Billions In The Bubble: Siara CEO Vivek Ragavan (Part 6)

SM: You moved on from Redback in May of 2001. What came next? VR: I joined Atrica, which was about Ethernet. When I was at Redback a lot of us were talking about how Ethernet was going to dominate and that SONET would transition into an Ethernet network. Ethernet was already data-centric. The only thing

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Billions In The Bubble: Siara CEO Vivek Ragavan (Part 5)

SM: How is it that Siara knew the gaps in the Cisco architecture? VR: Ravi came from Cisco, and what really enticed him to come was the chance to build a new routing architecture. His expectation was that it would have all kinds of advantages over the Cisco IOS architecture.

Billions In The Bubble: Siara CEO Vivek Ragavan (Part 4)

SM: Who was on was your team at Siara? VR: Dave Stiles was the CTO. Mike Yamamura came over from AMD where he ran ASIC development. We had a great software team. We hired Ravi Chandra from Cisco, and he built the whole routing team.

Billions In The Bubble: Siara CEO Vivek Ragavan (Part 3)

SM: What was the plan to follow on and build upon Fiberlane? VR: In the 1980s and 1990s there was a thing called SONET, which was a standard to carry signals over the fiber networks. It was designed for voice transmission. The Internet required a transition to data transmission. SONET was not initially designed for

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Billions In The Bubble: Siara CEO Vivek Ragavan (Part 2)

SM: Where was this based? VR: I took a VP of Engineering role in Pennsylvania. Cable networks were changing while I was there, from pure video signals to data signals.

Billions In The Bubble: Siara CEO Vivek Ragavan (Part 1)

Vivek Ragavan is the president and CEO of Siara. He has over 20 years of high-tech experience primarily in telecommunications. Prior to Siara he was president of the Residential Broadband Group of ADC Telecommunications, where he was responsible for $300 million telecommunication equipment businesses. He also led development of General Instrument’s leading digital video transport

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I Want To Change TV: Mitch Berman, CEO of ZillionTV (Part 7)

SM: You are going for the real idiot-proof user model. TiVo is not idiot-proof. MB: You are starting to hit it! The viewer experience is key. Search is a key component of the overall user experience. The ability for a human being to get the ads she is interested is something new. It is win-win

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I Want To Change TV: Mitch Berman, CEO of ZillionTV (Part 6)

SM: In terms of an investment thesis, how many millions of dollars has ZillionTV raised? MB: Not going to be speaking to that right now.