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.
Omid Tahernia
Omid Tahernia is President and Chief Executive Officer of Tilera Corporation. Mr. Tahernia has 24 years of experience in leading organizations providing systems and semiconductor solutions. Prior to Tilera, he spent three years at Xilinx, where he started as Vice President and General Manager of a newly-created DSP Division in 2004 and later served as Vice President and General Manager of the Processing Solutions Group consisting of DSP, Embedded and IP Divisions. His responsibilities included the business and product strategy for configurable DSP and Embedded processing. Mr. Tahernia served as a member of the Xilinx Executive team during his tenure there. Prior to Xilinx, Mr. Tahernia spent 21 years at Motorola where he began his career in 1984 and worked in both the equipment and semiconductor segments. In his final role at Motorola Semiconductors, from May 2003 to June 2004, he served as Vice President and Director of Worldwide Strategy and Business Development for the Wireless Group. Prior to that, from 1999 to 2003, he served as Vice President and General Manager of the Wireless and Mobile Systems Division driving a $1B wireless chipset business including baseband and application processors. Mr. Tahernia also held various management positions in the Motorola Paging Group including technology, product development, and licensing. His product management responsibilities included serving international markets of Japan, Asia Pacific and China. Mr. Tahernia was recognized for his engineering excellence and received the Motorola Distinguished Innovator and Patent of the Year awards in 1993 and 1994 respectively. Mr. Tahernia holds 13 U.S. patents, a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, and an M.S.EE degree from Georgia Institute of Technology.
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 is the Senior Vice President of Infrastructure Technologies for Broadcom Corporation. As a member of Broadcom's Office of the CTO, Mr. Yousefi leverages his depth of technical expertise to grow Broadcom's network infrastructure product portfolio and guide future product and technology strategies. Formerly, Mr. Yousefi was Senior Vice President and General Manager of Broadcom's Enterprise Networking Group (ENG), where he was responsible for all Ethernet switching, controller and physical layer products, optical solutions, storage products, security and embedded processors. The Group's products and technologies are targeted to service provider, data center, enterprise, small-to-medium-sized business (SMB) and small office/home office (SOHO) markets. End products offered by this Group include Ethernet switches and routers, controllers for network interface cards (NICs) and LAN on motherboard (LOM) solutions for notebooks, desktops and servers; storage silicon solutions, including Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE); and physical layer devices, optical solutions, security and embedded processors for Layer 2 to Layer 7 switches, routers and security appliances - equipment that delivers and manages the flow of voice, video and data services within and across networks. Mr. Yousefi joined Broadcom in March 1994 as Director of Networking Business Unit where Broadcom's Ethernet PHYs and Ethernet Controllers achieved #1 market position under his leadership. Mr. Yousefi became Vice President of LAN Engineering in 2003, and recently served as Vice President and General Manager of Broadcom's PHY and Optical businesses. In July 2007, Mr. Yousefi was elected to the position of Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Enterprise Networking Group. Prior to joining Broadcom, from 1991 to 1994, Mr. Yousefi served as an Engineering Manager at Standard Microsystems Corporation, a networking equipment manufacturer. Prior to Standard Microsystems, he held various engineering positions at Western Digital Corporation, a disk drive manufacturer, and Silicon Systems, a semiconductor company. Mr. Yousefi studied electrical engineering at the University of California, Davis and received a B.S.E.E. from the University of Pacific and his M.S.E.E. from the University of Southern California.