Robert M. Metcalfe

Distinguished Achievement Award

The inventor who grew into the mentor

THE JOB: General Partner, Polaris Venture Partners
THE ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Invented Ethernet local area networking technology; Founded 3Com Corp.; Computer industry pundit; Serves on the boards of Polaris-backed startups including 1366, Ember, GreenFuel, Infinite Power Solutions, Mintera, SiCortex and SiOnyx

“When you have a small company, you don’t want to walk around telling people that you are the founder. You want everyone to be a founder.”

BY JAMES M. CONNOLLY, Associate editor

When he was selected for the Distinguished Achievement Award — honoring his varied tech roles — Robert M. Metcalfe made it very clear: “Even though I’m getting this award, I’m not done yet. Sixty is the new 30. I never plan to retire, ever,” he said.

Bob Metcalfe, 62, accomplished more in his first career than entire companies do in a lifetime. He invented Ethernet. Those colored cables that run from the desktop back to the computer room, the first step toward the Internet — yes, that Ethernet. The invention led him to found 3Com Corp. He moved into publishing as a columnist and author, and then into the world of finance, as a venture capitalist, taking a special interest in alternative energy.

Metcalfe’s entry into technology came through tinkering with gadgets collected by his father. Bachelor’s degrees from MIT led to Harvard University for a master’s in applied mathematics and a Ph.D. in computer science. In the midst of his educational work, he helped link MIT’s computers to the evolving Arpanet.

In 1973, Metcalfe was working at Xerox PARC — the nest for ideas such as the PC, windows and laser printers. “Keep in mind that we were basically building our own tools there for use within Xerox. We were building some of the first PCs there, and I got the job of hooking them together,” he said.

Metcalfe circulated a memo, based on his work with another researcher, outlining the concept of Ethernet. He left to found 3Com in 1979. The patents for Ethernet stayed with Xerox, but the development team convinced the company to issue $1,000 lifetime licenses for the technology without royalties. Three decades later, some 350 million Ethernet ports ship each year. Metcalfe calls “the invention, standardization and commercialization of Ethernet” his greatest tech accomplishment. “It’s astronomically beyond anything I expected it to do.”

Metcalfe is blunt in discussing his success and failures. He publicly ate his words when his prediction of an Internet meltdown never came true. As founder, he ran 3Com’s sales and marketing, but was twice passed over for the CEO position. “In both cases, the company made the right decision. The company grew tremendously after each decision,” he recalled.

In the 1990s, Metcalfe was a self-proclaimed “pundit,” primarily writing for InfoWorld, although he points with particular pride to a 1991 article in Computerworld, which he said was the first to accuse Microsoft Corp. of abusing its monopoly power. “That was the end of my friendly relationship with Bill Gates,” he said.

Today, with Polaris Venture Partners, he has eight companies in his portfolio. As a VC, he puts himself in the place of those entrepreneurs pitching their ideas. “I started my own company. Most VCs haven’t had that experience,” he notes.

His advice to entrepreneurs: “Don’t let your ego get in the way. Even though you are an engineer, you need to respect salespeople. Very often, people have ‘founder’ on their business card. I advise them to stop that. When you have a small company, you don’t want to walk around telling people that you are the founder. You want everyone to be a founder.”

Justin Aborn

Telecom

Mission accomplished for network vet Aborn

THE JOB: Chief scientist, General Compression Inc.
THE ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Managed deployment of BBN’s Defense Simulation Internet; Developed the network architecture of the world’s first Internet service provider, BBN Planet; Served as co-chairman of the FCC’s Network Reliability and Interoperability Council; Lobbied the preserve on unregulated Internet

“(Clean energy) is the new mission. I’m a little worried about the world and the country.”

BY MICHELLE LANG, Associate editor

Justin Aborn still remembers telling his friends about sending an e-mail and getting only blank stares in response. At the time, in the mid-1980s, he worked for BBN Technologies (known at the time as Bolt, Beranek and Newman), where the ARPANET packet switching network laid the foundation for the multiple independent networks that would become the Internet. It was a moment where he knew he was “in an ‘in’ group,” as he said, with a cutting-edge mission. And he was hooked.

“It’s much more fun to have a mission than a job,” Aborn, now 47, said.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College, Aborn took a job as a hardware engineer at BBN.

