Board of Directors
Anant Agarwal
Anant Agarwal is the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Tilera Corporation, a professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at MIT, and a member of the CSAIL Laboratory. His teaching and research interests include computer architecture, VLSI, compilation, and software systems. Dr. Agarwal served as Associate Director of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) between 1998 and 2003, and is a co-leader of the Oxygen Project. He led a group that developed Sparcle (1992), an early multithreaded microprocessor based on the SPARC architecture, and the Alewife machine, a scalable shared-memory multiprocessor (1993). At MIT's CSAIL laboratory, Dr. Agarwal led the Raw project which developed a tiled multicore microprocessor for instruction level parallelism (ILP) and streams (2002). Dr. Agarwal also led the VirtualWires project at MIT. He has been a founder of several successful start-ups, including Virtual Machine Works, Inc. (1993). Dr. Agarwal won the Maurice Wilkes prize for computer architecture in 2001, the Presidential Young Investigator award in 1991, and the Louis D. Smullin Award for teaching excellence at MIT in 2005. Dr. Agarwal holds a Bachelor Degree from IIT Madras and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.
Rob Chandra
Rob Chandra is a Managing Partner in Bessemer's Menlo Park office. Since entering the venture capital industry in 1996, he has been involved with 19 early-stage investments that have gone public or have been acquired by public companies. Mr. Chandra is the founding managing partner of the firm's investment practice in China and India. Over his career, Mr. Chandra has helped build companies in a variety of industries. He was involved with communications equipment ventures such as Altiga (acquired by Cisco) and NBX (acquired by 3Com). He has experience with semiconductor investments such as Envoy (acquired by TI), LightLogic (acquired by Intel), Mellanox (IPO), and Mobilian (acquired by Intel). Mr. Chandra has been involved with consumer internet start-ups such as BuyerZone.com (acquired by Reed Elsevier), Direct Hit (acquired by Ask Jeeves), SmarterKids.com (IPO), MotherNature.com (IPO) and Centra (IPO). Prior to joining Bessemer, Mr. Chandra was a general partner with Commonwealth Capital Ventures, which he joined after 10 years of industry experience. Previously, Mr. Chandra spent three years with Accenture working in their San Francisco, London, and then New York offices where he served financial services and high tech clients. Mr. Chandra holds a BA from University of California at Berkeley and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Phil Herget
Phil Herget joined Columbia Capital in 1992 and focuses primarily on media and communications investments, both services and technologies. He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of Avail Media, Hatteras Networks, Hillcrest Laboratories, and Imagine Communications. Former Columbia portfolio companies that Mr. Herget managed include Altiga Networks (acquired by Cisco Systems), Call Technologies (acquired by 3Com), Columbia Spectrum Management (acquired by P-Com), NMP (acquired by AppNet / Commerce One), Ocular Networks (acquired by Tellabs), Riverbed Technologies (acquired by Aether Systems), Saville Systems (NASDAQ: SAVLY subsequently acquired by ADC Communications), Taqua (acquired by Tekelec), Telular (NASDAQ: WRLS), and Torrent Networking Technologies (acquired by Ericsson). In 1993, Mr. Herget joined Telular Corporation as its Chief Financial Officer where he led the company through an initial public offering, returning to Columbia Capital in 1994. Prior to joining Columbia Capital, he served in various financial management positions for Energy Service Company, Energy Insurance International, Marsh & McLennan, and Lloyd's of London broker C.T. Bowring & Co. in London, England. Mr. Herget received his B.A. from the University of Virginia and his M.B.A. from Kenan-Flager Business School at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Devesh Garg
With more than 23 years' experience across a wide range of industries, Mr. Devesh Garg has invested in, advised, and managed companies across all stages of development and geographies. Most recently, he lived in India for three years as Managing Director of Bessemer Venture Partners India investing in wide range of companies prior to returning to the United States. He joined Bessemer as an Operating Partner in 2003 advising and managing portfolio companies. Mr. Garg has also been closely involved in managing and advising Bessemer's investments in Avnera, Berkeley Design Automation, Azanda (acquired by Cortina), K2 Optronics (acquired by Emcore), PA Semi (acquired by Apple Computer), Applied Solar Technology and NetAmbit. He has made a number of personal investments in real estate, as well as in technology and internet companies including Sibyte (acquired by Broadcom), PA Semi (acquired by Apple), Avnera and Maginatics. Before he came to Bessemer, Mr. Garg was General Manager of the Security Business Unit at Broadcom (Nasdaq: BRCM), where he was part of the pre-IPO team and established their offices in Northern California. With executive management responsibilities for technical sales and field application engineering, he led his division to ~$500 million in annual revenues from nothing as the company grew from a start-up to its peak market capitalization of approximately $72 billion. Mr. Garg also serves on the Board of Directors of Fractal Analytics, Copal Art and Sunil Hitech (BSE: SHEL).
Lip-Bu Tan
Lip-Bu Tan is Founder and Chairman of Walden International, a leading venture capital firm managing over $1.9 billion. He concurrently serves as President and Chief Executive Officer of Cadence Design Systems, Inc., and has been a member of the Cadence Board of Directors since 2004. Lip-Bu invests primarily in industries relating to semiconductor/components, alternative energy, and digital media. He also serves on the Boards of Flextronics International (NASDAQ: FLEX); SINA (NASDAQ: SINA); and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (NYSE: SMI; HKSE: 981). During his tenure at Walden, he made investments in Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment Corporation; Ambarella, Inc.; Aptina Imaging, Inc.; Beceem Communications; Inphi Corporation; Pervasive, Inc.; Silicon Mitus; Telegent Systems; Tilera Corporation; Premisys Communication, S3, Centillium (NASDAQ: CTLM), Endwave (NASDAQ: ENWV), Integrated Silicon Solutions Inc. (NASDAQ: ISSI), Leadis Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: LDIS), Network Peripheral, and Unisem (KLSE: UNI).
Lip-Bu received his B.S. from Nanyang University in Singapore, his MBA from the University of San Francisco, and his M.S. in Nuclear Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Additionally, Lip-Bu serves on the College of Engineering Advisory Board at University of California (UC) Berkeley, the School of Engineering Dean’s Council at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), the Board of Directors of the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA), the School of Engineering Dean’s Advisory Board and the Visiting Committee for the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as a Trustee of Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore, on the Regent College Board of Governors, and as Trustee of the San Francisco Opera. Lip-Bu has been ranked amongst the Top 10 Venture Capitalists in China by Zero2ipo and the Top 50 Venture Capitalists on the Forbes Midas List.
Nariman Yousefi
Nariman Yousefi previously was a founding member and senior executive at Broadcom Corporation Networking group since 1994, where he was instrumental in establishing Broadcom as the leading supplier of Ethernet ICs. During this time he was responsible for a rich portfolio of networking products including Optical and Copper physical layer ICs (PHYs), WAN/Metro/SMB/Enterprise switches, Ethernet controllers and communication processors. While at Broadcom, he held multiple executive roles including Senior VP and General Manager of the Enterprise Networking Group and Senior VP of Infrastructure Technologies. Prior to joining Broadcom, Mr. Yousefi held engineering management positions with Standard Microsystems and Western Digital Corporation. Mr. Yousefi studied electrical engineering at the University of California, Davis and received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pacific and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California.