In the fall of 1968, after the Democratic Convention in Chicago, he entered the Harvard Business School. After one year, he transferred to the Harvard Kennedy School. He took leave to work on the George McGovern presidential campaign. After the McGovern campaign, he returned to the University of California, Berkeley, where he completed his bachelor's degree in 1975, and entered the Ph.D program in Mathematical Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He left the Ph.D program in 1982 to help found Sun Microsystems along with a few others.