He started off designing circuit boards and packet switches and eventually found his first mission deploying this hardware into a network. Assigned to work on the Defense Simulation Internet that would help train U.S. Army tank drivers, Aborn orchestrated what he called “the world’s largest video (game)” in which 20 or 30 tanks at a time simulated navigation through battlefields. The packet switches would conduct real-time communication in a defined amount of time between the tanks, in order to avoid collision.

The role broadened his experience in network debugging, router configuration and overall management.

“All these transitions occurred because of a need or crisis,” he said. “You wound up helping a bit, and pretty soon you wound up getting the whole network functioning.”

His ability to reason and communicate calmly and clearly under pressure served Aborn well for his next mission — the Internet.

BBN had launched BBN Planet, one of the world’s largest Internet service providers, eventually sold to GTE. By 1998, Aborn joined BBN Planet’s network architecture group where he says he helped deploy the company’s first asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) to 30,000 phone lines.

After a few years as network traffic cop, Aborn was recruited to serve as a U.S. State Department delegate to two international telecommunications forums and, in 2002, as co-chairman of the Federal Communications Commission’s Network Reliability and Interoperability Council.

Without the benefit of a predecessor, Aborn first explained the concept of peering, the voluntary exchange of network traffic, to the U.S. Then, as a U.S. State Department Delegate to the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation group (APEC), he brought those same skills to Asia Pacific, where he successfully lobbied the World Trade Organization to preserve the Internet’s unregulated mode of business that was working so well.

He credits a deep curiosity for driving this gradual projection of his career.

“One of the nice things the way my career and education worked out,” he said, “I started with bolts and amps, built up to digital circuits, then now network architecture — learning layer by layer and going up the stack, all the way to the top where the stack includes politics… and understanding how it works.”

Now, with his mission in telecom and the Internet accomplished, the Hingham native and current resident has moved on to a role as chief scientist at General Compression, an on-demand wind energy dispatcher.

“This is the new mission,” Aborn said. “I’m a little worried about the world and the country.”

Abigail A. Barrow

Education

Bringing technology from lab to marketplace

THE JOB: Director, Massachusetts Technology Transfer Center at the University of Massachusetts
THE ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Became founding director of MTTC in 2004; Helped fund spinouts like SunEthanol (UMass Amherst), Hepregen (MIT) and Chat Threads (Northeastern University)

“They want their Nobels and they want their big grants, but they also want to see what they’re developing get to industry.”

BY BRENDAN LYNCH, Staff writer

Watching over $5 billion worth of research doesn’t intimidate Abigail Barrow — she enjoys it.

In 2004, Barrow became the founding director of the Massachusetts Technology Transfer Center at the University of Massachusetts president’s office. Barrow came to the MTTC by way of San Diego, where she was the managing director of the William J. von Liebig Center, the University of California San Diego’s tech transfer center. Barrow said UCSD saw tech transfer as a faculty recruitment and retention tool even then.

The tech transfer business has changed since she started in San Diego 20 years ago. She said younger faculty are more likely to accept commercialization than their older colleagues, who have seen commercialization as a conflict with their research mission.

“They want their Nobels and they want their big grants, but they also want to see what they’re developing get to industry,” she said of academia’s younger generation.

When Barrow’s husband got a new job in Massachusetts four years ago, a friend said she should apply for the MTTC job.

“So I did,” she said.

Lately, Barrow has been working on securing new funding for the MTTC, which has spent $3 million of the $4 million funding it got in 2004. She said she’s talking to Beacon Hill — including supporters like Sen. Jack Hart, state Rep. Daniel Bosley, state Secretary of Energy and Environmental affairs Ian Bowles and state Secretary of Housing and Economic Development Dan O’Connell — and showing them what the MTTC has been up to. Barrow said MTTC-funded companies — like SunEthanol Inc. in Amherst and FloDesign Wind Turbine Corp. in Wilbraham — have gone on to raise more than $120 million in new funding since 2004. That multiplier effect leads to companies and jobs being created in the state.

“The model is working,” she said.

It’s also fun. Tech transfer, which Barrow said she got into “by accident” after college, is ultimately a people business. She said she enjoys working with first-time entrepreneurs to make a startup out of interesting research.

“There’s nothing we can do to help Bob Langer with his stuff,” she said, referring to the renowned MIT professor whose patents have been distributed to more than 200 pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device companies.

The MTTC has pulled this off with a staff of two full-time employees (including Barrow) and three part-timers.

