Connecting the Dot.Coms

The Pipeline Begins

McMurtry wasn’t about to keep this gem to himself. Starting in fall 1958 and every year for the next 10 years, McMurtry would travel back to Rice hoping to lure fresh graduates to California. He had a compelling pitch: come west and work for Sylvania, and the company will give you a good job and pick up the tab for you to go to graduate school at Stanford. It was such an alluring offer that McMurtry often would get a quarter to a third of each class of electrical engineers to sign on.

It wasn’t only what McMurtry had to offer that made him so persuasive but how he offered it. Ken Oshman ’62 remembers McMurtry coming to the lab and cornering him with tales of the Golden State. Oshman was set on going to Harvard Business School and didn’t really want to stick around and listen to McMurtry’s pitch. But he didn’t have much of a choice. “Burt is never a pushy guy, but he is persistent,” says Oshman. “Even though you might be looking like you’re annoyed that he’s keeping you, that doesn’t faze him. He just goes on, and he’s not going to rush his sentences, and he’s not going to skip any of them.”

McMurtry’s sales job wasn’t enough to get Oshman to drop his plans right there in the hallway. But it started a conversation—which included a long letter McMurtry wrote while on a business trip to Europe—that ultimately led Oshman and his wife to abandon their plan to go to Boston. “It changed the whole direction of my life,” Oshman says.

One thing that made this drastic change in course easier for Oshman was that McMurtry already had been so successful in luring other Rice graduates to California that going to work at Sylvania was akin to attending a college reunion. “It was comfortable,” Oshman says. “It was like going home rather than going to the wild blue yonder of Boston.”

The momentum westward from Houston built on itself. The more people who went to California, the more, it seemed, others wanted to follow. At one point, there were so many Rice alumni floating around Silicon Valley that they laughingly referred to themselves as the Rice mafia. “Burt started it,” says Bob Maxfield ’63, who was one of the few electrical engineers who turned McMurtry down, taking a job with IBM in San Jose instead. “He hired bright people, and those bright people came out and succeeded and tried to find more Rice people.”