Pang Xuelin stayed in the United States for another week, and in the repeated tug-of-war negotiations, the two sides finally reached an agreement.

Pang Xuelin acquired 49% of Scober's shares from Sun Yansheng, and Sequoia Capital also acquired part of the shares from Sun Yansheng and Scober's management team, bringing Sequoia Capital's total equity in Scooper to 40%, and the remaining 11% held by the management team.

Sequoia Capital will assign a CEO to Scottber who will be fully responsible for the company's operations.

At the same time, Transwarp and Scober have a cooperation agreement under which Scooper will be fully responsible for the market development of Transwarp's CVD/DVD in the Americas, Europe and Australia in the next 15 years.

On this basis, Sequoia Capital exchanged its 10% stake in Cisco with Transwarp, a subsidiary of Pang Xuelin, in the same ratio of 1:1.

As a result, Pang Xuelin finally got the Cisco shares he expected.

As for Sun Yansheng, after completing the equity transfer with Pang Xuelin and Sequoia Capital, he can't wait to return to China.

For him, Wanyan Company is the next main battlefield.

On April 15, 1994, in the third week of his arrival in the United States, Pang Xuelin went to Cisco for the first time as the largest individual shareholder, accompanied by Benson Rafael.

Cisco President Morgridge and Vice President Chambers have been waiting at the door for a long time.

John Morgridge was a tall, fifty-something, rimless pair of glasses, suave, and a typical image of the white elite.

Chambers looks a little younger, these two are Cisco's golden partners, and it is precisely because of their existence that Cisco has been able to enter glory in just a dozen years since its establishment, and even became the world's most valuable company for a time.

At that time, Cisco founders Lerner and his wife found Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital in search of investment.

Valentine's offer was that he would organize the management team, and the Lerners eventually agreed to his request.

Later, on Valentine's recommendation, Mogridge joined Cisco and became at the helm of the emerging technology company.

Mogridge has a steady personality and a keen eye, and his business philosophy is very different from that of the Lena couple, who are accustomed to small workshop work and the supremacy of technology.

After several heated clashes, Cisco's management had no choice but to fire the Lerners.

In 1990, the Lerners liquidated $170 million worth of Cisco stock and left the company they had founded.

Subsequently, Cisco officially entered the Morgridge era.

As it turned out, Morgridge was a man who understood.

He clearly realized that Cisco is no longer a company that can grow and grow only by technology research and development, and must be separated from the family-style management.

Morgridge was looking for a new helmsman for Cisco, and he had his eye on Chambers.

Born in 1949, John Chambers went on to earn degrees in law and business from West Virginia University and an MBA in finance and management from Indiana University.

Chambers moved to California in 1976 and spent six years in marketing at IBM, before joining Ang Wang Computer in 1983 as head of sales and marketing, and later as senior vice president of the Americas and Asia Pacific.

In 1991, Mogridge invited Chambers to join Cisco. Chambers began his career as Senior Executive of Cisco's Global Operations Group, where he brought new ideas to Cisco and was involved in a number of major decisions for the company.

Three years later, this year, Chambers became Executive Vice President, with full responsibility for R&D, manufacturing, marketing, and control.

In January 1995, at the age of 46, Chambers officially succeeded Mogridge as Cisco's new CEO and took the helm of the networking company. Under his leadership, Cisco has achieved some of the most brilliant achievements in the history of the Internet. In 1997, Cisco was named to the Fortune 500 list of U.S. companies. At the time, the rise of the Internet propelled Cisco's tremendous growth, and the company's routers and switches were soon seen as important pillars in an increasingly networked world.

Having been on the front lines of sales and customer service, Chambers understands the importance of meeting customer needs, which aligns with Cisco's customer-centric culture. After years of experience in IBM, Wang An and other large companies, Chambers has accumulated rich experience in marketing and sales, and has also formed his unique management philosophy.

Both Chambers and Mogridge had worked in sales, and neither of them specialized in technology, so neither of them was superstitious about technology.

