I'd like to meet Andy Bechtolsheim, a legendary figure who I'm about to emulate. Not just because of his first name.

In September 1998, Andy wiped sweat from his brow. California heat boiled the Menlo Park garage, a raging furnace without A/C. He knew what to expect because he'd already been in the Valley for a couple decades. Thankfully these PhD nerds sitting on their machine by the only doorway with cool air required less than 10 minutes to present their demo.

The technology clearly worked, and masterfully so. The crawlers had been live since August '96 consuming half of Stanford's web net. At some point during the research they picked google.com, about a year ago now.

I have no idea if my adjectives here are true, but for certain what happened next created fire like Prometheus sparking a Cambrian explosion of human flourishing via uncountable projects and relationships growing out of that garage.

Andy could have run to his car and zipped away. Instead, he pulled out his pen and a checkbook in that talent-infused heat, wrote "$100k for Google" and handed it to the founders before dashing.

Larry & Sergey had yet to incorporate the entity, so things changed now that they could walk down the street and file company paperwork with the security of their first real backer.

Bechtolsheim went about his business. He knew what they were going through. Andy had trained as an electrical engineering PhD, also at Stanford, and done research designing modular workstation systems. They could use existing building blocks because even 45+ years ago, Intel had already made some chips by then.

I have to imagine Andy could look at messy things and work backwards to first principles. He must have been able to activate his own energy to make optimizations, based on his belief that the world could be changed for the better.

When you get to first principles, you're not always fine-tuning things. Sometimes, there are significant optimizations that unlock tremendous leaps forward in value.

But moving forward is hard, and when you're lost in the research, you often need someone who has sculpted a business to tell you what to do next. Or at least obsessed about that enough to get an MBA, preferably whatever maximally enables you to focus on the key technical details.

Andy writing that $100k check was indeed a pure manifestation of cleanly facilitating progress. It took less time than the pitch explainer, just a decision and a commitment, a few seconds of pen scratching paper. But this act shifted things, akin to transforming from a time to a frequency domain, the Dirac delta spike.

I'd barely call this a transaction. Andy's execution, based on his engineer's intuition of business systems, allowed him to strike like a samurai with an eversharp katana. He shot those students out of the school circus with his iron cannon of logic and IQ striking IQ.

He didn't need to stick around, although he surely did because who wouldn't want to talk to the guy who shot you out of the cannon? As a cofounder of Sun Microsystems, Andy had already seen what it looks like to go from designing cable plugs to selling. He figured they had a shot, because hell, hadn't he?

$8M in year 1 then more. Exponentially more. Each year, every year. Until $8B in annual revenue comes your way, by the time you're checking out the kids in the garage.

Progress happens every day really, waking up to the new day's sun and doing things a little bit better each time. Andy had bought things before, cars maybe, or computer parts in bulk for his designs, and he felt would get a good deal of productive work from his $100k in that garage if things worked out as he hoped they could with this new internet thing. 
 
It had been a good couple decades for him already, in the heat of Silicon Valley.