FEMALE SPEAKER: Hell, everyone. It's my pleasure to introduce
Pat Gelsinger, our speaker today. Pat started his career at Intel. He was recruited to be a
technician in the beginning. And then as he was
working full time, he got his bachelor's degree
in double E at Santa Clara. And then he went on to
get his master's degree in double E and computer
science at Stanford. At age 31 he was the youngest
vice president at Intel, and then he became the
first CTO at Intel. In 2010 he was recruited by
EMC in Boston to be the COO. And then in 2012 he was the
CEO of VMware in the Bay Area. Pat and his wife Linda
have four children. And today, he is going
to speak about his book, "The Juggling Act,
Bringing Balance to Your Faith,
Family, and Work." Please welcome Pat Gelsinger. [APPLAUSE] PAT GELSINGER:
Thank you, Petula. Great to be here with you today. I'll cover a little
bit about my story. As we go along, we'll
dig into this subject of juggling a little bit. I didn't try to embarrass
myself with the juggling balls, but maybe afterward I will. We'll see. And then a little bit
about being a Christian both in the workplace
and in the Bay Area. And then we'll open up for
Q&A and talk about whatever else you feel like as well. So be informal and interactive. So a little bit about my story. I was born and raised
in Pennsylvania. And if you've ever been
to the Amish Country in Pennsylvania, the
ultra, ultra conservatives, the Amish-- they haven't
accepted any new technology since 1869. And then there's
the Mennonites who are, like, really conservative,
but less so than the Amish. And then there's the
Pennsylvania Dutch. And that's what
I was growing up. So compared to the Amish
we were really liberal. But by all means very, very
conservative farm community. My dad was eighth
of nine children. So son number one had
a farm, son number two, daughter number one-- it
got down to at number eight, and my grandfather said, we
have enough farms in the family. Just work with your brothers. Otherwise I'd be a farm
boy in Pennsylvania today. And when I came out to
Intel I knew a lot more about cow chips than
computer chips at the time. At six days old I was baptized
with full knowledge of what I was doing in our
church, and became president of the youth
group at 12 years old, and those types of things. And I thought I was a Christian
just because I was born and raised in that environment. There was one good
reason to go to church. That was to meet girls
or impress their mothers or grandmothers. And other than that, I was
just rotten the other 6 and 1/2 days of the week. I ended up skipping my
last year of high school. I accidentally took
a scholarship exam to get a tech degree. So I ended up skipping my
last year of high school, getting my associate's degree. So literally, I graduated from
high school with my tech degree in the summer of a
'79 at 18 years old. And Intel came recruiting. So there was sort of an
industry-wide shortage of technicians. So Intel came from
the West Coast to recruit and invite me on
a trip to come to California. And the guy who
was interviewing, Ron Smith was his name, he
interviewed 12 people that day. And any of you who've done
a lot of interviewing, you know at about number
six, you sort of lose track of John versus Joe. And about number nine, you
lose track of Jane versus John. And I was number 12
on his interview list. And this is what he wrote
about me after the interview. He said, smart,
aggressive, arrogant. He'll fit right in. So I got invited to come
to interview with Intel. 18 years old and I had
never been on an airplane. At 18 years old, you're
getting invited for free trip to California. And they even through in I
could stay for the weekend. So how long you think it took
me to decide to take the trip? About a nanosecond. Yeah, sure. I'm taking a free
trip to California. First time an airplane. But I promised my
mom before I left, no way am I moving
to California. I mean, they're crazy out there. Earthquakes and cults and stuff. I'm a farm boy in Pennsylvania. No problem. I'm staying here. But after I came and
interviewed with Intel, they made me a job offer. And the thing that convinced
me to go to Intel more than anything else
as a technician, I wanted to be the engineer
on the other side of the table telling the tech what to do. That was my whole
career ambition summed up the one thing. | want to sit on that
side of the table. And they had a tuition
reimbursement program. So as long as I was working
30 hours a week or more and getting passing grades, they
would pay for all my school. So I got my bachelor's
at Santa Clara, did my master's at Stanford,
was working on my Ph.D. At Stanford-- all of
that paid for by Intel. And I was a poor farm boy,
so this is pretty good. So I took the job
with Intel, moved out here at the ripe old
age of 18, and then started working full time and
going to school full time. And light-weight programs
like Santa Clara, no problem. Graduate programs like
Stanford while you're working full time, no problem. Ph.D.-- so this
is pretty intense. Working full time, going
to school full time, but I loved it. The first time I ever had a
computer architecture class, it was like, that's what I want
to do for the rest of my life. I was one of those
kids you didn't want to be in the class with me. I had my first computer
architecture class. I found out what
the textbook was. Over the summer, I read
the entire textbook, finished every problem
in the textbook, and showed up on the
first day of class having done the entire syllabus
for computer architecture. Yeah. The professor-- it
was a new textbook on computer architecture,
Tenenbaum's computer textbook at the time-- he,
the professor hadn't done past the second
chapter yet in the class. So my notes became the
notes for the class. But I was sort of manic
about it in that way. I also-- when I
came to California I thought I was a Christian. And I showed up, went to church
on Sunday for what purpose? Meet girls and impress their
mothers and grandmothers. It's that simple. So what did I do when
I got to California? Went to church to meet girls
and impress their mother and grandmothers. So walked down the street to
Santa Clara Christian Church, and sure enough that
first Sunday met Linda, who you'll
meet in a little bit. I'll show a picture
of her in a second. And she asked me early
in our relationship if I was a Christian. And my answer was yes. I was baptized when
I was six days old, president of the youth group,
went to church every Sunday to meet girls. Of course I'm a Christian. And as we got to
know each other, the church adopted me and
it quickly became apparent that I was, at best
case, a Sunday Christian, and a lot worse than that
most other days of the week. And the sermon topic in February
of 1980 was based on Revelation 3:15-16. . "I know your deeds, that you
are neither hot nor cold. I wish you were
one of the other. But since you're neither
cold or hot but lukewarm, I'm about to spit
you out of my mouth." And that verse cut
me to the heart because there I was, I like to
feign Christianity on the one side, looking good. And on the other side
was living my own life. And I came to that moment of
crisis of my personal faith and said, I have
to make a decision. And I was really
challenged in that. And in February of 1980 made
the decision to be hot for God, and made the decision to
be a full-time Christian. And absolutely at
that point made this fundamental, life
changing decision. I'm going to be hot
for God and live my life as a Christian in
the workplace and what I do. So that's February of 1980. Just a couple of
months later-- so I'm a baby Christian
at this point, sort of figuring out what it
really means to read the word, be in fellowship, all the other
things associated with that-- and God puts on my heart
in a deep and profound way, become a minister. And I'm like, I don't
want to be a minister. I'm loving this tech stuff,
computer architecture, knocking it out of
the park at my job. That's the last
thing I want to do. And I just wrestled with God
for months about the idea of becoming a minister. It's like I don't want
to be like-- just nothing about it attracted me. So I just wrestled with God,
argued with him about it as I was praying. And after doing that
for a couple of months, just couldn't let up in my
heart and in the soul about it, and finally said,
OK, God, I give up. If this happens, and I laid
a-- you know, in the Bible they had a story where Gideon
lays the fleece before God. The ground is dry,
the fleece is wet. The next day the fleece
is wet, the ground is dry. And I laid a fleece before
God and said, if this happens, I will go into
full-time ministry. And it was just finally
giving up before God. And after laying that
fleece before him, as soon as I did it,
he came back and said, the workplace is your ministry. And then since
that point in time, and my life verse at that point
became Colossians 3:23-24. "Whatever you do, work at
it with all your heart, as working for the Lord,
not for human masters, since you know that you
will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ
you are serving." And that's become my life view. I'm in the workplace. And whether I'm a
low-level technician, a medium-level engineer, now
CEO of a great software company, I'm working for the Lord Jesus
Christ as my full-time CEO. It's great that I get us
a paycheck from VMware. And You go online,
you can check out-- I make too much money as a CEO. That's really cool. And I have a board
of directors as well. You can check out all
them online as well. But my full-time CEO is
the Lord Jesus Christ. And my job, the platform,
everything I'm given, is to be a workplace minister. And there's a few who are
called to vocational ministry. But all of us who claim
the name of Jesus Christ are called to be
full-time ministers. In the workplace, in the home
place, in the marketplace, in the school place, or
wherever we are as Christians, we are called to be
full-time ministers. It is the Lord Christ
you are serving. Now, also I do want to just
emphasize a little bit that being a Christian
and an engineer is often seen as contradictory. I believe in the
scientific method. I have now four degrees,
and absolutely committed to deep technical pursuit,
data-driven capabilities. And I am a full-time
believer in the word of God and in the Christian
truths that come with it. I do not believe those are
in disharmony whatsoever. Areas of good debate, areas of
good discussion inside of that. But the Bible is not meant
as a scientific textbook. It's meant as a love story
that demands faith for people to come to know him. And if it was an unequivocal,
immutable truth that was there that could not be
denied by any scientific method it wouldn't require faith. But God says, you will
take a step of faith to come into a
relationship with me. I believe I have a very
credible, reasonable faith with good scientific
data that supports it. But the last step is
always a step of faith. And you cannot come all the way
to God just based on scientific method. Cannot be done. And he wouldn't allow
that to be the case. He demands that you
make a step of faith. But I am absolutely
confident, and I'll debate any miracle the
Bible that's talked about, any other factual science. We'll have fun
debate about that. But at the end of it,
I cannot prove it. I give you good scientific
method behind it, but it requires a step
the faith to fully accept and belief and live for him. So continuing into the
juggling discussion. As I mentioned this young lady,
Linda-- so I started at Intel, was working for 30,
40, 70 hours a week depending on school
workloads and so on, the project I was on. I'm sure all of you
work a nice 30 or 40 hours a week here at Google. Just crazy work
schedule sometimes. So working full time,
going to school full time, light weight-program, Santa
Clara, Stanford, et cetera. And then I met this
young lady named Linda. And Linda and I-- she
invited me over-- so this is Christmas of 1979. So she invites me to have
Christmas dinner with her mom and grandmother. Remember this meeting
mothers and grandmothers? The formula's working great. So Linda with two generations--
mom and grandma are there. They invite me over
for Christmas dinner. Now, I'm a poor orphan
on the West Coast. I had neither money nor vacation
to go back East for Christmas. So I had dinner with Linda
and her mom and grandmother. And at the end of
the evening, we just had a great evening together. In particular grandma
and I hit it off great. You know, play this
card, and so on. Grandma closes the door
at the end of the night and turns to Linda on the first
time she ever met me, never met me before, she turns to
