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HOT TOPICS
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
Eric Benhamou & the Turnaround of 3Com (Part 7)
Eric takes over as CEO of 3Com, and as a first item of business, makes some hardline choices. SM: What catalyzed the CEO change at 3Com? EB: The board realized something needed to be done. In 1989, my two partners at Bridge, Bill Caraco and Judy Estren, left out of frustration. They realized this was
The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 6)
Anant identified five significant areas where innovation had to occur for multicore processors to really take off. He addressed each of these areas. Here we discuss the interconnect bottleneck issues in further depth. SM: So you are doing some set of pre-routing on a switch. AA: Exactly. Now that you have a switch on each
Eric Benhamou & the Turnaround of 3Com (Part 6)
After the merger with 3Com, the company faced some significant internal challenges. There were two opposing business strategies, and clearly only one could be followed. This set the stage for Eric, not yet 35 years old, to become the CEO. SM: Was the 3Com merger when Metcalfe was running it? EB: Bill Krause, Metcalfe was
Eric Benhamou & the Turnaround of 3Com (Part 5)
Here Eric details several significant happenings. Not only does he discuss the development of Bridge and the IPO, but also the birth of networking as a recognized market, as well as the merger with 3Com. SM: Where you running Bridge during the IPO? EB: I was not the CEO, but I was one of the
The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 4)
SM: Did you get started because of pressure from the VC’s or did you feel the market was turning? AA: I thought the timing was right in 2004, so we formed the company in October of that year. What is interesting is when I go back and look at the time of our VCs presentations,
Eric Benhamou & the Turnaround of 3Com (Part 4)
SM: You were at Zilog, but their focus was not on networking. EB: Right. We attempted to build a business out of the networking developments. When I say we, I say a few friends who all ended up being significant contributors to the networking industry. They are people like Judy Estrin, Joe Kennedy, Bill Carico,
The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 3)
SM: What came after Alewife and VMW? AA: I did VMW in 1994 – 1995, and in 1996 I came back to MIT. I started the Raw effort in 1996. Looking at processor design, we felt that in another 10 years we would have chips with billions of transistors and we wanted to discover how
Eric Benhamou & the Turnaround of 3Com (Part 3)
SM: Where did you go after Stanford? EB: The first company that offered me a job was Zilog. They were the second microprocessor company in Silicon Valley; Intel was the first one. The inventor of the microprocessor, Federico Faggin had left Intel and founded Zilog. I joined him about 12 to 18 months after he