One thing she’s concerned about is funding sources — with a deep financial crisis on Wall Street, it’s not an ideal time to be looking for money. Federal funding is drying up and corporations don’t have cash to throw around either, Barrow said, which will affect research and by extension, tech transfer.

“Without basic research being done, you won’t have technology out there,” she said.

Barrow is working with Lt. Gov. Tim Murray, Senate President Therese Murray, and Massachusetts Life Sciences Center CEO Susan Windham-Bannister on efforts to expand trade between the state and Ireland and Northern Ireland.

The Birmingham, England, native, who received her bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and her Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, said moving to Boston four years ago was perfect because it allows more frequent visits to the U.K.

Chris Brogan

Social Media

Social media leader, before it was social media

THE JOB: Vice president, strategy and technology, CrossTech Media
THE ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Started blogging in 1998, before “blog” was even a word. Now his blog is in the top 20 on the Advertising Age Power 150 list and his blog ranks within the top 150 on Technorati.; Co-founder of PodCamp to promote the use of social media technologies throughout the world

“Social media tools are now where e-mail was when it came out; it seems like a toy. Cell phones seemed like toys at first too, but now everyone has one.”

BY BRIDGET BOTELHO, Special to Mass High Tech

Chris Brogan worked in telecommunications for 16 years doing a little of everything: software release engineering, project management, data center planning, and solutions architecture. But none of that stuff ever really flipped his trigger.

Blogging has been Brogan’s thing since 1998, before the term “blog” had developed as the short form of “weblog” and, frankly, before the term “weblog” existed. He kept at it and today, his blog at www.chrisbrogan.com is hugely popular — consistently in the top 20 on the Advertising Age Power 150 list and within the top 150 blogs on Technorati.

“When I started blogging in 1998, there wasn’t even any blog software. It was called journaling. I would take a spreadsheet, make two columns, and would post things on a personal website,” Brogan said.

Brogan began his career working with Nynex, the phone company, in 1989 and moved to Bedford-based BCGI, a wireless telecommunications solutions company, in 1997. In the spring of 2006, Brogan attended Boston University’s Podcast Academy and became even more enthusiastic about social media. Unfortunately, his employer was not.

“I thought it was fun, but no one at my company cared about it, so I decided I needed to do something else,” Brogan said.

He left enterprise behind in 2006 to work on events in Internet video, social media, and social computing technologies at Pulver.com in Melville, N.Y. A year later, Brogan headed back to Massachusetts to join Canton-based CrossTech Media, an events and media company specializing in real time and online experiences.

In 2006, Brogan went to a techie unconference (or unorganized conference) called BarCamp in Boston and connected with Christopher Penn. That year, the two co-created PodCamp, an international unconference series for new-media enthusiasts including bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers, social networkers, and anyone interested in new media.

So far, there have been 46 PodCamp events all over the world where talented minds get together and discuss new media. The events are not for profit and are free to attend, funded through sponsorships. Some events involve fundraising, where tickets can be bought in the name of a charity, Brogan said. For instance, this summer at PodCamp Boston 3, the group raised about $1,000 in cash for the Greater Boston Food Bank.

On the road ahead, Brogan plans to educate as many people as possible about how to use social media not only for fun, but as business tools. “World domination” would also be nice, he said.

“Social media tools are now where e-mail was when it came out; it seems like a toy. Cell phones seemed like toys at first, too, but now everyone has one,” Brogan said. “The way people use social media will change. I am already seeing business adoption of social networks for specific industries, like medicine. (Cambridge-based) Sermo is one example of this.”

Sermo is a professional network where physicians can chat about cases, report unusual events, and work together to impact patient care. It requires M.D. or D.O. credentials to join.

“These social media tools are more than just a fad,” Brogan said.

Bridget Botelho is a freelance writer in North Providence, R.I.

Karen Copenhaver

Legal

A driving force in open source software

THE JOB: Partner, Choate Hall & Stewart LLP
THE ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Co-legal counsel, Linux Foundation; Board member, Center for Women and Enterprise; Named Outstanding Woman Attorney, IP Law360; Honored by Chambers USA, Legal 500 and Massachusetts Super Lawyer

“We are all dependent on each other to create jobs and opportunities for each other. None of us can accomplish anything of
lasting importance alone.”

BY JAY RIZOLI, Special to Mass High Tech

Karen Copenhaver’s law career began at a most opportune time. When the newly minted lawyer joined IBM Corp. as in-house counsel in 1979, evolving anti-trust law had just enabled competitors to do research together, so long as they weren’t collaborating on product development. That began Copenhaver’s passion for open source, or collaborative development.