Linda and says, he's the one. And then Linda
starts to describe all of my failings,
which are numerous. All these kind of things. We weren't dating
yet or anything. It was just a friendship
at that point. Two months later, Linda's mom
says to her, he's the one. We still hadn't
even gone on a date. I got both generations
in my favor. This is cool. And then we started dating a
couple of months after that. But I was on the slow
boat to matrimony. I was going to finish my
bachelor's, finish my masters, do Ph.D. And probably
post-doc work before thinking about
getting married. So I had sort of a 10-year
plan until matrimony. And God had a very
different plan. And Linda, after a dating
for about a year and a half, she was diagnosed with
endometriosis, a disorder of the reproductive system. Had surgery-- one ovary removed,
part of the second one removed. And the doctor said to
her, kids now or never. Remember, we're just dating. I told her. She knew my plan. I was on the 10-year
plan to matrimony. And she comes to me--
one of our date nights, she comes to me with an
armful of medical books. And if a woman
ever approaches you with an armful of medical
books, you're in trouble. And she explains to
me what's going on and what's going to happen, and
the doctor says, now or never. Wrestle over that for a while
and we decide to get married. So we got married
the following summer. And again, the doctor
said, kids maybe never. You got one ovary removed,
part of the second one removed. And we began our family. And that part of
one ovary did OK. So this is our
oldest, Elizabeth. Elizabeth is named after the
mother of John the Baptist. She's our older. She's 31 years old now. Here's our son
Josiah, is number two. And he works at Seagate. He's in the M&A
department at Seagate now. And his wife Carly, and
our first granddaughter. Grandbabies are wonderful. Skip kids. Go straight to grandkids,
just for advice. It's much better that way. You enjoy them twice--
once when they show up, once when they leave. It's really good. And then our third is
Nathan-- he lives in Oregon-- and his wife Rachel, and our
second granddaughter, Alice. And he's a youth minister
at a church up there. And our son Micah is the
last of our tribe here. And if we have time I'll
tell you a story about Micah or so as we go. But now I'm working full time,
I'm going to school full time, and having a family full time. And this is what I call
the juggling years. How do you make it all fit? How do you possibly deal
with all the challenges that you have? All of the issues that
are pounding upon you? And if you think about this
period of your life, with it-- the normal priorities that
we want to work for-- I mean, you're here developing
your career. How successful do you
want to be in your job? Very. And if you're good and
capable, how much of the job do they want of you? As much as you give it. Your ego and your job
are in perfect harmony. All of you. Work more, harder-- you
want to be successful, you want to be promoted,
you want to make more money. And all of those are in perfect
harmony with each other. So you know what happens at that
phase is your priorities ending up being work, family, God. And work just wants
to consume it all. And you want to be
successful, reinforced. What are the God
given priorities? God, family, work. So we live our
lives almost exactly inverted to the priorities
that God has set. So how do you make things fit? How do you live in
this period of life when you're just being
pressed on all sides-- family responsibilities,
school responsibilities, other personal
objectives that you have? And in this period
of time-- and this is sort of the
topic of the book, and most of the learnings
out of that sort of came from this
15-year period where it's full-time work, a
full-time job, full-time school, full time family, and
how to make it fit. So just a couple of things. And you can read more about
in the book and Q&A session. But the first is a
mission statement. I had gotten to be 31 years old. At that point, I had a couple
of chips that I had finished. I had gotten my first
patent from Intel. I'm an inventor. I mean, that was cool. You get your second patent. I'm still inventor. You get your third one. Well OK, I'm still an inventor--
but written my first book. How many of you
read my first book? You did? So anyway, it's a thriller. "Programming the 80386." You get to last chapter
and you turn paging on. Yeah. This is exciting stuff. Yeah, to a Google audience,
you guys would get that. I mean, this is when
segmentation and small address spaces were a problem, and
the first fully flat 32-bit. I mean, this was
cool stuff, man. So I'd written my first
book, my first patent. I became the youngest
vice president at Intel at 31 years old. All this is cool and great. But all of a sudden
it's like, what do I want to do with
the rest of my life? What are my priorities? What are my objectives? And out of that came
writing a mission statement. And in this period of life I
said, just being very, very thoughtful about
what you want to do with the rest of your
life because you're being faced with too many
things are demanding your time. How do you decide
what you want to do? And out of that, being
very clear about what your goals are. And I developed mine. You can look at it
in the book, you can look at it on
my website as well. Let's just say the three
elements of my mission statement, my personal
mission, first is my mission. I will be a Christian husband,
family man, and businessman. I will use every
resource God has given me to carry out his work
on earth as set forth below. So that's what I want my
epitaph to read on my tombstone. That's what I want it to be. And then are my values. And things like work
hard in all I do, be open to the direction
of the Holy Spirit, enthusiastically approach--
those are the values. And when you say,
what's Pat like? That's what I want you to
say-- you know, personality. And then finally,
specific goals. And some of my goals-- make
my marriage an example of that laid out in scriptures,
encourage all four of our children into Christ,
become for the CEO of Intel Corporation, visitor 50
country-- I wrote that about being the CEO of Intel
when I was 31 years old. What a precocious little brat
I was when I first wrote that. But audacious with
some of the goals. Some can be long,
