Creating and Backing Transformative Ventures

From Entrepreneur to Early-Stage Catalyst

Over the course of my career, I’ve been drawn to the entrepreneurial act of turning vision into reality — whether in academic labs or Silicon Valley startups. I’ve co-founded and helped build companies that pushed the boundaries of networking, wireless, and edge infrastructure, often operating in the high-risk, high-reward 0→1 phase. Several of these ventures were acquired by leading industry players, validating early technology bets and accelerating impact. Alongside founding companies, I’ve also played a seed investor and advisor role — often during a company’s formative stage, helping shape early direction, team, and vision. As these companies scaled, I was glad to step back and let professional teams and boards take them forward. My focus has always been on catalyzing early momentum, rooted in systems thinking and conviction around paradigm shifts.

Looking ahead, I remain committed to identifying and nurturing transformative ideas. As we enter the Gen AI era, I continue to be energized by early-stage opportunities that sit at the frontier of technological and human potential. My current focus spans both ends of the AI stack: advancing AI infrastructure that enables the scalable and sovereign deployment of intelligent systems, and building AI-enabled life coaching platforms that support emotional well-being, self-awareness, and human flourishing. These two pursuits — one rooted in systems, the other in the soul — reflect the next chapter of my lifelong journey at the intersection of innovation and impact.

Startups I Co-Founded

✨ Ananki (Acquired by Intel)

Ananki was a nascent startup that was being spun out of Open Networking Foundation to commercialize open source platform Aether: Cloud-managed distributed edge platform with private 5G for Industry 4.0 transformation.

At Intel, I led the engineering team responsible for delivering seven releases of the Edge AI Platform as a software product — a modular, cloud-based multi-tenant platform to manage a large distributed infrastructure and do the full lifecycle orchestration of AI applications at the edge. The platform supported scalable, enterprise-grade deployments across multiple edge environments. Intel later decided to open-source the platform, making it available for the broader community to use and build upon.

✨ Sceos (IPO’d as Ruckus Wireless)

I incubated this company with Gaurav Garg and Zubair Hussain at Sequoia Captial and hired two amazing people: Bill Kish and Victor Shtrom. And they took this venture forward as Ruckus Wireless and the rest is history. Ruckus pioneered carrier-class wireless networking, shaping the WiFi revolution.

✨ Growth Networks (Acquired by Cisco)

Late Jerry Cox, Jon Turner and I started Growth at Washington University in St. Loius based on our 10+ years of research on gigabit networking. Later we joined forces with Ron Bernal and Dan Lenoski and got the company funded and moved to Silicon Valley. Will Eather, Zubin Dittia and Andy Fingerhut joined soon after and that was the whole founding team. 

Growth Networks developed high-performance switching silicon for scalable Internet routers and became a foundation technology for Cisco's flagship router CRS for many years to come.