Biography|John Morgridge — The Tasman Drive Firm He Took from 34 People to a Public Book

People treat the Cisco succession as a 1995 story about John Chambers.

The first professional CEO on this campus arrived seven years earlier.

In October 1988, Sequoia Capital's Don Valentine installed John Morgridge as president and chief executive of cisco Systems, then still styled with a lowercase c.

The History of Computer Communications narrative dates the hire to that month.

Cisco's own corporate timeline lists 1988 as the year he joined as president and CEO, with 29 employees on the official count and 34 in the version the company later printed in his chairman-emeritus biography.

The firm was four years old.

Headquarters in 1988 were still in Menlo Park.

The San Jose campus on West Tasman Drive, including Building D at 170 West Tasman Drive, became headquarters only in 1994.

Pin the surviving public campus and say so.

A visitor who walks Tasman Drive is not standing in the 1988 office.

They are standing where the company landed after he had already taken it public.

On 16 February 1990, under his watch, Cisco sold 2.8 million shares at 18 dollars.

The first-day close was 22.25 dollars on Nasdaq.

Cisco's own history page and the contemporary offering record agree on those figures.

Sales had already jumped from about 5.5 million dollars in fiscal 1988 toward the tens of millions.

The founders, Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner, left later in 1990 after a clash with the new management.

In 1995 the board moved Morgridge to chairman and named Chambers CEO.

He became chairman emeritus in 2006, with the headcount by then in the tens of thousands across dozens of countries.

The Tasman campus is the place the company chose to keep.

Photo: Pedro Xing, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons