He was a graduate student in nuclear engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1970s but the Three Mile Island accident caused a sharp reduction in opportunities in that industry , so instead he studied for an MBA from the University of San Francisco , and founded Walden International . He named the firm after the book '' Walden '' by Henry David Thoreau because Tan 's goal was to be like Thoreau : " contrarian , rather than just following the trend . " In 2017 , the analytics firm Relationship Science named him most connected executives in the technology industry garnering a perfect " power score " of 100
Three Mile Island accident
Three Mile Island accident
Lip-Bu Tan