some come short. Talk about physical
exercise, about how we're going to use our
finances and wealth, and supporting
charities and so on. But my specific goals--
every year I grade our goals. I do it tax time. I'm already depressed,
so it's a great time to come back to the
goals and do it. But grading myself, and how am I
doing against the things I say? It also allows you, as
things come up in your life, to say no, not in my goals. No, I don't want to
spend time on that. That's not consistent with who
I am and what I want to be. So it helps you say no. It also helps you say
yes and develop the areas that you want to be. So developing a personal
mission statement or maybe a family mission
statement to help guide you to set the
direction that you want to go and invest in and
pursue those directions. So first the juggling act
rules is a mission statement. Second, priorities. And we talked about this God,
family, work versus work, family, God. And how do you live
every day-- because it's easy to sit some weekend
and write your priorities, and then life hits
Monday morning. And how do you keep
them firmly in place? And just a few things
from how I've learned to manage those over time. And trust me, a CEO job
doesn't make it any easier. As you get higher in the ranks
it gets worse as you go along. One of those is beginning
the day in scripture, in the word every day. And I set as my priority that
I started reading the "Wall Street Journal" very early. Like, 21 years old, I read
the "Wall Street Journal" every day. But I don't read
the business bible before I read God's Bible. It's just one of those things. And maybe before your
first cup of coffee, just finding ways to put God
on the throne every day and starting with
him as a priority. Making sure you're in
regular fellowship in church, and making those clear priority
decisions in your life. So putting God on
that throne every day. And that's one of my priorities. And I have to live that way
to keep myself balanced. He is my CEO. He is the person that I
want to be accountable to at the end of my life. And the second
priority is family. Now, how many of you find it
easy to be home every night in time for your family? Nobody, huh? OK. Oh, you're lying. OK. Now, imagine the conversations
that Linda and I would have. Remember, my work
objectives are exactly aligned with my ego objectives. I want to be successful
at work-- you remember how that spiral goes. So I'd have a
conversation with Linda. So imagine, she would
approach me and she'd say, you haven't been
home much lately. And my response would be,
no that's not really true. I've been home more the
last couple of weeks than before that. No you haven't. Yes, you have. No, you haven't. So you're just in the
middle of an argument. So we started keeping score. So we set up at home chart. And on the at home chart,
if I was home by 6:15, that was one point. If I was home by 5 o'clock,
that was two points. After 6:15 was zero. Weekend days were negative
points if I was gone. That's the numerator
and the denominator was the number of workdays. We set a goal on the at
home chart of having 70%. And my secretary
produced a spreadsheet that she sent to my
wife and I every month. We have almost 30 years
of the mean, the median, the 12-month running average,
the skew, the kurtosis. Now we sit down, now
we have the data. Now we have the
discussion on my time. And you say, you haven't
been home much lately. But look at the graph, and it
was like, oh, you're right. I haven't been home much lately. Or no, I have been home more. I haven't felt like
you've been home more. That's totally different. But keeping score,
setting goals. And most of us in positions
in the tech industry and at Google, I mean,
we're goal-oriented. We want to be successful. Some days I'll be at
the end of our driveway, sitting on the
cellphone at 6:12. 6:13-- sorry, got to go. I'm getting a point tonight. Done. In the garage on time. I'm not gonna lose a
point over a minute or two of a stupid meeting. So keeping score and keeping
things in balance that way. And also things like
dating our kids. One of the things
I started early, every week I took one of
them out for breakfast. Four kids, once a
month, dating my kids. Dating Linda-- twice a month,
we go on dates together. Twice a year, we take long
weekends or trips, just the two of us. Finding ways to
live that priority that family is more important. I was given the opportunity
to become Andy Gross' technical assistant. Now, at Intel this
was the marquee-- this was like becoming
Larry and Sergey's personal second-in-command
at Intel. So it was the marquee
development position in the company. Two of the last three CEOs
had that role at Intel. So I was offered that job. I turned it down. Everybody in the company
was like, what an idiot you are for turning down that job. But I knew I
couldn't do that job and keep my priorities of
God, family, work at the time. Sometimes those
decisions are hard. But being clear about what your
goals are, your priorities are, and then living
according to them. Third tool for your journey
as a juggler, mentors. Now, I was in charge-- this
about, I'm 23 years old, something like that--
and I was in charge of taping out the 80386. How many of you
remember the 80386? Just humor me. A few of you, right? But it was a big, big deal. It was probably the most
important chip going on in the industry at the time. And I was in charge
of assembling the database of
the chip to prepare it to send off to go to fab. That was my job. And I was working 20 hours
a day getting the chip done. And we had a design review
with executive staff of Intel. So Andy Grove is in
the audience-- founder, "Time Magazine" Man of the Year,
one of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley the time. Next to him was Robert Noyce,
the Nobel Prize winning inventor of the
integrated circuit. Next to him was Gordon
Moore-- Moore's law. I mean, I got the gods
of the industry here, and I'm giving an update
on taping out the 386. And basically, I
chewed them out. The computers weren't stable. They were crashing. And I'm not going
to get my chip done if you don't fix these-- I mean,
what a precocious brat I was. 23-year-old, the guy-- so on. But just really, really
aggressive in their face about this. A couple of days
later, I'm sitting in my office working
