John Chambers grew up in West Virginia and went on to run what was once the world’s most valuable company, the computer networking firm Cisco Systems Inc. Now he is trying to help economically lagging West Virginia by making it a “start-up state” akin to Israel, which has been called the start-up nation. I interviewed Chambers recently about his hopes and the magnitude of the challenge. Chambers was born in 1949 while his parents were in medical school at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He grew up mostly in Charleston, W.Va., and earned a bachelor’s degree and a law degree from West Virginia University. Chambers became a salesperson for IBM, then for Wang Laboratories, before joining Cisco in 1990, six years after the company was founded in Silicon Valley.

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