, for a while leading up to the acquisition, we rented a room in our house (at this point we were living in Berkeley) to a graduate student to help make ends meet.

I started to think about how best to exit Informix. It was at this point that one of the partners at Accel reached out to me. Accel had been an investor in Illustra and I had built a relationship with one of the founding partners there who was on the Illustra board. I was offered the opportunity to be an EIR or “Entrepreneur-in-Residence,” with the hope that I would start another company in which Accel would invest. I accepted and joined the firm in September of 1997.

I didn’t know much about the world of venture capital. I really only knew the operating side of tech companies, but not the mechanics of investing in them. Sitting in on partners’ discussions was truly eye opening. Part of my time was spent trying to come up with my own ideas to start a business and the rest of the time I was tasked with evaluating new investments the firm was considering. In all candor, none of my personal ideas at the time were very good. Several months into my tenure at Accel, the managing partners said to me, “We don’t think you are getting anywhere with your own start-up, but we value your expertise and analytical skills in evaluating companies. Why don’t you join us an investing partner?”

What should have been a no-brainer, where do I sign right now kind of moment, was actually not that straightforward. I had dreamed about being a CEO for some time and had been approached for CEO roles, and this would mean giving up that opportunity. Prior to and during this time period, Michelle and I had gone into couples counseling as one of the biggest issues in our marriage was how much parenting disproportionately fell on Michelle, given how all-consuming my jobs had been. I travelled a great deal. I worked all the time. When I was home I was not always really present for the family. And this issue had been building for some time. So when the discussion came up about whether I should pursue a CEO role, Michelle was clear that she was not supportive. She knew that I would likely be consumed by this role and that it could last for many years. And I knew she was right in her observations. I didn’t really know how to do that kind of job without being consumed by it, which would inevitably mean the family and our marriage would suffer. So after some reflection, I seized the chance to move to the investing side of the tech world as a welcome fork in the road.

If you are still awake after reading my ramblings to this point, let me fast forward over the next twenty-three years. Not much happened. There was the first internet bubble and collapse. Then a financial crisis. Meanwhile, everything went mobile. Then everything started moving to the cloud (and is still moving to the cloud). Tech investing seemingly touches every aspect of industry and people’s lives. Start-ups began emerging all over the world. Michelle and I with kids in tow, moved to London from 2002 to 2013, where I accepted a role to help create Accel Europe and invest in start-ups all across Europe and parts of the Middle East. Venture Capital became a much larger asset class and far more global.

I am now 61 and am winding down my career. About six years ago I joined the board of Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Our family has always loved theatre and this was a way to repay my appreciation for Berkeley Rep as an important platform for new voices in American theatre. As a VC, I still sit on five boards. I’ve been the lead investor in 34 companies. I made a lot of stupid investments and a few good ones. But in the world of venture capital, a few good ones more than cover the losses. It’s been a good career where I’ve had the chance to work with many talented, driven, capable people. The financial rewards have been far greater than I ever expected or frankly think are deserved. It is not lost on me that people like my father had to work seven days per week for almost their entire lives, to create a modest standard of living for his family, while my “labor” is rewarded exponentially differently. And obviously, if you have a pulse, it is impossible to ignore the obscene level of inequality in our country. We are now in a nation-wide if not international moment of reckoning regarding systemic racism. And we are on the cusp of destroying the planet by ignoring the threat of climate change.

Perhaps with age comes some measure of wisdom and growing self-awareness. Over the past several years, it has been impossible to ignore all the people who are not at the tables I often sit at. There are far too few women, and almost no Black or Latinx members on boards or in the executive suites of the tech world. When I think about who has power in this country, and in particular political power, it is primarily wealthy white people and corporations.

So for this current chapter of our lives, Michelle and I have been working on electing progressive women to office across the country. We have been investing in platform-building and infrastructure to identify, recruit, train, and support women running for office at all levels, but especially for Congress and the Senate. We are particularly investing in entities and specific races to support women of color. My hope is that we see Congress get to 50% women by the end of our lifetimes. We believe by building a more reflective democracy of political power, that policy changes will take place for parental leave, child care, protecting women’s reproductive health and choices, and leveling wage gaps. It’s also time to start addressing the insane wealth inequality via more progressive tax policy and estate taxes (if not outright wealth taxes).

I regret not paying more attention in my career as to who was participating in the wealth and career progression in the tech landscape vs. who was not really invited to play. In looking back, it was clueless and irresponsible then, but to ignore the status quo today would simply be shameless.

I hope that one day, if I am fortunate enough to have grandchildren (Zoe and Benjy if you are reading this, honestly, there’s no pressure, but remember that I’m not getting any younger), I do want to be able to look at them and say I tried to leave this planet a little bit better and safer for you. My parents desperately wanted to see their children and their children’s children, be healthy and thrive. On this Father’s Day, I’ll raise a glass in my Dad’s honor and promise him that I won’t squander all the lessons I learned from him.