like crazy on the chip and assembly, and design rule
checks and that other kind of stuff. The phone rings. Who is it? I didn't want to be interrupted. It's when phones really rang. They weren't in your pocket. And the voice comes
back, Andy-- Andy who? And I respond, and the voice
comes back, Andy Grove. I'm dweeb, and he--
way up here, president, founder of the company. And I'm just so beside
myself, out of my stupor. And he starts shelling
me with questions. What are you reading? What are you studying? What are your career objectives? What are your development
plan-- so just and I'm like, uh! After a few minutes
of that, I'm just, uh! And he says, those
are lousy answers. Yeah, they were. I could barely talk. He says, be in my office
in a week with better ones. Wow, the president and COO says
to be in his office in a week, you got two choices-- leave
the country or show up. It's pretty simple. So I showed up, and that
began a mentoring relationship with Andy Grove that literally
lasted til just a couple of years ago. And the only reason I'm in
a position like I'm in today is because I've had people like
Andy Grove making me better. Now, mentoring with Andy Grove,
it's like going to the dentist without Novocaine. He's not a nice guy. If you're mostly right and a
little bit wrong, your wrong. One time I came
into his office-- just to let you know
how blunt this guy was-- I came into his office
and I had grown a beard since the last time
he had seen me. He looks at me. I can tell he's sort
of checking this out. He says, that's ugly. Shave it off. But that was Andy. Just blunt, direct,
and making you better. And I just say, for everybody
in this phase of life, both keeping you accountable,
helping you along the way, do you have people like an
Andy Grove in your life? People who are just
making you better? Who are challenging you? And in scriptural
terms I've called it-- it's three strands, a Paul,
a Barnabas, a Timothy. Somebody who's breathing
into your life, somebody who's a partner on the
way, a buddy on the journey, and then somebody whose life
you're breathing into as well. And to be able to have those
kind of mentoring relationships to help you as you're
developing, and in your career, and learning or
along this journey, and how to keep balance
in all the things that you're off
to do that you've said in the Mission statement. Keeping you accountable
against that. So three-- there's a number
of others in the book, but maybe some ideas. And in the Q&A time we can
talk about that a bit more. But some thoughts on how to
manage through the juggling act. Now, when I was
asked to come back to be the CEO of VMware-- I
mean, that's a pretty good job, don't you think? Yeah, a lot worse jobs
than being CEO of VMware. We're a $6 billion
software company. I know that's small
by Google terms. But in software
terms, that makes us the number five software
company in the world today. So hey, we're not
bad at that level. We crossed 6 billion. I got 19,000 employees now
working for me-- Bay Area. I mean, this is OK. But when we left the Bay Area--
Linda I were here 10 years, then we moved to Oregon, then
I became president and CEO at Intel in Boston, and then
coming back to the Bay Area. And when we left the
Bay Area 25 years ago, Linda said, we're
never coming back. We wanted to raise our
kids in a different area, different lifestyle, et cetera. The busyness, the craziness
of the Bay Area-- we're never coming back was what she said. And just never say never to God. He has different plans. And so we're invited back
to come to the Bay Area, she really struggled. Again, I was all in. We've made our home. We still have a home
in Oregon for 25 years. That's what we
really consider home. So the idea of coming
back to the Bay Area was, OK, God, what
are you up to? What do you want to do here? And this big platform
called being CEO. And with thatt-- a few
things about the Bay Area. It's a very geographically
diverse area, very ethnically diverse area, highly affluent. You now live in the
richest area on earth. Highest per capita
income-- Bay Area. We've crossed all the
others on the earth. Innovative and
influential-- Googles, Amazons, Microsofts, VMware,
Facebooks, et cetera-- we changed the world
from the Bay Area. Highly innovative
and influential. But one of the lowest areas
of philanthropy in the nation. Can you believe that? Some of the highest income
and lowest philanthropy. If you go to the census data
that show philanthropy rates, there are poor
counties in Arkansas that have higher per capita
giving rates than the Bay Area. It's like we're like 310 out
of 348 different census zones that they have. Pitiful. And some of the lowest church
areas in the nation as well. So as I view it, my mission
field now, my area of ministry is to rich,
influential, miserly, pagans in the Bay Area. Yeah, that's my neighbors. That's your neighbors as well. And out of that,
I've helped to start an organization called
TBC, called Transforming the Bay with Christ. And we said, there's three
things that we want to do. One is unify the
Christian leadership across the Bay-- pastors,
parachurch leaders, et cetera, to bring them into
relationship with each other. Nationally known leaders in
the Bay Area-- Chip Ingrams, Francis Chans, John Ortbergs and
others don't know each other. Just bring them
together and say, let's get to know each
other and work together. Second is amplify. Amplify what God is doing
through works of service. And the church has become
known for what we're against, not what we do. And Matthew in 5:16,
it's listed here. "In the same way let your
light shine before others that they might
see your good deeds and glorify your
Father in Heaven." It's not by our superior
intellectual position, buy our superior
political position, it's by our good deeds
that we should glorify. And we've gotten so confused
as a church to lose focus on love and good deeds for it. So it's to really amplify works
of service throughout the Bay. And the church largely seen
today as one of two things, and particularly
so in the Bay Area. It's either any
evolutionary leftover that I as an intelligent
being have no purpose for, or it's a tool of
the political right. And either one of those is
not interesting to me as well 95% of the Bay Area population. So how can we make the
church appealing again? And then finally bringing
