Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson.

I'm not a person who particularly had heros when growing up.

At the same time, much of it seems to have to do with recreating things we or others had already done; it seems rather derivative intellectually; is there a dearth of really new ideas?

We obviously wanted to get him to an expert in that area. Once [Thompson] examined him and had all of the information, he did the angiogram to get kind of the gold standard of evaluations.

The critics have been harsh all the way through my career but it doesn't affect me.

I've had the most incredible luck in my career.