1 Hour Talk with Rick Rashid

He was born in a poor Idaho family, with a very optimistic father and a very loving / supporting mom.  After a string of not-so-successful business attempts by his father, he went to Stanford on a poverty fund. 

He did not have the chance to touch a computer until he entered Stanford majored in Mathematics and Comparative Literature. From there, out of pure curiosity and fun-seeking, he took all computer science courses opened for undergraduates, without getting a CS degree, as Stanford had not had offer CS under-graduate degree at that time. 

He almost decided to continue Ph.D. study on Applied Mathematics at UC Berkeley upon gradation from Stanford. Until June 1974,  he got contacted by Christopher Brown, who taught Rick in some CS undergrad courses. Chris was invited to create a new CS department at University of Rochester, and he asked if Rick would like to be his Ph.D. student at Rochester. He thought it over and agreed, rejected the offer from Berkeley. Only until many many years later, he was talking with his father about this, his father told him that the night his parents got the phone call from him about this decision, both parents thought he went completely insane and his mom cried out that night with the unbelievable thoughts that their son must have ruined his own future. But they disclosed not even a single word to Rick about their deep concerns back then, what they communicated was only their whole-heart support for his decision.  

He enjoyed a lot on those days in Rochester, co-programmed the earliest version of a multi-player network game (Alto Trek). He secured a tenure-track position in CS department in CMU after getting the Ph.D. from Rochester in 1980, which once again made his parents unbelievable, that their dear son could find a "real" job with a Computer Science degree. 

During his CMU days, even though his appointed main focus research areas were artificial intelligence and distributed system, he was deeply fascinated by the internal of operation systems and decided to write one by himself, which leads to his most notable work - Mach kernel. 

After 10 years at CMU and secured a tenured position, at 1991, he was enticed by another risky yet exciting opportunity presented in front of him, to create Microsoft Research from ground zero, a first attempt to create a computer science theoretical research lab within a commercial software company at that time.  No friends were supporting his decision then, it was too obvious to everyone else when weighing in a tenured professor from one of the more prestigious universities, versus a founder of a no-one-knows-where-to-go research lab. But he seized the opportunity and made the risky leap. 

Within years, Microsoft Research grows its fame to one of the leading research labs in software industry, with more than 1000 researchers and engineers nowadays, aims to tackle the most challenging research topics in almost all key sub-domains in computer sciences. In his spare time as a Senior VP who in charge of MSR operations during late 1990s, out of sheer personal interests and passion, and in order to learn the DirectX API programming, he re-implemented the old-day Alto Trek game, which is re-named to Allegiance, the best-selling game on XBox before Halo release. He was amusingly joking about those days as Bill Gates was wondering what he was doing with that game.

He is the most optimistic people I ever met in life, he shows his optimism in such a confident while humble way, which makes the optimism immediately contagious in the air. 

When he was asked about how he was made the decision to go with Computer Science at those early days, his answer was simple, he did not make any single big-move decision at any point of time, he was just following his true passion and interests along the way. Because he was introduced to a "fun class about coding" by his then-best-friend Dan Ling at Stanford (who later convinced by Rick and joined MSR), that was how he got started and never stopped since then, until now. 

When he was asked about what did he do during adversity or how he overcame those difficult times, he went lightheartedly as "you may find this unbelievable, but this is what I do: I just dump those bad things into a box and shove it away, not think about it anymore and find new things which excites me. I usually never let anything upset me more than 24 hours." "It is not necessary to learn a lesson from something bad happened, since it may not be any lesson to learn out of it, such as a loved one passed away, you did nothing wrong." "People sometimes learnt the wrong lessons, which make them more constrained over the time."

He repeated his most loved "Rick's parking karma" story, as his wife always jokes with him that there is always a parking spot in front row "reserved" for Rick in a busy parking garage. Whenever Rick drives, they will get that sweet front row parking spot. He then more amusingly mentioned the anecdote of this famous anecdote, he was once telling this story in a new employment event a few years back and got an thank-you note email from one employee who attended that events, which said: "Rick, thank you for your advice, I could not believe that I followed your advice and DID get a front-row parking spot at the busy Costco last weekend!". It is quite hilarious that when you are trying to make an analogy while people take it literally. (I felt enormously fortunate and lucky that I actually followed this advice, even before I heard of it, so that I ventured to front row and the got the spot which gave me this wonderful opportunity to talk to Rick!)

He used his comparative literature background to elaborate the Pollyanna-ish optimism with real optimism that I questioned, "there is nothing would happen EXACTLY as you expected, if you do believe and expect everything happen as you planned,  that's Pollyanna-ish, if you accept the fact that things will almost never happen in a way that you expected and actively adapt to the change, find the good things out of what's happened and enjoy the process of doing it, you are a sure optimist." (He used another famous literature character other than Pollyanna, but I did not remember/recognize the name and did not asked for it :-(. )

He is an regular runner, is always proud of his recent two full marathons in past 3 years and loves to make them as opening anecdotes for his speeches, to encourage his audience to start trying new things. He himself is never tired of new adventures, like learning flying small non-commercial aircrafts with his wife since a few years back. 

He passionately introduced his collections in his office to me, among many other memorable and impressive pieces, including a original TRS-80, one of the earliest mass-produced PC, with the proud claim that, it was probably the last batch of hardware which ran on some codes written by Bill Gates. 

He also generously loaned a book to me, which is the collection of articles written by his colleagues, students, families as gifts for his 60th birthday, and specially recommended the one by his loving wife, titled "seven habits of the highly effective Rick Rashid". :-)

He specifically emphasized at the end, "trust me, in my eyes, you are still young, there are many things that you can do and achieve, do not be afraid!" and I felt that I could not be more convinced with his genuine smile and conviction.