about multiplication, expanding churches
throughout the day to grow, expand, to become that social
influence for the long term in the Bay Area. So we've launched the TBC. You can go look at it, TBC.city,
and potentially participate, or with your church
join in working with us to help influence
the Bay for Christ for the long term. So with that, I'll pause
and we'll take questions on any subject all. AUDIENCE: My question is
about, I guess, the role as a Christian in technology
and just-- not just in the workplace, but just in
the work that I actually do. Sometimes I feel
like the work that I do and the work
that people work on is so-- we focus
so much on the how and the what that we
forget the who and the why. And it gets kind of
depressing sometimes to not see the connection
between the thing that I'm actually building
and how God can use that. So I was wondering if you
have any advice for that? PAT GELSINGER: Yeah, and I
say, let me tell you-- here. Good job, thank you. I sort of set this as sort
of my personal, professional objective many,
many, many years ago. I said, I want to work on
a piece of technology that touches every
human on the planet in every modality of life--
work, home, and play. And that's my
objective in my career so that I might both improve
their lives and quality of life as well as hasten the
day of Christ coming. So that's my-- what I'm
trying to do professionally. And if any of you have used the
personal computer-- any of you use that? Any of you use a Mac
or anything like that? OK, you've worked on a
piece of my technology. Have any of you used USB? OK, I did that. Did you use Wi-Fi? OK, I worked on that. I mean, and now with cloud, I'd
say with Google-- I mean, think about the bigger objective of
the work that you're in today and always keep that in mind. Because you do, you
just get down here way in the minutia of the stuff. So there is just
a bigger purpose that we're out to change lives,
improve the world, et cetera. Also, in the workplace
it is so easy to get so consumed
by what you're doing, you lose track of
the bigger picture. The most important thing to
me is-- we'll get back here to this picture. I started my leadership
event this year and I showed off pictures of
my two-year-old grandchildren and told stories about them. Because hey, all the stuff,
the projects and so on, the lives that we touch--
I spent the first 20 years of my career and I talked
about this, relationships are more important than results. And it wasn't that I didn't
care about other people. But you were sort of
generally a distraction. If you weren't helping
me get my project done, you were generally
a distraction. So get out of my road. Either help or get out
of my-- kind of thing. And over the last 10
years of my career, I start every
meeting, how are you? Today I had one of the guys
in my office who just got back from a trip through Europe. How was the trip? How's your family
doing, and so on. And to really shift the focus. Not to ever lose
sight of the-- I mean you have a
fiduciary responsibility to be a great employee. Not a good one, not a
mediocre one, a great one. If we're Christians,
we should absolutely be the best employees
because we're working for a much higher calling. But in that, find ways to be
able to build relationships, focus on the higher purpose
and calling that we have. And find ways to be able to
be salt and light as it says in scripture in the every day. How can I pray for you? What things are
going on your life that I can really be
uniquely connecting with you and supporting? And even-- I've
asked that question to thousands of
people-- the most atheist, agnostic,
other people, nobody has ever denied me praying
for their sick relatives. Never once. Can you believe that? Hey, you're an atheist. You don't even believe
there is a God. Why will you let me pray
for-- so never once. It just changes the
relationship that you have and the potential
role that you have with your peers and
colleagues in the workplace. AUDIENCE: Hi, just to follow up. Can you elaborate on what you
mean by to be a great employee, or to be, say, the
best that you can be? Especially in light of
a lot of your discussion seems to be about how to juggle
by, say, making time for family or by considering
relationships to be important. PAT GELSINGER: Yup, yup. So a couple thoughts on that. One is, sometimes-- and I want
this to be very-- every once in a while, you just gotta walk
home, tell your spouse, hey, for the next 30 days, I'm gone. The project demands
it, and so on. You are just going to do what
it takes to get the job done. But then the next 30 days
after that, you better say, oh, this is how I'm going
to keep balance as well. And if you can't keep some
reasonable balance while you're being a great employee,
getting the job done, doing the projects and so on,
then find a different job. Because you have to be able
to live by your priorities and live for the
long term as well. But you know hey
when I'm taping out a chip when I was
at Intel, now when I'm getting ready for
earnings calls no, or other big-- we have VMworld
coming up, 25,000 people. I can promise you
I will not be home for dinner for a number of
nights the week beforehand. But then also balance
it by, OK, here's when I'm taking vacation. The first 10 years at
Intel, I took no vacation. Can you believe--
why I take vacation? I love what I'm doing. Why stop? It was just great. And then Linda came to
me one day and she says, you might not need
vacation, but your family needs you on vacation. Oh. Changed my perspective entirely. It sounds so stupid
when I say it now. But that's-- and since then
I take every day vacation I'm entitled to at that point,
and really making it a good. You can be on vacation
and not on vacation. But really finding ways. And hey, as a CEO it's
really hard to do this now. But honey, just giving me an
hour or two in the morning, and then I can feel good
the rest of the day. OK, so I get up early,
clean out the inbox, handle the crisis, and so on. OK, now we can have a
great day and we can go bike riding and all the stuff. We just had a long
a 4th of July. So part of it is doing the job. Also, when you're
doing the job one of the things as a
Christian that you get to do is you realize there's a
much higher purpose in mind. It changes your attitude and
