FWTB: Chapter 20: Beyond the Algorithm: How Technical Excellence Wasn't Enough

The Rise (1990–1994)

Before Netflix or YouTube, we built the first real streaming video system—and no one remembers it.

By 1990, I had established myself as a respected software engineer at Silicon Graphics. The proof was right there on my desk: a stack of SIGGRAPH conference paper submissions waiting for my review. Me—the kid from Detroit—now judging the work of the computer graphics elite. The irony wasn't lost on me.

Between compile runs, I'd pull another paper from the stack, scribbling notes in the margins. Some were brilliant, others barely coherent. This was the life I had dreamed of: being at the cutting edge of technology, my opinions valued, my expertise recognized.

That recognition, however, proved more complicated than I expected. Months after completing the paper reviews, Dan stuck his head in my office.

“Alan submitted a paper to SIGGRAPH. Did you know about that?”

“What? No I didn’t!”

I walked to Alan’s office. “Did you really submit a paper without my knowledge?”

He wasn’t there, but I got my answer when I received a preprint. There it was—our algorithm, the one I'd spent months implementing, debugging, perfecting. Alan had contributed some basic theory, sure, but theory alone doesn't make software run. Every technical detail matched what we'd built. But under the title, only Alan’s name appeared.

I kept my mouth shut—not quite sure where I stood, but knowing any drama from me would only damage my reputation. A colleague, seeing my distress, offered advice I never forgot: “Don’t wrestle with a pig; the pig will like it, and you’ll only get dirty.” So I swallowed my rage and buried the disappointment. Each time I saw Alan on campus, that familiar anger surged. Even success in Silicon Valley, I realized, came with a bitter aftertaste. Alan left SGI a year later, and gradually, I learned to let the burden go.

Still, I was beginning to see that SGI wasn't as straightforward as I’d believed. I had arrived thinking that good work spoke for itself, but now I was watching office politics unfold in real time. I kept quiet about Alan’s theft to avoid being labeled difficult, but the experience shook my belief that technical excellence was all that mattered. Pat White had opened my eyes that first summer at Bell Labs. There seemed to be an unwritten rulebook everyone else had read.

By 1993, something bigger was brewing. The technology industry was abuzz with predictions of convergence—the merging of television, computers, and telecommunications. Every major player was placing bets. Apple publicly showcased its interactive TV ambitions through prototypes, demos, and a partnership with Bell Atlantic, while Microsoft, invoking the “information highway” vision, took a lower-profile approach focused on internal R&D and platform groundwork.

At the time, television was completely passive. You watched whatever was on, when it was on. No pausing, no skipping, no control. Cable boxes were glorified remote extenders—capable of changing the channel, nothing more. The idea that you could browse a menu of movies, choose one, hit play, pause it halfway through, rewind or fast-forward—that sounded like science fiction.

Then Time Warner called. They had a vision—and they wanted SGI to help build it.

Their project was called the Full Service Network, and it aimed to be the first true interactive television platform. It would launch in Orlando, Florida, and beam digital content—movies, games, shopping, educational programming—into thousands of homes over a fiber-optic network. The user would navigate a dynamic 3D interface, select content on demand, and control playback in real time. It was Netflix before broadband, before the internet was in every home.

The ambition was enormous. The infrastructure didn’t exist yet. We were asked to build the future using technology that barely existed. Our solution was bold but expensive: a repurposed SGI Indy workstation, costing about $5,000, modified to function as a high-end set-top box. Standard cable boxes of the day cost under $250. But we weren’t building for cost—we were building to prove it was possible.

I was the third engineer on the team and there from the beginning. As the project grew, so did my role. I interviewed hundreds of candidates, often serving as the closer because I was best at selling SGI’s culture. And I meant every word—I loved working there.

Kirk introduced me to his friend Frank, someone he knew from his East Coast days. Frank and his wife Celeste were ready for a change, and he was a perfect fit: always smiling, endlessly positive, and adaptable—the kind of person who thrived in SGI’s unstructured chaos.

I also tapped the most talented engineer I knew at SGI: Kevin P. Smith. He had taken my code—the same visual rendering solution Alan had once tried to claim—and restructured it for SGI’s new graphics library, positioning us to compete with the likes of Microsoft.

“Seems a bit ambitious,” Kevin said when I described it, mistaking my past work for a proposal.

“Ambitious?” I bristled, reading it as arrogance. I kept calm.

“I suppose it was, but it’s complete. I’ll send you the code.” I let my work speak for itself.

Kevin reviewed it and preserved my design exactly as I had written it. That gesture sealed our mutual respect for life. With Kevin’s stewardship, my code and designs were ultimately included with OpenGL as the official Utilities library—a quiet but lasting legacy at SGI.

Kevin, Steve, Sunita, Frank, and I became a team. We thrived on the challenge of building software for what we hoped would become the set-top box killer.

“Derrick man, I can’t get this driver to work. The documentation is useless,” Frank said.

“Hmm. Let’s get the chip’s designer to help,” I replied.

Two weeks later, Marc—the designer of the specialized video processing hardware from SGS Thompson—flew in from France. We were his first customer, and he needed proof his creation could work in the real world.

Within days, we had it running. Frank demoed The Terminator playing through Marc’s chip. Marc was stunned.

“No one had ever done this before,” he said. “Streaming compressed video in real time with full playback control—pause, rewind, fast-forward—all on demand.”

We had built the future. Real-time digital video with full user control, running live on custom hardware. It was 2007, achieved in 1994.

But the timing was wrong. The hardware was too expensive. The networks were too immature. The world just wasn’t ready yet.

The Time Warner Full Service Network in Orlando was a rollercoaster—an ambitious, high-stakes experiment to reinvent television. We were a band of dreamers pushing the limits of what was technically possible. The energy was electric. The pace, unforgiving. After leading the team to deliver production-ready software and helping to recruit some of the best talent I’d ever worked with, I was offered a supervisory role.

I should have felt triumphant. Instead, I felt the weight of what we had built—and the world’s inability to see it yet.

The Peak (1994–1995)

My former manager Reuel—6'5", from Waco, Texas, with a full beard and a full head of long, straight hair combed to the side—was my model of a good team leader. He was caring but direct, focused on results yet never forgetful that we were all human and flawed. He operated with the highest integrity—he never exaggerated, never manipulated. You always knew where you stood with Reuel. I wanted to lead like that, but I didn’t yet have his maturity or emotional steadiness.

In this new and challenging role, I found an unexpected haven in Ken Coleman’s HR department. Ken—one of the few Black executives in Silicon Valley at the time—had risen through the ranks at Hewlett-Packard before joining SGI. Among his team was Colette McPherson, a perceptive Oakland native who quickly became my coach and confidant.

I stopped by her cubicle regularly. I wasn’t wracked with anxiety, but I was facing situations that genuinely befuddled me. My instincts—so reliable in engineering—now felt out of tune in leadership. What used to work no longer did.

I was reminded of my time at Princeton, when I became president of the NSBE chapter. Back then, I had also stepped into leadership expecting competence and drive to be enough. But managing people—especially peers—proved far more complex. That same feeling had returned, only now the stakes were higher, the audience larger, and the margin for error thinner.

One morning, after a particularly tense meeting, I walked into Colette’s cubicle, unsure what I even wanted to say. A team member, once collegial, had grown distant and resentful since my promotion.

“He won't even look me in the eye,” I told her. “Leans back, folds his arms, looks down his nose like I’m the one who doesn’t belong.”

Colette didn’t flinch.

“Invite him to lunch. One-on-one,” she said. “Tell him you value his experience. Be honest about your challenges. Humility can be disarming.”

So I did. And it didn’t work—at least not at first. The first few lunches were stiff, awkward. He stayed guarded, and I kept second-guessing myself. But I persisted. I named the tension, owned my discomfort, and gradually, he softened. We didn’t become friends, but we became functional. That was a start.

When I told Colette, she smiled. “See? People want to feel valued. The leader doesn’t stop being human.”

She kept nudging me toward a leadership style I didn’t yet understand. I was frustrated. I wanted this guy to recognize my competence, to get over whatever insecurity or resentment he carried. Why couldn’t he just fall in line like everyone else?

“You want acknowledgment of your strengths before revealing any weaknesses,” Colette observed during one of our sessions. “But trust doesn’t work that way. Leadership begins with vulnerability.”

It was a gut punch. Everything I’d learned in Silicon Valley told me to project confidence, suppress doubt, and never show weakness. I had trained myself to appear invulnerable, fearing that a single mistake could mark me forever. And yet here was Colette, suggesting I deliberately reveal the very things I’d spent years hiding.