To hear her tell it, the partner at law firm Choate Hall & Stewart plays just one part in the development of a business model that eases technology development, shortens development cycles, increases quality, reduces costs and creates jobs.

“I was trying to be an art major, and I happened to pick up an economics degree,” says Copenhaver, who initially did major in art at Dickinson College. But economics courses caught her attention, and while she heard plenty about how “girls” didn’t major in economics, take calculus or go to law school, she went ahead and did those things anyway.

At IBM, she fell in love with technology and took the same courses the line workers took. She also picked up a piece of advice that has served her since, when a manager pointed out the sheer volume of employees at the Burlington, Vt., plant and how their families and the community depended so heavily on the success of the IBM plant.

“It was one of the most powerful statements I have ever heard about how our economy actually works,” she said. “We are all dependent on each other to create jobs and opportunities for each other. None of us can accomplish anything of lasting importance alone.”

Copenhaver spent 10 years at IBM and has since been a partner at law firms on both coasts, as well as executive vice president at Black Duck Software Inc. She also is co-legal counsel of the Linux Foundation. She has dedicated herself to sharing information and selling companies on the notion that a collaborative, cooperative model offers value for all involved. She frequently speaks about open source at events, and she participated in a landmark federal case involving open source.

“Open source is just taking the concept of shared resources one step further and seeing that companies can work in a common infrastructure,” she said. “If companies want that infrastructure they’re not going to look to government. Businesses are totally dependent on each other.”

And that’s a model that applies to her own success as well.

“My life is full of heroes, a lot of people who were willing to take a risk with me.”

Some of those heroes:

• Bill Gilbert from Burlington, Vt., who taught her that generosity of spirit is the secret ingredient in great accomplishments.
• Jack Brown in Phoenix, who said the best moments in life are never planned and thus are often missed by those who hesitate.
• Her father, who taught her “the joy of being useful, and that integrity in all things, large and small, is the true measure of a person.”
• And her husband, who “sees life at its most difficult moments, sickness, death, disillusionment, and still, from the bottom of his heart, declares it good. He is the most hopeful person I have ever known.”

Copenhaver says, “All of these people had confidence in me and that confidence made it possible for me to do things that I would never have even attempted to do in the absence of their support.”

Jay Rizoli is a freelance writer in Franklin.

Alexei Erchak

Hardware

At center stage with LED technology

THE JOB: Founder and CTO, Luminus Devices Inc.
THE ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Founded Luminus Devices Inc. in 2002; Worked at Sandia National Laboratories on a “secret” project; Was a member of the improv comedy troupe Another Leg of Lamb

“I have this ‘rule of one.’ You can do one thing outside of family and work, and it used be improv, but now I have run a couple of marathons. I definitely have this competitiveness in me.”

BY RODNEY BROWN, Acting managing editor

To Alexei Erchak, the founder and CTO of Luminus Devices Inc., LED technology is not funny — but most everything else is.

Erchak, who moved to the Hub in 1997 to get his doctorate in materials science and engineering at MIT, decided to break up the mental torture of spending hours in a lab or in class by doing what anyone would do — join an improv comedy troupe.

“During MIT, I spent a lot of time in the lab — you’re in a clean room and there are a lot of things that are not allowed,” he said. “I kind of wanted to do the opposite of that and so I got into improv comedy.”

A stint as a comedian isn’t the only unusual aspect of Erchak’s path to being a tech entrepreneur. Knowing from a young age that he wanted to be a scientist and businessman, Erchak went to college that was not at a traditional feeder school for MIT, but at the liberal arts bastion Skidmore College.

Along with the cost savings that came from the fact that his father was a professor at the college, Erchak says the massive amount of personal attention devoted to him by the two dozen or so members of the science department didn’t hurt either. “There were only two physics majors, and I was one of them,” Erchak said. “If I had the opportunity to do it over again, and I had the chance to go to a traditional engineering school, I wouldn’t take it.”

In between Skidmore and MIT, Erchak spent a summer as an intern at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., working on something he says he can’t really talk about. Back at MIT he attended a talk by physics professor John Joannopoulos on what was at the time an interesting but impractical bit of knowledge — photonic lattices. The LED light went off in Erchak’s head, and he realized that this quirk of physics could be used to create larger and more powerful light emitting diodes.

