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John Cioffi, ASSIA
John M. Cioffi is Chairman and CEO of ASSIA Inc, a Redwood City, CA based company pioneering DSL management software sold to DSL service providers, specifically known for introducing Dynamic Spectrum Management or DSM. He is also the Hitachi Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, where he held a tenured endowed professorship before retiring after 25 full-time years. John received his BSEE, 1978, Illinois; PhDEE, 1984, Stanford; Honorary Doctorate, University of Edinburgh 2010; Bell Laboratories, 1978-1984; IBM Research, 1984-1986; EE Prof., Stanford, 1986-present. John also founded Amati Com. Corp in 1991 (purchased by TI in 1997 for its DSL technology) and was officer/director from 1991-1997. At Amati, John designed the worlds first ADSL and VDSL modems, which design today accounts for roughly 98% of the worlds over 300 million DSL connections. John is an inventor on the basic patents on the widely licensed ADSL design, VDSL, Dynamic Spectrum Management, and vectored DSLs.
John currently is also on the Board of Directors of Alto Beam, Teranetics, and ClariPhy. He is on the advisory boards of Focus Ventures, Wavion, SiTune, and Quantenna. Various other awards include IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal (2010), International Marconi Fellow (2006); Member, United States National Academy of Engineering (2001); International Fellow United Kingdom’s Royal Academy of Engineering (2009); IEEE Kobayashi Medal (2001); IEEE Millennium Medal (2000); IEEE Fellow (1996); IEE JJ Tomson Medal (2000); 1999 U. of Illinois Outstanding Alumnus and 2010 Distinguished Alumnus. John has published several hundred technical papers and is the inventor named on over 100 additional patents, many of which are heavily licensed in the communication industry.
Irwin Federman, US Venture Partners (USVP)
Irwin Federman, who joined USVP as a General Partner in April 1990, was President and CEO of Monolithic Memories, Inc. (MMI) from 1978-1987. Under Irwin’s leadership, MMI grew from virtual bankruptcy to $250 million in revenues during his nine-year tenure as CEO, culminating in a merger with AMD where Irwin became Vice Chairman. Irwin was two-term Chairman of the Semiconductor Industry Association, has served on the Board of Directors of the National Venture Capital Association, and served two terms on the Dean’s Advisory Board of Santa Clara University. As CEO at Monolithic Memories, Irwin initiated MMI investments in such highly successful venture capital start-ups as Cypress Semiconductor, Xilinx and Altera. As a professional venture capitalist, Irwin was a founding lead investor in Crescendo Communications, Power Integrations, SanDisk, TelCom Semiconductor, Resumix, CheckPoint Software, MMC Networks, Centillium Communications, Netro, Nuance Communications and QuickLogic. He is presently Vice Chairman of SanDisk and serves on the Boards of CheckPoint Software, Mellanox and several privately-held companies. Irwin received a B.S. in Economics from Brooklyn College and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Engineering Science from Santa Clara University. He is a recipient of the Anti-Defamation League’s Torch of Liberty Award, and the Brotherhood Award from the National Conference of Community and Justice, and has been installed in Junior Achievement’s Silicon Valley Hall of Fame.
Steven Goldberg, Venrock Associates
Steven Goldberg is currently an Executive-In-Residence at Venrock Associates. He currently sits on the boards of Teranetics, Quantenna, and Newport Media.
Prior to joining Venrock he led, as CEO, a number of early stage companies including DataRunway, Vidient, Arcwave, and CoWave Networks. His general management and technical experience have been focused in the telecommunications and wireless markets. He was also Vice President of Research and Development at Nokia Internet Communications and VP and GM of the Wireless Communications Division at Cylink Corporation, which, after going public, was later sold to P-Com. Additionally, he has held senior management and engineering positions at Trimble Navigation and Hewlett Packard.
Steve holds a Ph.D. E.E. from the University of California at Santa Barbara and M.S.E.E. and B.S.E.E degrees from Washington University in St Louis, Mo. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, and a past president of the IEEE Communications Society, Santa Clara Section.
