Introductions
Since this is the first time most of you will have run into me, I guess I should introduce myself. I’m currently retired, by choice. I advise two venture funded startups, Agito Networks and Aerohive Networks. I volunteer my time to the Jazz Archive project at KCSM-FM, digitizing the third largest jazz LP collection in the world. I serve on the board of San Jose Jazz, a service organization that provides music education programs and presents the San Jose Jazz Festival.
I have the good fortune to have met up with three brilliant colleagues in 2001 to start a wireless LAN system company, Airespace. We built the company from a pretty rocky start to about 200 wonderful people and nearly $100M in annual sales. It was some of the hardest work and most fun I have ever had. Cisco came around in 2005 and paid us (and our investors) very well for the company, folding it into their Wireless Networks Business Unit where it quickly expanded to account for more than 65% of the sales.
I stayed at Cisco for nearly three years after the acquisition, leading some work in standards development (802.11/Wi-Fi and IETF), continuing the work with our WLAN system, and working to develop new products in the WLAN space. When friends asked how I liked it at Cisco, I told them it was a lot like trying to teach an elephant to dance. I finally decided that being at a large company was not the thing for me, at least not in the long term. While the elephant got the waltz and the nightclub two step, it was never going to do the samba, cha-cha, or salsa. It was just not an up tempo kind of place.
Before Airespace I spent five years as a successful consultant, helping companies to develop standards and understand the strategy involved with standardization. Standards are a very important part of success in technology. That’s a topic for a different blog, though.
Before that, I spent 12 and a half years at AMD, where I got introduced to wireless LANs and 802.11 and managed the product planning and applications group in the High Speed Networks Division. Unfortunately, AMD was a place where there was a tremendous amount of talent and very little management foresight. Essentially, if it wasn’t attached to making the processor beat Intel that quarter, it wasn’t important.
Back in the mists of prehistory I was also a jazz musician and cut a record (yeah, the vinyl kind), I worked in the aerospace industry as a defense contractor designing the precursor to the USB thumb drive, got an engineering degree, told a professor I didn’t need an MSEE bad enough to let him get away with changing my thesis topic after he had my first draft in his hands, and saw much of a top secret project I worked on described in Tom Clancy’s “Hunt For Red October”.
So, that’s me. If you choose to leave a comment below, I hope you will introduce yourself, as well.
Tags: Introduction
