How the World Got Wired · Routers and the People Who Built Them

What Happened to Cisco, and What Happened to Sandy

Cisco, without its founders, grew into one of the most successful companies in history. Through the 1990s, it became the dominant maker of routers on Earth. Almost every internet service provider, every big corporation, every university, every government, bought its routers from Cisco. The company’s value rose from about $200 million in 1990 to, at one breathtaking peak in March of 2000, more than $500 billion. For a short period — a few weeks — Cisco was the single most valuable company in the world.

A great deal of that success, you could argue, came from professional management that Sandy and Len could not, or would not, have provided. The board fired Sandy in part because they thought the company needed a different kind of leadership to grow. They were not entirely wrong.

You could also argue that Sandy and Len were treated badly. That a company should not have the right to fire the people who created it. That if you build something with your own hands, in your living room, on seven-day weeks, no one should be able to take it from you with a vote of a few investors. Many people argue this too. They are not entirely wrong either.

Both things can be true. This is something to remember about the technology business. The same system that produced trillions of dollars of value, by efficiently moving money to small fast-growing companies, also produced a long line of founders who were pushed out of the things they made. The system is not all good. The system is not all bad. It is a particular set of rules that produces a particular set of winners and losers, and you should know how it works before you decide what you think of it.

Sandy Lerner, for her part, did not need anyone’s sympathy.

After Cisco, she co-founded a cosmetics company called Urban Decay, which was created in protest of the pink and beige makeup that dominated stores at the time. It made nail polish in colors with names like Roach and Bruise. It became enormously successful and was eventually sold to a larger cosmetics company for a great deal of money.

She used her wealth to buy a historic estate in England that had belonged to the family of Jane Austen, the novelist. She turned much of the land into an organic farm. She has written books about Austen. She is, by all accounts, doing exactly what she wants to do, with the money that the company she founded in 1984 in her living room continues to be worth.

Len, more quietly, has spent his post-Cisco decades funding scientific research and education.

The marriage did not last. They divorced in 1990, around the same time they left the company.

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