“The students learn a lot from him,” Baer said. He has got a lifetime of experiences, and Metcalfe shares his stories about double dating with Steve Jobs or being the first investor in PowerPoint with students, Baer said. Metcalfe earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from MIT and a master’s degree in applied mathematics and a PhD in computer science from Harvard. He then worked at the famed Xerox Palo Alto Research Center early in his career. That led to his famous invention of Ethernet, a local area networking technology that lets computers communicate with each other. In 2013, Metcalfe was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame for inventing Ethernet. Metcalfe also co-founded 3Com and worked as a publisher and columnist at InfoWorld. He worked as a full time venture capitalist for a decade at Polaris Partners, a Boston-based venture capital firm. So how did Metcalfe end up in Austin and at UT? “I met a saleswoman for NI,” Metcalfe said. The saleswoman, he doesn’t remember her name now, attended a speech he gave in Boston and told him her boss, James Truchard, CEO and co-founder of National Instruments, wanted to meet Metcalfe. The two then met for breakfast and Truchard invited Metcalfe to Austin to speak at NI week. Not long after that meeting, Metcalfe attended the National Venture Capital Association convention in Los Angeles. He sat at an empty table. And Rudy Garza, a venture capitalist and founder of G51 Capital, joined him. Once Garza sat down, Metcalfe told him he was going “Meta on innovation” and he thought he might spend the next 10 years of his life in Austin, Garza recalled. “I said Bob, as president of the UT Alumni Association, I think I can help make that happen,” Garza told him. Metcalfe told Garza he would be in Austin in June of 2010 to give a speech during NI week.
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When Garza got back to Austin, he met with Greg Fenves, then dean of engineering at UT, to brainstorm how they could get Metcalfe to move to Austin. They arranged a dinner with local movers and shakers in Austin’s technology community to get together at Fenves’ house to meet Metcalfe. “It was serendipity, timing and dumb luck,” Garza said. “I think Bob really felt a spirit of collaboration in Austin and a real hunger and a real passion about taking the city and the region to the next level. And that’s part of what attracted him.” In fact, one of Metcalfe’s goals is to make Austin and the surrounding area of which he includes San Antonio, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth, into a better Silicon Valley. He doesn’t want to keep Austin weird, a movement he associates with a left wing and anti-corporate faction, he said. Instead, he has adopted the new slogan of “Keep Austin Wired.” Last year, Metcalfe sold his Boston condo and bought a house in Austin. He’s put down roots here now. He drives a giant black Suburban so his wife can easily transport her bike to various races, he said. His other car is a tiny red smart car. “I feel like when Bob came to Austin you could just feel that rising tide effect,” Baer said. “The whole tide came up a few feet just from him being here. We’re still in the afterglow from that.” Metcalfe has been a wonderful catalyst for growth in Austin’s technology community, Garza said. He recognizes opportunities for collaboration between angel investors, venture capitalists, universities, students, incubators and accelerators. He is able, along with some of his friends in the industry, to be the glue that makes everything stick together, Garza said. “He arrived at the perfect time for the growth of the city as we are becoming more recognized as a technology hub,” Garza said. Metcalfe shines a light on the innovative spirit of Austin and its powerful entrepreneurial ecosystem and helps to communicate all that is going on here to the world, said Michele Skelding, senior vice president of global technology and innovation at the Austin Chamber of Commerce.