Sanjay Kasturia, Teranetics
Sanjay Kasturia has more than 20 years of experience in the communications industry. Sanjay was editor-in-chief of the 10GBASE-T standard. Before starting Teranetics, Sanjay co-founded Airgo Networks, now part of Qualcomm, which developed wireless LAN ICs that significantly increased the range and reliability of networks using multi-antenna signal processing technology. Prior to Airgo Networks, Sanjay was the Vice President of Engineering at Iospan Wireless developing technology for non-line-of-sight broadband access.
Sanjay has previously served as Vice President Advanced Technology at Raychem's Telecommunications, Energy and Industrial Division, focusing on telecommunications and access network electronics. Before Raychem, Sanjay was at Lucent Technologies as R&D Director for its Global Wireless Products Group and earlier as head of Wireless Technology Research for Bell Laboratories. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (Kanpur) and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.
Nersi Nazari, Teranetics
Nersi Nazari is a veteran semiconductor professional with over 20 years of experience in design, management, business development and venture funding in the communications industry. He holds a doctorate in EE from the University of Colorado and has been awarded eight US patents.
Nersi served in R&D positions at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and Seagate Technology, prior to joining GEC Plessey Semiconductor as Chief Technologist in 1994. Nersi joined Marvell Semiconductor in 1997 as the founding VP of Signal Processing Technology. At Marvell, he introduced the company’s first Trellis Coded Modulation-based read channel chip, the first SOC solution as well as the industry’s first sub-two Watt 1000Base-T Gigabit Ethernet chip. These products were key to the company’s successful IPO in June 2000 and have since grown to over $1 billion in annual revenue.
Joe Kellman, Granite Global Ventures
Joel Kellman is a co-founder of GGV Capital. Previously, he was a founder and longtime partner of the Silicon Valley law firm, Fenwick & West LLP. Joel co-managed Fenwick & West's investments in early stage high technology companies from 1982 to 2000, when he left Fenwick & West to launch GGV Capital. Joel also co-founded KLM Capital, a cross-border venture capital fund, and Utah Ventures.
He is GGV's Board representative for its investments in Intarcia Therapeutics and 2Wire. Joel was formerly GGV's Board representative for Agility (acquired by JDS Uniphase), QPass (acquired by Amdocs), Biosensors (SGX: B20.SI), Xenoport (NASDAQ: XNPT) and Oculex (sold to Allergan).
Joel is a graduate of SUNY Binghamton and St. John’s University Law School and received an LLM in Foreign and Comparative Law from New York University.
Outside of GGV, Joel sweats through bikram yoga and skies in Deer Valley. He continues to be active with Onevoice, a Palestinian-Israeli peace organization and is also a Senior Advisor to the Institute for Asia and Asian Diasporas of Binghamton University. He also is on the Advisory Board of the Jacobson Leadership Program in Law and Business at NYU Law School.
Vijay Parikh, Global Catalyst Partners
Vijay C. Parikh (Managing Principal) was Vice President and General Manager within the Public Carrier IP Group (PCIPG) at Cisco. During his tenure he was responsible for developing and introducing the 10G solution on the 12416 GSR platform, which resulted in the sales growth from $400 million in FY 1998 to several billion dollars FY in 2001.
Vijay was President and CEO of StratumOne Communications, a leading developer of framers and layer 2/3 engines for 10G solutions in high-end routing/switching applications. StratumOne was funded by Sequoia Capital, Brentwood Capital, Institutional Venture Partners, and Redwood Ventures. Cisco Systems acquired StratumOne on September 20, 1999 representing its most expensive private acquisition at that time.
Prior to StratumOne, Vijay was VP/GM of the Wireless Communications Division (WCD) at Conexant where he grew it from a non-revenue position to a $180 million business at the time of his departure. WCD had programs in all of the key wireless technologies including GSM, CDMA, TDMA, Spread Spectrum, PHS, DECT and PDC. Prior to that he held several VP/GM positions at Conexant including those for the Personal Computing Division (PCD) which involved programs in software modems, PC audio and xDSL and the Global Positioning System (GPS) division which had programs focused on the integration of multi-channel GPS with wireless data systems including those for ARDIS, CDPD and Mobitex. He also held several management positions at Conexant in its Japanese Operations facility.
Vijay earned a BSEE from the Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences in India and an M.B.A from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.