After getting his Ph.D., Erchak founded Billerica-based Luminus Devices, based on the research into photonic lattices he did at MIT. But it would take years before the company had a product far enough along to entice a major customer. That customer win came in 2007, when South Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. decided to use Luminus’ PhlatLight LEDs to power a line of its digital linear projection (DLP) TVs, foregoing the traditional projection lamp or arc lamp.

Luminus’ large LEDs put out nearly 100 times the light of a standard LED, but retain the power efficiencies of their smaller cousins. This makes them practical for high-power lighting uses, such as theatrical lighting and industrial and commercial building applications. And that is the market Erchak is targeting, by hiring the type of staff needed to meet the needs of those customers.

“Most of our new hires are going into application development — developing the whole ecosystem around the LED,” Erchak said.

While most of Erchak’s time is focused now on developing the business opportunities for Luminus, he is already certain he eventually wants that tag of serial entrepreneur after his name. And if thinking up new companies isn’t enough to fill his time, Erchak, 32, got married this past summer.

“I have this ‘rule of one.’ You can do one thing outside of family and work, and it used be improv, but now I have run a couple of marathons. I definitely have this competitiveness in me.”

Trish Fleming

Community

A shepherd for women and for entrepreneurs

THE JOB: Director, MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge
THE ACCOMPLISHMENTS: First professional director of the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge; Former director of community programs at the YWCA; Co-chair of MHT’s Women to Watch program since its inception

“It drives me crazy that in the MIT $100k or in Enterprise Forum events, most of the entrepreneurs are men.”

BY BRENDAN LYNCH, Staff writer

Trish Fleming moved from helping young women find their way in the community to helping young tech companies find a business model, and now she does a little bit of both.

In Fleming’s years as director, the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge has shepherded companies such as Avid Technology Inc., Brooktrout Technology Inc., Brontes Technologies Inc. and Xobni Corp. She said Xobni’s founders blogged about presenting at the forum, and noted how it was the first time they had talked about their technology to people outside their own age group. The presentation taught them to be more focused on the business, rather than just the technology.

“That’s really what the forum wants to do,” she said.

The MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge, one of 23 chapters around the world, is a nonprofit that helps high-tech entrepreneurs handle the business aspects of their startups. Fleming became the first professional director of the Enterprise Forum of Cambridge 12 years ago. Prior to that, she had been working for the Young Women’s Christian Association as director of community programs during the economic recession of the early 1990s. At the YWCA, Fleming raised money and wrote grants for after-school programs and community programs, which she said prepared her for work at the Enterprise Forum.

When she arrived at MIT, Fleming had received no exposure to the world of technology, venture capital and entrepreneurship.

“I thought, ‘VC’ — I don’t know what that means,” she said, laughing. “I’ll just keep my mouth shut.”

Fleming said she picked things up pretty quickly and found that while those in the MIT crowd were knowledgeable about technology to the point of being daunting, they frequently didn’t know about business. Fleming and the Enterprise Forum help entrepreneurs focus their business plans. She said Avid Technology Inc. founder Bill Warner was about to give up on his technology until he presented at the Enterprise Forum. The forum encouraged him to stick with it, and video-editing giant Avid took off from there.

“That gives people a certain comfort. There is a way to meet in the middle,” she said.

Fleming, who was a child at the time of NASA’s Apollo and Gemini missions and described herself as a “frustrated astronaut wannabe,” has worked on Mass High Tech’s Women to Watch program since its inception five years ago. She said it’s important to recognize female tech talent earlier on in their careers, and encourage them to commercialize their technology, rather than stay in the lab.

Fleming, who said she sees her work on Women to Watch as an extension of her work at the YWCA, cited EMC Corp. and the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory Inc. as organizations who make an effort to promote women to visible roles.

“It drives me crazy that in the MIT $100k or in Enterprise Forum events, most of the entrepreneurs are men,” she said.

The Enterprise Forum is celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2008, and while there’s no gala planned, Fleming said there have been the changes in the tech landscape since the forum started.

“Thirty years ago, there were only a couple VCs. Mass High Tech didn’t exist,” Fleming said. “There was only the Enterprise Forum.”

David Friend

Internet

Launching companies because it’s fun

THE JOB: CEO, Carbonite Inc.
THE ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Co-founded music synthesizer company ARP Instruments Inc.; Sold his next startup, Computer Pictures Corp., to Cullinet Software Inc.; Launched Carbonite Inc. with longtime collaborator Jeff Flowers

“Hanging out with The Who and Stevie Wonder was definitely the most fun.”

BY CHRISTOPHER CALNAN, Staff writer

Entrepreneur David Friend likens a career starting six technology companies to running road races. Sure, one feels the pressure and the jitters before each race, but then a realization strikes that such pressure can be the fuel to finish.

“There’s that pre-race edginess that permeates your life, and you learn to live with it,” Friend says. “And after awhile, you thrive on it.”

Friend, the 60-year-old CEO of Carbonite Inc., a Boston-based developer of online backup for personal computers, planned on becoming an engineer when growing up in Westchester, N.Y. In 1970, he dropped out of graduate school at Princeton University to co-found musical synthesizer developer ARP Instruments Inc. in Newton.

The business required Friend, who had a double major of music and engineering at Yale University as an undergraduate, to travel the country pitching the synthesizer to bands — one of the highlights of a highlight-filled career. “Hanging out with The Who and Stevie Wonder was definitely the most fun,” he says.

After ARP was acquired by CBS Musical Instruments in the late 1970s, Friend co-founded Computer Pictures Corp., a graphics software company.

While at Computer Pictures, Friend recruited eventual business partner on four companies, Jeff Flowers, after reading about Flowers’ programing work at Prime Computer Inc. in Natick. After Computer Pictures was acquired in 1983 by Westwood-based Cullinet Software Inc., Friend didn’t waste time and started business intelligence software maker Pilot Software Inc. in 1984.

“The past is the past,” he says. “I tend to wash these things away and get on with the next thing.”

Pilot was bought by Dun & Bradstreet Corp. in 1994, and Friend’s next thing was FaxNet Corp., a provider of fax-to-e-mail and e-mail-to-fax services, followed by Sonexis Inc., an audio and web conferencing company.

After departing Sonexis in 2003, Friend considered starting a venture capital firm with Flowers and raising a $75 million fund. But the two quickly realized that funding startup companies wouldn’t be as enjoyable as starting them, Friend says.

During four decades in the Boston startup business, Friend said he’s seen important changes, such as increased conservatism of local venture capitalists and the dwindling number of information technology deals, compared with the 1980s and 1990s.

“Boston is transitioning from a big IT center to a biotechnology center,” he says. “I’m OK with that.”

With Carbonite, Friend came upon the online backup idea after he and Flowers had family members who lost photos and music in separate incidents on their PCs. So Friend started his latest metaphorical road race, this one with a name appropriated from “Star Wars.”

Trained as an electrical engineer, Friend explains that he just likes to build “stuff.” But he also readily acknowledges that he also has a little bit of riverboat gambler in his blood, creating an aversion to playing it safe and waiting for long term return on investments.

“I’m just impatient,” he says. “I’ve always liked the high-roller type of deals.” Experience has taught Friend not to overreact when his businesses face problems. It’s just another race to run — and win.

“You know what you need to do,” he say. “You’ve done it before and you give it your best shot.”

Peter Gammel

Electronics

Achievement and a note of caution

THE JOB: CTO, SiGe Semiconductor Inc.
THE ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Led the development of the Lucent bulk acoustic wave resonator, eventually sold to Skyworks Inc.; 26 patents issued; Won the Bell Labs Gold Presidents award as part of the Lambda router team; Worked on the protocol that became 802.11n

“One of the greatest experiences you can have 
is to work on something 
and help build something and see it in use. To walk down 
the street and see someone using it and be able to say 
‘Hey, I was part of that.’”

BY EFRAIN VISCAROLASAGA, Staff writer

Since the 1980s, Peter Gammel, the chief technology officer of SiGe Semiconductor Inc., has consistently been on the leading edge of the semiconductor industry, through both its booms and recessions. During the 1980s and 1990s at Bell Laboratories (and later Lucent Technologies Inc.) he was part of a technology pipeline out of the fabled AT&T labs that brought countless technologies to market.

Today, as CTO at SiGe, Gammel is part of the new generation of technology companies that are building from the ground up without major research centers like Bell Labs. While he and his company have managed to succeed in the atmosphere — under his watch SiGe’s new products have experienced a better than 50 percent annual growth rate over the past three years — he admits that it has become harder to find the cutting-edge technologies on which to build.

“We had a tremendous pipeline at Bell Labs and (today) I am concerned about the stability of that pipeline,” he said. “The scale and influence of those large organizations (such as Bell Labs and IBM) are not there now.”