Behind the scenes, Ken Coleman continued to shape my development. Seeing how much I struggled with conflict resolution, he sponsored me for Harvard’s Course on Negotiation, where Professor Margaret Neale taught us about BATNA—the Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement. It shifted how I thought about leverage and power. Ken also secured me a spot in the Stanford Graduate School of Business / American Electronics Association Executive Institute, where I began to learn how to manage across functions and build relationships with people who didn’t think like engineers.

By 1994, the Orlando project had peaked—and so had I. While others still chased the promise of interactive TV, my friend Maynard Holliday introduced me to something far more transformative: the Mosaic web browser.

In an instant, I saw the future.

This wasn't just software—it was a portal. The internet would change everything.

Jim Clark, SGI’s founder, saw it too. He left the company to launch Mosaic Communications Corporation, later renamed Netscape, with Marc Andreessen, Mosaic’s young co-creator. A few weeks later, over coffee in Palo Alto, Jim invited me to join them.

"We’re going to revolutionize how people use computers," he said. "And the stock options will be worth millions."

I hesitated. I admired Jim’s brilliance, but I doubted the culture he would build. SGI felt safe. I had a reputation, a team, stability. I wasn’t sure I could survive the volatility of a startup—even one with Jim at the helm.

That night, while Gina fed the kids, I recounted the conversation.

“What did he say exactly?” she asked.

“That the internet is the future. That we’ll be part of something huge.”

“And?”

“And that we’ll get rich. But it’s risky. And I’m not sure I’d fit in.”

I declined Jim’s offer.

The decision haunted me for months. I watched from the sidelines as Netscape took off—launching the first popular web browser, making the internet feel real to everyday people, and setting off a wave of startup frenzy with its record-breaking IPO. It even sparked the “browser wars” that would shape the tech world for years. Each headline brought a pang of regret. Every jump in the stock price felt like a quiet sting. I had chosen security over risk, stability over possibility—and that choice revealed more about me than I was ready to admit.

My Detroit upbringing had taught me to be steady and self-reliant. I had no safety net—sure, Mom and Dad loved me and I could always go home, but I was married with kids. I needed to build the net, not just for myself, but for Gina and the children. Every professional decision carried weight. Gina’s job at Kaiser gave us reliable income, but I needed to provide just as much. In Silicon Valley, calculated risk was the currency of advancement—but for me, risk wasn’t theoretical. It was personal. And I wasn’t playing with house money.

Years later, when I saw Jim again, he teased me for missing the boat.

And he was right—it had sailed. But I wasn’t ready to jump.

Not yet.

Soon after Jim left, so did the magic. SGI’s market cap peaked just above $7 billion in 1995. My own tenure crested around the same time, when I was promoted to second-level leadership.

From there, the decline began—more political, more personal, and far less about technical merit than I had imagined.

The Decline (1995–1998)

SGI’s attempt at sustainable growth—structuring independent divisions around a shared sales team—backfired spectacularly. I felt like a boat without a rudder, drifting between organizations with no real direction, no clear purpose.

At its peak, SGI wasn’t just a hardware company—it was Silicon Valley royalty. Our machines powered the first blockbuster visual effects, drove NASA simulations, and enabled cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs. To work there felt like shaping the future in real time.

In 1996, my former engineering sponsor Wei Yen left SGI to start his own company. But Wei was more than a sponsor—he had championed my work, opened doors, and helped me earn credibility in rooms where I might not have been invited otherwise. I reached out to explore potential opportunities, assuming our shared history would at least merit a conversation. His dismissive response caught me completely off guard.

“Why are you calling me?” he scoffed.

His tone made it clear: I wasn’t on his level. I recoiled, hurt and surprised.

The sting lingered. I had believed our professional relationship meant something—that the code I’d written, the problems I’d solved, had earned a baseline of respect. His rejection forced me to confront an uncomfortable truth: my perception of workplace relationships often diverged from reality.

My mind flashed back to our first meeting, years earlier—long before LinkedIn or social media made people visible on demand.

“Are you Derrick?” he asked, clearly surprised.

“Yes,” I replied, already aware of his reputation.

“I expected an old white man,” he admitted.

“I hope you’re not disappointed,” I joked.

“No,” he chuckled. “Just surprised.”

Now, after that abrupt phone call, I found myself questioning the sincerity of that first encounter. Had Wei been genuine? Or just strategic? The lessons of Detroit echoed clearly—stay vigilant, trust carefully.

As SGI’s stock slid, Hollywood stopped calling. No more magazine covers. No more being the coolest tech company in town. We were yesterday’s news.

