Clutching his fishing pole, the six-year-old boy was swept along the rapids of a raging West Virginia river. Only fate and the calming words of his own father nearby would coalesce to save Cisco Systems Inc.’s future leader.

It was a near-death experience that John Chambers (pictured) would not soon forget. A perilous day on the river would prepare Cisco’s chief executive for the dot-com bust in 2001, when a quarter of the company’s customers simply disappeared and the firm’s market capitalization lost nearly $400 billion.

“When disaster strikes, how you handle that determines who you are in the future,” said Chambers, who described how his father finally fished him out of the cold water. “Then you know what he did? He put me right back in the rapids and let me do it myself.”

From a near-death experience on a raging river in West Virginia to navigating the treacherous waters of the technology industry, John Chambers’ story is one of a life in full. A great deal of his career’s lessons and views on the tech industry are chronicled in the Cisco chairman emeritus’ latest book, “Connecting the Dots: Lessons for Leadership in a Startup World.”

Chambers discussed his latest venture, past experiences with two major tech firms before joining Cisco, the value of mentorship, and the state of Silicon Valley with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at Chambers’ home in Palo Alto, California, as part of the Mayfield People First series. (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE features John Chambers as its Guest of the Week.

Commitment to startups

At the age of 69, Chambers insists he has not retired, preferring instead to describe his current endeavor as “the next chapter.” He is the founder and chief executive officer of JC2 Ventures, an investment firm devoted to capitalizing on new technologies incubated by fledgling entrepreneurs.

JC2 has already made a series of investments in startup companies, ranging from Aspire Food Group, a firm that farms palm weevil larvae and raises food-grade crickets on a commercial scale, to Rubrik Inc., a cloud data management company.

“I’m into the startup world now,” Chambers said. “This is where the innovation is going to come from.”

In addition to his investment role, Chambers has also returned to his boyhood roots and recently funded a startup engine in the College of Business and Economics at West Virginia University. The gift will form a philanthropic venture capital fund to support startup innovation and create a new Center for Artificial Intelligence Management.

Having seen the significant role in fostering startups and innovation played by universities within the Silicon Valley community, Chambers is seeking to duplicate that model in his home state. “How do we take the tremendous prosperity and growth in Silicon Valley and make it more uniform across the country?” Chambers asked. “At the core of almost every great startup engine is a really world-class university. They have to set the pace.”

Missed opportunities

Chambers’ interest in the startup community stems from personal experience and the lessons he learned while working inside major technology firms before taking the helm at Cisco. What he saw was that the window for true innovation opens and closes rapidly and some of the biggest firms in the world can be blinded by success.

In the 1970s, IBM Corp. was riding high. Mainframes had emerged as the powerhouse tool for running the enterprise, and “Big Blue” was widely viewed as the gold standard. But when a fledgling company named Microsoft Inc. came calling for an operating system to run microcomputers, IBM’s management made the fateful decision to cede control of the software to the Seattle-based company run by a young engineer named Bill Gates.

Chambers worked at IBM as a salesman from the mid-1970s until 1982. “I watched IBM and mainframes, and then I watched them miss on going to the minicomputer and then miss in terms of the internet,” Chambers said.

History would repeat itself at Chambers’ next company, Wang Laboratories. The Boston-based firm had risen to become a major player in the office minicomputer market by the early 1980s. At one point more than 80 percent of the 2,000 largest companies in the U.S. used Wang equipment.

But by the late 1980s, Wang had committed to a business strategy that focused on hardware instead of software and ignored the rise of personal computers. Wang would file for bankruptcy in 1992, and the area around Boston populated by thriving tech companies, known as Route 128, was suddenly not as vibrant.

“We were the Silicon Valley of the world, and we knew it,” Chambers said. “We failed to make a transition from the minicomputer era to the PC and the internet era. You’re a product of your experiences and know the tremendous pain that occurs because Boston’s Route 128 is no way near what it used to be.”

Help from a mentor

While Wang was rising and falling in the 1980s, a young married couple from Stanford University had decided to form their own company to make router technology available for large-scale use outside the school’s walls. Cisco, derived from the last five letters of the major city 20 miles to the north, was founded in 1984, and Chambers joined the firm seven years later to run worldwide operations.

By 1995, Chambers had been named president, and reached out for advice from Lew Platt, CEO of Hewlett-Packard and a man who had experienced his own highs and lows in the chaotic culture of Silicon Valley. Platt became an important mentor for Chambers, who met with HP’s top executive at least once a quarter.

Platt, who rose through the ranks at HP as a single dad supporting two young daughters after his wife died in the early 1980s, provided valuable advice to Chambers as Cisco began to become enormously profitable. A key element of Platt’s mentorship included a focus on people.

“I knew every illness of every employee, spouse or their children that was life-threatening, and we were there for them in ways that others were not,” Chambers said. “I still get notes from many people we helped 10 or 15 years ago.”

Tug of war in Silicon Valley

From the halls of IBM and Wang to the executive suite at Cisco, Chambers has seen the growth of the technology industry and the culture that surrounds it. He’s not shy about questioning its current direction either.

“There’s a tug of war going on here in terms of what the underlying purpose of the Valley is,” Chambers said. “Is it primarily to have major economic benefits and be a little bit arms-length from the average citizen and from government, or is it to do well financially but also do very well in giving back and making it inclusive?”

Here’s the complete video interview, another in a series of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Mayfield People First event. (Disclosure: TheCUBE’s coverage of the Mayfield People First event is presented by Mayfield Fund LLC.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE