In 1995, Scott Rozic graduated from college with a business degree, a credit card, and an idea for a software company. He piled all his possessions into his Pathfinder and headed to Silicon Valley. His modest goal: to find a high-powered, established player who could teach him the intricacies of strategy and finance—someone who really understood how to build a business from the ground up, preferably someone who’d helped run a billion-dollar business before. Fortunately, a classmate’s father introduced Rozic to Stan Meresman, an executive just leaving Silicon Graphics. Meresman agreed to meet Rozic for 20 minutes over a cup of coffee. Meresman found the recent graduate fascinating. The younger man had no experience, no expertise, and no prospects for immediate funding, but Meresman discerned something special nonetheless. “I was confident that he would someday be the CEO of a large, successful software company,” he recalls. Because he thought Rozic had a lot of potential, and because he enjoyed seeing young people succeed, Meresman took Rozic on as his protégé.