Today, Gammel uses the network he has built over 25 years in the industry to learn of, and access, the technology he needs to help bring SiGe’s products to market. While he feels the U.S., in general, is under-investing in technology development today, he has helped turn SiGe into one of the region’s most successful fabless semiconductor companies.

The 100-person company counts the likes of Apple Inc., Dell Inc., Cisco-Linksys LLC, Hewlett-Packard Co. and Nintendo Co. Ltd. among its customers. While privately held, SiGe reported $69 million in revenue in 2007, placing it among Deloitte LLP’s Fast 500, Wireless Fast 50, and Technology Fast 50, which is focused solely on New England.

Gammel earned his doctorate in physics at Cornell University after receiving bachelors’ degrees in physics and mathematics at MIT. He spent 16 years at Bell Labs, but he has since built a resume in the startup area. Prior to SiGe, he served as CTO or technology director at Pennsylvania-based Agere Systems Inc. (radio frequency micro-electro-mechanical systems; Lambda routers), New York-based AdvanceNanotech Inc. (nanotechnology) and California-based Renaissance Wireless Inc. (tunable radio frequency acoustic wave filters).

In the startup world, Gammel learned that engineering is important, but that the sales and marketing side of a business can be equally critical to getting product into the consumer consciousness. He attributes that lesson to SiGe CEO Sohail Khan, with whom he also worked at Bell Labs and Agere.

“I was always product and technology focused, but one of my mentors (Khan) was very good at the sales and marketing side,” he said. “For us to understand what each other is doing has been very critical to growing the company.”

While Gammel has worked on technologies for a variety of applications, the ones that stand out are those that have an impact on everyday life, such as the wireless networking technologies he has built, both at Bell Labs and SiGe.

“One of the greatest experiences you can have is to work on something and help build something and see it in use,” he said. “To walk down the street and see someone using it and be able to say ‘Hey, I was part of that.’”

Foster Hinshaw

Information Systems

From tinkerer to data warehouse entrepreneur

THE JOB: President and CEO, Dataupia Corp.
THE ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Won the Clean Air Car Race in 1970 — in a battery-powered AMC Hornet; Invented the term and concept of the data warehouse appliance; Co-founded Netezza Corp. and founded Dataupia Corp.

“What I love about entrepreneurship is that you can create new things, and I think a lot of people don’t realize the opportunities there are to really break out and have some fun. Who wants to go to a job that isn’t fun?”

BY RODNEY BROWN, Acting managing editor

Foster Hinshaw comes by his monicker “Father of the data warehouse appliance” honestly. After all, he both coined the term and helped develop the very concept of combining software and dedicated hardware to creating a plug-and-play device for handling and analyzing a company’s vast amounts of data.

Hinshaw, 60, was fascinated by how things work from an early age, growing up in a section of upper Manhattan called Yorkville. “Even as a kid, I just loved to take clocks apart and phones apart — which is not to say I ever got them back together again,” said Hinshaw, who today is president, CEO and founder of Dataupia Corp.

That curiosity led Hinshaw to an electrical engineering degree from Cornell University, where he discovered electric cars. In 1970 Hinshaw was part of a team from Cornell that entered the first all-battery-powered electric car (a modified 1970 AMC Hornet, no less) into the Clean Air Car Race, a 3,600-mile run from MIT to Caltech in Pasadena, Calif.

After completing a master’s degree at Cornell, Hinshaw, whose goal was to mix technology with business, enrolled in Harvard Business School and received his MBA in 1974.

A stint on the investment side of things followed for a few years. Then Hinshaw, as a self-described “free spirit” decided he could choose where he wanted to live. There were just two criteria — it had to be fun and it had to have business opportunities. “I chose Boston over San Francisco, and I have loved it here ever since,” Hinshaw said.

He jumped from company to company — by his own count, he has worked for at least 20 so far — including director of information systems at Bedford’s Videoguide Inc. and a role with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection.

Hinshaw co-founded Netezza Corp. with its current chairman and CEO, Jit Saxena, in 2000. The company started the data warehouse appliance market, and as the Framingham-based company’s CTO, Hinshaw designed the technology that makes it easier for companies to better handle their customer data — and in the process launched a new category of equipment to the market. Netezza went public last July, raising $108 million.

Eventually, Hinshaw saw that there was still a large market not being served by the existing data products — including Netezza’s — which were mostly focused on large enterprises. So he launched Dataupia Corp. in 2005 to bring an affordable data warehouse appliance to the midsize business market.