perspective on everything. And there's-- does Google
have any interwork politics? Any large organization does. But as a Christian, you
can look past that so much more easily as well. And just say, I didn't
get the promotion. God be praised. I wasn't ready for it
for whatever reason may be the case. I got the promotion. God be praised for it as well. And you can improve
your work attitude, your team attitude
so much if you take on that higher perspective
of what you're off to do, the lives you're off
to change and so on. I remember at one will
point in my career at Intel, I was so furious. I was a vice president. There was another
vice president, Mike. He got promoted to a senior
vice president before me. I mean, he was nowhere
near producing what I was. I was so torqued. What a criminal
injustice of the universe that he was promoted before me. And in retrospect, hey, my
career's done just fine. But being able to keep that
balance to realize that, hey, I am going to be
the best employee even if a fundamental
injustice of the universe just occurred with
that promotion. I'm just going to continue
to be doing my job, to never get caught
up in politics, to absolutely be doing the
right thing for the company, for the customer with the
highest integrity, et cetera. And of course,
sometimes you just got to do what it takes to
get the project done as well. And that's what I mean by
being a great employee. And if you're great
employee, I call it like this invisible
bank account that you're making deposits into. Because someday stuff
happens, bad stuff happens. But they sort of come and look
and say, oh, no, she's great. She's been such a team player. She's got so many good things. You survive some of
those bad situations because they will inevitably
arise at different times. AUDIENCE: Yeah, so
Karen is asking, do you have any specific advice
for women who are balancing work, family, and faith? PAT GELSINGER: Yeah,
unfortunately women in technology-- it's
a terrible situation. And it begins with a lousy
raw material in the sense that old 18% of incoming
technical STEM are females. I mean, that number's
got to get fixed. Because there's just such--
it's all male dominated, and then technology is
so much more so that way. So to me, the most
important things-- and we're hosting a Girls Who Code at our
campus in a couple of weeks, and those kind of things. We really just got to get
those numbers just way up. It should be 50-50, right? And we're nowhere near
that at that level. And then what happens
is females generally-- because there aren't
good role models, there aren't good
systems to support them, micro-inequities inside
of the environment. They generally get promoted
less, they get lower raises, they don't have a good
role model-- statistically, it's the way it is. So we have to fight those
things very aggressively just like any other situation. We're doing things at VMware. I'm sure Google is doing
those things as well. But it's one of
those hard things that's just going to take a
long time to really turn around. And we are starting to see
the STEM rates into STEM fields starting to rise now. So it's an encouraging
environment that we're in. And obviously companies--
we have policies, and again, I'm sure that Google
does as well-- with regard to, often women fallout of the
technical fields in the child bearing years. They drop out, they
don't come back. How can we make that
more effective for them to come back and return and
participate-- job sharing, other things like
that to make that more effective in that
environment-- strong mentoring programs and so on. So there's a lot
of things that we need to do to make it better. And obviously, for
women proper, being able to be successful in a
male-dominated environment is hard. And finding good
mentors, people who are your champions
along the way are some of the most
valuable things that can be done in that respect. But we have a long, long
way to go unfortunately. I remember I was the champion
of the senior technical females at Intel. After five years, we made
no statistical progress. None. After five years, we started to
move the needle on the program. And to me it was so frustrating. I don't take on projects to
not succeed after five years. I mean, I was
embarrassed for it. It's just slow, hard,
and deeply ingrained, and takes a while
to move the needle. AUDIENCE: My question
goes to in regard to you're mission statement. So at some point,
I guess you just decided that you were
taking on too many things and so you decided to be build
up a mission statement that would affect your whole life? So I guess, where do you get the
insight to build such a mission statement? PAT GELSINGER:
Yeah, for me, I got to this period of
sort of aimlessness in life which sort
of drove me to it. I wasn't sure what
I wanted to do next. I wanted to be a VP. I wanted to write a book. I did that. I got patent. It was sort of like,
OK, now that I've sort of done the things
that I had in mind I wanted to get done, it was like
this period of aimlessness. So it's really sort
of a year of sojourn and wandering
until I really read a few books and other
things to get to that point. The way to write, to me--
writing a mission statement, you can look at mine
online or in the book. You could look at others. There's a few books that
talk about that subject as well that might give
you other models for it. Talk with your mentors about
it, significant others, spouses, et cetera, are very helpful to
help you shape the thinking. And writing a mission statement,
generally write down the things that you have in mind,
revise it a few times, and then stick it in the
drawer for a couple of months. And then take it out,
and look at it again. Is that really who you want to
be 10, 20, 30 years from now? Tear it up, do it again. And then put it in
the drawer again. And then finally about
the third major revision, it's probably getting
to be pretty close. And then take it to mentors and
another significant influences your life and say, is what
you think Pat should be? Does this resonate with
you and who you see me being, as well as what you think
I should aspire to be as well? And it's a hard process. It took me about a year to write
the first, what I considered, finished version of
my mission statement. Now I think I'm on version
6Ba, I think is what I'm on or something like that. But it hasn't
changed a whole lot since that first version at 31. But I've revised it sort of
for the major epics of life. When we were in the major
child rearing years, sort of one epic of life. I did a major revision after
we empty nested because that's a very different phase
of life and the role that you're in there. And I think sort of
as you go into sort of the twilight
years of your career may be the next epic as well. But as you write it,
it should be good for, like, the next 10
or 20 years of your life, and as the things
you want to get done. And maybe some
short-term agendas. I want to exercise
this many days a week, or stuff like that. But some also sort of
saying, hey, in 10 years, where do you want
your career to be? What do you want to be? And then what are you doing
today to help you get there? What are you doing
right now to help you prepare for
those next major jobs that you would want in
your career in the future? And if you're not
doing those things, then that's really not
what you want to do. You're kidding yourself if
you can start pointing it back to things you're really
underway today with. AUDIENCE: So you
mentioned several times about work and ego
being very aligned. And I was wondering if you have
any thoughts on, rather than individual responsibility
for that decision, if you have any thoughts
on kind of pushing from the top of the
company in changing the culture around work? PAT GELSINGER: Well, a
handful of thoughts there. Because clearly, if I
look at my job as CEO now, how successful do I
want VMware to be? Very successful. But we've also been
very thoughtful. And let me just-- I
think I have them here. These are the VMware values. And also saying,
these are the values-- it's not just
about projects that were getting done-- but we say,
execution, passion, integrity, customer, and community. And we talk a lot about that. And then the community It's not
just the social community we're in, but also the community
of our people, the employees, and the families as well. So we clearly
emphasize that as part of the values of
our company as well. And yeah, we got
projects to get done, we have schedules
to keep and so on. But we do a lot. And my role-- I mean,
we help to do this. We're an epic company, with epic
values, with epic customers, with epic products. CRM The whole thing works
pretty nicely that way. But clearly, I mean like
we have-- on our campus we hold a Halloween celebration. This last year we had
Ariana Grande as our singer for-- we had, I
think, 6,000 people on campus for our
Halloween celebration. 4,000 of them, or
5,000 kids-- can you imagine 5,000 sugar
infested, crazy dressed kids running around? I mean, it was chaos. But again, it's reinforcing
the family, the balance. And again, I know Google does
those kind of things as well. But clearly, I got to
reinforce it from the top, otherwise we turn into
a sweatshop as well. And we're here for the long term
to build families, communities, relationships for the long term. And a lot I do, as I
reinforce these values, it's critical to reinforce
that from the top even as bottoms-up
decisions are made. And every once in a while,
yep, I'm going to come to you and say, sorry, I need
to work this weekend. But then I have to
be able to also say, and maybe at the
end of the month, you need to take a few extra
days off, and balance as well. And creating a culture
that allows that to occur. I just had dinner last
night with one of our guys, and we gave him what
we call a take three. We give people the opportunity
after so many years of service to take three
months to go do something else. And that could be nothing. And in his case, he's
been bike riding. He says he does a three-hour
bike ride every day. He's lost 20 pounds. And he just had done a big
vSphere release for us. And he says, I just
needed a break. And he was so grateful just
to give him that chance to reset everything. And we're talking
about what project he's going to do as he
re-enters the company and so on. So it really is
that mix of things of working hard, being
proud of what you do, passionate for the projects. But also saying, yeah, we
have to keep things in balance because my grandkids
are way more important than the next earnings
call for a VMware. AUDIENCE: I was
wondering if you to go into more detail in
that period of your life where you're trying to
grow as a Christian? Because you said you were,
like a baby Christian, and then you were working
long hours, building a family, going to school. PAT GELSINGER: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and it was, at
that point in my life, it was just this
frenetic period. And I'm growing as a Christian,
and trying to figure out what that was like. At the various-- soon after
I became a Christian-- just tell you a little story. I walking down the
halls of Intel. This was like a week after
I became a Christian. And this guy comes up to
me, and you could tell he was sort of checking me out. And I couldn't quite--
didn't know him at all. And he comes up, and
he says, hi, I'm Bob. Are you Pat? And I said, yeah. Again, this is sort of weird. And he says, God told me
I should be your roommate. God's talking to you about me? I mean, we became roommates for
the couple of years until Linda and I got married. And I'll just tell
you, he was just this perfect, mature
Christian that sort of helped lead me through
some of those early phases. He was like the first
spiritual mentor I had in my life-- people
helping you in those. After Linda and I
got married, we've had Bible studies
in our home now for probably 25 of
the last 30 years that I've been leading us well. The best way you want
to mature as a Christian is to teach other people. And that's one for me,
I find that to be very challenging in that respect. And that journey as
you're going through it, good church, good leaders,
good teaching, spending time in the Bible and prayer
yourself-- all those things-- just the good diet of a
young Christian experience. But my case, Bob was extremely
critical and influential in those early Christian years. And I think everybody
in that phase of life need that kind of
influence for it as well. So hey, I am so grateful to be
able to spend time with you. I'll be hanging around
a little bit afterward. And I'd love to chat some more. Thank you very much. God bless. [APPLAUSE]
