"no matter where you work, most of the smart people work somewhere else"

I saw this in a presentation, attributed to Joy. Does anyone know if he really did say this? -Quasipalm (talk) 14:51, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

I worked at Sun Microsystems in 1988 and left in 1989 to found Cygnus Support, the world's first open source company. I lobbied Wayne Rosing and Eric Schmidt to get Sun to invest in developing free software, arguing, in effect, that "no matter how many smart people Sun hires, there will always be more smart people outside the company than inside". This message was relayed to Bill Joy and Scott McNealy. I heard that McNealy's response to my proposal was "if the kid's so smart, why doesn't he do it himself". I did. But Bill Joy got the credit for using my quote (unless somebody can prove he used it before 1988). Michael Tiemann (talk) 14:17, 21 June 2015 (UTC)