Connecting the Dot.Coms

For 48 years, Rice alumni have followed Burt McMurtry’s
well-worn path from Houston to Silicon Valley, defining an industry in the process.

By Chris Warren
Photography: Tommy LaVergne

When people talk about Silicon Valley, they often cite the unique recipe that led to the remarkable success of the area south of San Francisco. Some choose to emphasize different aspects of the stew—the entrepreneurial culture or the venture capital that supports innovation and risk taking. But one ingredient almost always is mentioned: Stanford University in Palo Alto. Located in the spiritual heart of Silicon Valley, Stanford has served as an incubator for the ideas that have fueled the technology industry’s boom and as a magnet for the people behind those ideas.

However, a university thousands of miles from northern California also has had a great impact on the industry and the area responsible for world-transforming innovations such as personal computers and the Internet. That university is Rice and, indeed, its alumni have played an extremely large role in Silicon Valley, contributing to the achievements of marquee names in technology—Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Amazon, and Intel—and to the development of some of the most widely used technologies of the late 20th century, including personal digital assistants, Web browsers, operating systems software, chips, and microprocessors.

“It’s eerie,” says Bruce W. Dunlevie ’79, as he rattles off just a few of the names of Rice alumni who have flourished in Silicon Valley: Jim Treybig ’63, founder of Tandem Computers; John Doerr ’73, an influential venture capitalist whose firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, has invested over $1.3 billion in more than 250 technology ventures; and Leighton Read ’73, a partner with another venture capital company, Alloy Ventures. “The fact of the matter is that Rice has played a large role in imprinting Silicon Valley.” Dunlevie, himself, is a co-founder of the well-respected technology investor Benchmark Capital, which he formed in 1995 with Kevin Harvey ’87.

Burton McMurtry

The path between Houston and California was well worn by the time Dunlevie, Doerr, and many others made the trek. The journey started inside Abercrombie Hall, where electrical engineering students have been holding their labs for decades. It was there that a Houston kid named Burton McMurtry ’56 happened on a recruiter from the electronics company Sylvania, sitting on a bench. McMurtry was puzzling over what to do after graduation, but he was confident he didn’t need to schmooze with someone from Sylvania. “I thought they made lightbulbs,” he recalls nearly 50 years later.

Still, McMurtry wanted to make sure the recruiter was getting a good impression of his school. “I wanted him to feel good about the place,” he says. “I went over and talked to him and asked him if he had met some interesting people.” Ever curious—and always a good conversationalist—McMurtry peppered the recruiter with questions. Having worked the previous summer in a microwave tube lab for General Electric in Schenectady, New York, McMurtry had an inkling of a desire to pursue a career with that new technology. He also knew he’d have to attend graduate school if he hoped to make much headway. McMurtry finally asked the recruiter, “Does your company have anything on the West Coast that would let me work in the microwave tube field and go to grad school at Stanford?”

The recruiter wasn’t sure, but he thought Sylvania might have recently set up a program exactly like that. As McMurtry remembers the encounter, the recruiter was a little taken aback by the young student’s avalanche of inquiries. When the recruiter finally had a chance to speak, he told McMurtry he’d check into Sylvania’s West Coast operations, and then he asked a question of his own. “He very politely said, ‘Who are you?’” recalls McMurtry.

If ever there was evidence that the world can be shaped by chance encounters, McMurtry’s incident with the Sylvania recruiter is it. That event ended up dramatically changing the direction of not only McMurtry’s life but, arguably, the lives of countless other Rice graduates. In fact, it’s not a stretch to say that it helped shape the landscape of one of the country’s most important industries.
After a visit to Sylvania’s operations in Mountain View, California—during which it was uncharacteristically rainy—McMurtry and his wife, Deedee ’56, decided to decline the logical and safe option of staying in Houston so he could work in the oil industry and instead traveled west to the unknown.

The California they reached in 1957 was a far different place than it is today. The semiconductor industry, which made computer chips from sheets of silicon, was in its infancy. The term Silicon Valley hadn’t even been born. The landscape was filled with cherry and orange orchards instead of the ubiquitous office parks and strip malls that now cover the flat region ringed by the Diablo and Santa Cruz mountain ranges. Real estate, although considered pricey at the time, still was within the reach of young couples not long out of college; today, a modest tract house in Mountain View or Palo Alto fetches upwards of $1 million, sometimes much more.

The McMurtrys quickly settled into a hectic life. For the next five years, Burt juggled his class work at Stanford, where he earned an MS and a PhD in electrical engineering, with his research and development duties at Sylvania. At the same time, they started a family, but because of McMurtry’s demanding schedule, Deedee handled much of the child rearing. “My wife was literally a single parent,” he recalls.

Despite being so busy, McMurtry found school and work complementary and fulfilling. And simply being in an area that was transforming itself into the world epicenter of technological innovation was thrilling for him. At Sylvania, which became GTE in 1959, he worked in research and development on traveling wave tubes. Later, he moved into the burgeoning laser field, setting up GTE’s laser group. “I was excited by being in the Stanford area,” says McMurtry. “There were so many interesting, highly educated people trying to do interesting things and trying to push the frontier of science and engineering.”