Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Anurag (Anu) Nigam, President, Sand Hill Angels (Part 1)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold This is the fortieth interview in our series on financing for entrepreneurs. I am talking to Anurag (Anu) Nigam, president of Sand Hill Angels, which is an angel investing group in Silicon Valley with more than 60 members. Anu is also the founder and CEO of BuzzBox,

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Billions In The Bubble: Siara CEO Vivek Ragavan (Part 7)

SM: Was Atrica focused on service providers as well? VR: We were focused on helping businesses get broadband services like high-speed data. We thought Ethernet would be driven by the broadband requirements of businesses and homes and expected that businesses would come first, which indeed happened.

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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