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 that SONET had that Ethernet did not have was reliability and redundancy. >>>

Deal Radar 2009: Mytopia

You read my Recession Entrepreneurship column on Friday focusing on business ideas that required little or no investment to build up. In this installment of the Deal Radar, we profile a company that has been able to build a $1 million-plus revenue stream in the field of social gaming without raising much financing. >>>

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. >>>

Do You Want To Be Rich, Or Be the King?

By Guest Author Tony Scott

Over the past twenty-plus years I’ve been working with and advising start-ups, I have often been asked by boards to have “a talk” with entrepreneurs about “potentially” bringing in new leadership. Yes, even experienced boards often run from confrontation with entrepreneurs, because building consensus is typically how boards work – not direct confrontation. So, it’s often easier to use an outsider to be the messenger to bring that bad news, in case the messenger gets shot! >>>

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. >>>

Redesign That: Online Personal Finance (Part 7)

By guest authors Charles W. Bush and Kathy Hwang of 3Strand Innovation, a brand experience consultancy.

Over these past few weeks, we’ve taken a quick look at:
(1) the core value proposition behind money management
(2) a market landscape analysis of online personal finance services, and
(3) opportunities to improve the user experience and engage users in social networking (using Wesabe.com as our candidate for redesign). >>>

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 that. >>>

Bullish On ERII

After disappointing results for last quarter, Energy Recovery Inc (ERII) beat the market’s expectations this quarter, and the company gave a positive outlook for the coming quarters. For an in-depth look at the global water crisis and business opportunities therein, read Dominique Trempont’s Water Shortages: Opportunities for Entrepreneurs. >>>