Serial Entrepreneurship in Pittsburgh: Ron Bianchini’s Amazing Journey (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: We can go on and on about Computer Science, but what did you do after Carnegie Mellon?

Ron Bianchini: I graduated in 1989. They asked me to stay on as a professor. So, I stayed on and taught. I very much enjoyed Computer Engineering. When my dad was at NYU and even when I was getting my degree, universities were all about publishing. You went to corporations and they were panting and protecting their IP. In universities, it’s all about public source and getting things out to a public domain.

When I was a teacher, universities were just catching on. Stanford became very famous for their tech transfer. CMU had just started tech transfer offers. I and another professor wrote a patent on an ATM switch. It was mildly successful. We were able to write licenses for $2 million. Basically, the tech transfer offers were just starting.

The Lycos guys came out of Computer Science and they got license money 20 times of what we did. All of a sudden, we got pushed to the back burner. We were there during the university’s transition from public domain to tech transfer.

Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking now?

Ron Bianchini: In 1989, I started teaching. I left in 1996. This is probably happening around 1994.

Sramana Mitra: That’s just when the Internet was starting to become mainstream.

Ron Bianchini: It was when universities were moving into a much more modern style of commercialization of IP.

Sramana Mitra: Did you start a company with the IP?

Ron Bianchini: We assigned the first patent to the university. In 1996, we came up with an idea for another patent. We hadn’t done any research on this yet and hadn’t really used any university resources. We talked to the tech transfer about it. They said, “This is really up to you. You own the IP right now. You can assign it to the university or if you want to do something with it, you can.” We both took a sabbatical and started a company.

The name of the company was called Scalable Networks. It was a large scalable Ethernet switch. We put the second patent into the company. We had the university’s blessings. The funny thing was, we ran that company for a year. In one year’s time, we were acquired by a number of other CMU professors and researchers including an ex-student. After the acquisition, they made me report to my ex-student as kind of an ironic joke.

Sramana Mitra: That’s cute. All of this was happening around CMU?

Ron Bianchini: Have you heard of FORE Systems?

Sramana Mitra: Yes.

Ron Bianchini: They were a big company. FORE stands for Francois, Onat, Robert, and Eric. Eric was a professor in Computer Science. Onat and Robert were research programmers and Francois was a PhD student in Computer Engineering. He wasn’t a student in my class, but I was on his PhD qualifying committee. I qualified him for his PhD and then he left immediately after to go start his company.

Sramana Mitra: Then acquired yours.

Ron Bianchini: Yes.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Serial Entrepreneurship in Pittsburgh: Ron Bianchini’s Amazing Journey
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