A fundamental shift was underway. For years, cutting-edge graphics and simulation work required high-end workstations and supercomputers—custom-built machines that cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. But by the mid-’90s, that power was migrating to personal computers, which were rapidly becoming cheaper, faster, and “good enough.” Instead of buying a specialized SGI machine, customers could now build powerful systems from off-the-shelf parts—and get most of the performance at a fraction of the cost.

Yet many of our customers were locked into SGI hardware, stuck until their systems fully depreciated. Ken Coleman believed a resourceful manager could manage anything—and brought in Willie C. Hooks, who had led professional services for DEC across the entire U.S. West Coast. He knew how to design, package, and deliver services to enterprise customers just like ours—complex environments, high expectations, and no room for failure.

Ken carved out a new role for me—not managing engineers, but serving as a General Manager with full profit-and-loss responsibility. It was a world I knew nothing about.

Seeing that, Willie paired me with Malcolm Jones, a seasoned professional services expert and former colleague—another Black man who had walked this road before me. Willie encouraged me to hire him as my personal tutor. I was stunned by this level of investment—and grateful.

The team I inherited had been assembled by a prior leader—brilliant software engineers who loved to delight customers but knew little about building scalable, repeatable services. They thrived on custom engineering, crafting one-off solutions for each client. But as Malcolm taught me, that’s not what professional services is. Real services businesses run on process, not artistry—on offerings that can be delivered again and again, profitably, without reinventing the wheel every time.

For nearly six weeks, Malcolm coached me through those fundamentals: repeatable offerings plus high utilization equaled profitability. Simple in theory. Daunting in practice.

The role exposed my insecurities. One colleague in particular, Blake White, seemed to have everything I didn’t. Polished, charismatic, brilliant in front of customers, he led our Entertainment vertical and navigated Hollywood like he’d been born into it. I couldn’t open those doors. My envy became mistrust, and my mistrust occasionally turned into visible frustration.

Ken noticed.

One day, waiting for the elevator, he called me out.

“Derrick,” he said, voice low and firm, “we need to talk about your behavior.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, already bracing.

“Your anger. Your mistrust of colleagues. These men are your allies.”

“But Ken—”

He cut me off, pressing a finger into my chest.

“You don’t lash out just because you feel anger. Know yourself. Control yourself.”

The elevator opened, and Ken stepped inside, calm again—leaving me shaken, but newly clear-eyed.

His words cut deep. I had to grow up.

Until then, I had used anger as armor. As an engineer, feedback was immediate—my code either ran or crashed. In leadership, there were no unit tests for people. Without that instant validation, I defaulted to defensiveness. Anger became a crutch.

Weeks later, Vince walked into my office and dropped into a chair.

“I’m leaving too,” he said.

“When?” I asked, stomach already tightening.

Each departure now felt like a betrayal, even if I knew better. Vince wasn’t just a colleague—he was part of my foundation at SGI.

“End of the month,” he said. “Did you see the stock?”

I checked. $15.75. Just three years earlier, it had been $45.

It felt like watching a slow-motion collapse. First Howard, then Jim, then Marc. A steady drip had become a flood. And with each goodbye, the truth got clearer: my time was ending too.

SGI had become more than a job—it was a mirror, a proving ground, a second home. Leaving felt like an identity fracture.

After two failed attempts at internal transfers, I found myself seated across from Ken’s HR rep, negotiating my severance. Twelve years after arriving as a summer intern, I was leaving as a General Manager. The irony wasn’t lost on me.

I paused at the doorway to my office. My books, technical journals—the “Derrick Burns branch” of the SGI library—were packed into boxes. I carefully placed my O2 project plaque, commemorating our groundbreaking sub-$20,000 workstation, on top, next to family photos.

As I rolled the boxes toward my car, wheels squeaking across once-lively floors, I passed conference rooms that used to ring with debate and laughter. The halls were quiet now.

Fired. Shaken. I took stock.

I needed redemption. A second wind. Silicon Valley still held possibilities—if I could learn what it had tried to teach me.

SGI had been my rollercoaster—thrilling, terrifying, transformative. I arrived believing talent would carry me. I left knowing it never would.

At my car, I loaded the final box. On top sat a photo of Marc Hannah and me—two engineers who helped shape the foundation of modern computer graphics.

As I pulled away, I felt the weight of a chapter ending.

A chapter I hadn’t expected to close.