When Chambers worked at Wang, he was forced to lay off 5,000 employees because the company's reliance on outdated technology eventually led to a decline in the company's performance. Afterwards, Chambers became more convinced of the "cult of no technology", which later evolved into another core of Cisco's corporate culture.

Chambers is ready to buy any new company that represents the future of technology.

Chambers believes that such an acquisition would allow Cisco to avoid detours, reduce uncertainty about the future, and save money in the long-term development of the market.

The acquisition also expanded Cisco's market share in various areas and accelerated Cisco's establishment of market leadership.

Chambers believes that market entry is not an end in itself, it is important to occupy first or second place in each market. If Cisco can't do that on its own, then make alliances with other companies in this market, or make acquisitions, and make sure you reach the goal, or you get out. Acquisitions have been a driving force for Cisco since 1993. In 2000 alone, Cisco acquired 22 companies. The acquisition helped Cisco absorb innovative technologies, quickly enter new markets, and brought a large number of engineering talents to Cisco.

Chambers didn't let the spirit of the company part ways with the founding couple. He encouraged Cisco engineers to start their own businesses in their spare time, even if they left Cisco for the sake of a startup, and Cisco would support them financially as investors rather than managers.

If the project is successful, Cisco has the right of first refusal, and if it fails, the company loses some investment, but saves a lot of trouble in management, personnel, and organizational structure adjustment. Cisco also outsources its production activities.

This means that Cisco can quickly scale up production without having to worry about expanding its plant and recruiting employees. When demand shrinks, companies can easily scale down production, so they don't have to worry about laying off employees too much during a recession.

This concept can be said to be contrary to Warwick's business philosophy.

Huawei is to identify a technology, start from the lowest principle, understand it step by step, and then expand the application field of new technology step by step.

This method, whether it is a communication equipment supplier or the later era of consumer electronics, Huawei is the same.

For example, when making mobile phones, Huawei pointed at the technology tree for taking pictures, so in the case that the screen and memory are not as good as Samsung, and the system is not as good as Apple, Huawei finally relied on its ultra-high level in the field of photography to gain a firm foothold in the flagship market.

In the 5G era, with its deep technical foundation in the field of 5G, it bucked the trend and was one step ahead of Samsung and Apple.

In Pang Xuelin's view, this is the gap between first-class enterprises and great enterprises.

Chambers and Mogridge are both excellent businessmen and entrepreneurs, but they are one level behind Ren Zhengfei.

This is also the reason why after Cisco became the world's most valuable company, it collapsed because of the Internet bubble, while Huawei was able to buck the trend and go through several crises, but it became stronger and stronger.

"Hello Mr. Pang, welcome to Cisco!"

Both Mogridge and Chambers looked at the magical boy from the East in front of them with some curiosity.

They don't know much about Pang Xuelin, except that this young man invented a new audio-visual equipment in China, which became popular throughout China in just a few months, creating billions of dollars.

Then that company attracted Valentine's attention, and eventually Pang Xuelin and Valentine became one of Cisco's largest individual shareholders by swapping Cisco shares.

But Morgridge isn't worried about the impact on Cisco of having someone like this on the board.

Not to mention that the two of them have more shares in Cisco than Pang Xuelin, Sequoia Capital still owns 20% of Cisco's shares, plus the shares of other investment institutions, Pang Xuelin's 10% shares can't make any waves at all.

Pang Xuelin stepped forward and shook hands with Morgridge and Chambers respectively, and then accompanied by the two, he entered the Cisco headquarters for a visit.

"Mr. Morgrid, I remember that you acquired a company called Crescendo Communications last year, and the R&D department of that company should also be included in Cisco Labs, right? Would it be convenient for me to visit it now? ”

Mogridge and Chambers glanced at each other, a little surprised Pang Xuelin's deep understanding of Cisco, but he didn't think too much about it, and smiled: "Mr. Pang, of course you can!" ”

Pang Xuelin followed Morgridge and Chambers and went straight to the Cisco lab.

He didn't come to Cisco this time to meet these two business tycoons.

Pang Xuelin's real goal was Cisco's Catalyst switches.

In 1993, Cisco completed its first M&A with the goal of a startup called Crescendo Communications.

Although Cisco has created as many as 200 mergers and acquisitions since then, this is the first time in its "life", and it is this acquisition that has ushered in the glorious era of Cisco Catalyst switches.

The deal is worth $94.5 million, which is not a small amount for Cisco, which has just been on the market for three years and has revenues of less than $1 billion.

But a few years later, Catalyst switches were generating $15 billion in annual revenue.

Here I have to admire the vision and luck of Cisco's management, in this era when even network hubs (HUBs) are far from being popularized, Cisco, which started as a router, is keenly aware of the network switch market and chooses to make a decisive move to buy Crescendo.

This acquisition, in addition to obtaining Crescendo's products and technology, was also joined by three key people, Mario, Prem and Luca, who later became legendary engineers at Cisco, known as the company's "heart, soul and brain", also known as the "MPLS" team. (There is also a person who is Soni)

Following the acquisition, Cisco introduced its first switch, the Catalyst 1200, in 1994, based on Crescendo's technology.

The switch supports eight 10M Ethernet ports (10Base-T copper or 10Base-F fiber) and two module slots for UPLINK.

The slot module supports two 100M FDDI or CDDI interfaces, the so-called fiber distributed data interface.

At this time, the Internet is still relatively fast, whether copper or fiber, the maximum can only run up to 10M, while the rate of FDDI/CDDI is 100M, which is twice as high.

One of Crescendo's specialties is FDDI/CDDI, so the debut of Cisco Catalyst is such a switch that integrates Ethernet and FDDI.

This was not enough to support the great Catalyst product line, and next, Cisco, which tasted the sweetness, launched a series of mergers and acquisitions.

This year, Cisco will also acquire Kalpana, which developed the industry's first Ethernet switch in 1989/90 and invented PortChannel.

Later, based on Kalpana's modularization and stacking technology, the Catalyst 3000 series switches were born.

In the same year, it acquired LightStream, an ATM switch manufacturer, so that Cisco had ATM technology.

In 1995, Grand Junction Networks was acquired, which gave Cisco 100M Fast Ethernet technology.

This is the origin of the Catalyst 1700/1900/2800 Series Desktop Switches.

In 1996, Cisco acquired Nashoba Networks and Granite Systems, which owned Token Ring technology, while the latter owned Gigabit Ethernet technology.

At the same time, based on Crescendo's technology and talent accumulation, Cisco also launched its first generation of backbone switches, the Catalyst 5000 series "big box", in 1995.

After some operations, Cisco completed the full-stack technology accumulation in the switching field at that time.

From 10M Ethernet, Fast Ethernet to Gigabit Ethernet, from FDDI to ATM to Token Ring, from modular technology, stacking technology to Chassis.

Cisco became the market leader in switches, and the first-generation fleet of Catalyst switches began to take shape.

Fast forward to 1999, and people are immersed in the panic of the end of the century and the hope of the new millennium.

In the middle of the year, a major event occurred that was comparable to the acquisition of Crescendo, and the most classic product in Cisco's history was born.

This is the Catalyst 6500 Series Spine Switches.

Strictly speaking, the 65 series, either before or after its release, was not achieved overnight.

Starting with the C5000, Cisco has been experimenting with chassis backbone switch development, and after the C5000, C5500, C6000, and finally the Catalyst 6500 has become a "cross-century" generation.

No one thought that this series of switches would be sold for 20 years as soon as they were sold.

In 2019, the Catalyst 6500 celebrates its 20th birthday.

Over the past 20 years, the Catalyst 6500 has set numerous industry benchmarks, obtained more than 500 patents, and shipped hundreds of millions of ports, accompanying generations of customers through the era of ".com", "cloud computing", and "Internet of Things".

Such a core-level product with a life cycle of more than 20 years and cumulative sales of more than 1 million units can be called a "masterpiece" in the history of network development!