The primary function that Hinshaw says his latest company’s technology brings to its customers is flexibility.

“If you want to start a marketing campaign tomorrow, you could do it, as opposed to the six-month lag that you used to have,” Hinshaw said, noting that having easier access to customer data also makes that marketing campaign more focused and less likely to be seen as spam.

When not starting companies — Hinshaw calls himself more of a “parallel entrepreneur” than a serial one — he is out sailing, or flying in his plane to the islands or to his wife’s home state of Maine.

But it is the thrill of entrepreneurship that clearly drives Hinshaw.

“What I love about entrepreneurship is that you can create new things, and I think a lot of people don’t realize the opportunities there are to really break out and have some fun,” he said. “Who wants to go to a job that isn’t fun?”

Paul Maeder

Venture Capital

Entrepreneurship as the happy side of life

THE JOB: Co-founder and general partner, Highland Capital Partners LLC
THE ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Managed implantable artificial heart projects for Novacor Corp.; Developed a visual field examination instrument at Synemed Corp.; Co-founded Highland Capital Partners in 1988

“It will take a long time for the wave of innovation that will step in and be a sequel to the computer revolution.”

BY CHRISTOPHER CALNAN, Staff writer

Paul Maeder grew up in Providence, R.I., with plans of becoming an engineer, building things and starting his own company. His plan came to fruition, just not exactly as he expected. Instead of building just one technology company, Maeder founded Highland Capital Partners LLC, a venture capital firm that has helped build dozens and dozens of them.

During the 20 years since, the firm has grown to become one of the largest VC firms in the country. And Maeder says he’s had the best time imaginable watching his portfolio companies — and the people who start them — give birth to businesses.

“It’s the entrepreneurs — they’re fun to work with,” he says. “It’s like being a pediatrician: You deal with the happy end of life.”

Maeder, 54, entered the venture capital industry in 1984 at Charles River Ventures figuring that it would be a good way to learn about starting a company. But after four years, when the firm was between funds, he took the opportunity to launch Highland Capital with Bob Higgins. The firm now employs 60 workers, operates four offices and has invested in 200 companies.

The 1980s was a much different time for the venture capital world. There were fewer firms, investing was mostly done locally, there was less competition and sector specialization. Such conditions engendered a collegiality marked by monthly VC meetings at the tony Harvard Club in Boston, Maeder said.

“It was a much clubbier industry,” he says. “It’s rewarding to see a niche industry grow to become so global.”

Maeder earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering at Princeton University, a master’s in mechanical engineering at Stanford University and an MBA at Harvard Business School.

Before entering the venture capital industry, Maeder developed a field examination instrument to diagnose visual problems such as glaucoma at Synemed Corp., where he headed the Berkeley, Calif.-based company’s mechanical engineering and software development. Prior to Synemed, he managed several projects in the development of an implantable artificial heart at Novacor Corp., also in Berkeley.

At Highland Capital, the major industry change occurred during the dot–com bubble of the late 1990s when the emergence of the Internet spawned a new sector and myriad business models to capitalize on it.

But the information technology sector has matured, and Maeder is now looking at what the future holds for VC firm investment.

“It’s not clear what the next big thing will be to replace it,” he says. “It will take a long time for the wave of innovation that will step in and be a sequel to the computer revolution.”

Maeder is a member of the executive committee of the board of directors of the National Venture Capital Association. He is also a former director of 30 technology companies and now serves on the boards of 10, including Lincoln-based Avidyne Corp., Waltham’s Bit9 Inc., and Lexington’s Predictive Biosciences Inc.

However, don’t ask Maeder to talk about the highlights of his investing career. He said it would be like picking his favorite child — impossible. Besides, there is no time to look back in VC business.

“The triumphs are fairly short lived,” he says. “There’s not a huge amount time for personal reflection. You have to enjoy the process.”

G. Robert Malan

Networking

Malan sees the threat forest through the trees

THE JOB: Co-founder and CTO, Arbor Networks Inc.
THE ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Worked as a researcher on Mach operating system; Developed ATLAS, global threat level analysis system used by more than 70 percent of the world’s ISPs; Received the ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Award for a groundbreaking paper on Internet routing instability

“If someone is trying to take you down, you have to know about it and be able to do something about it.”

BY JAY RIZOLI, Special to Mass High Tech

In the post-9/11 world, perhaps no word has enjoyed such a usage renaissance as “security.” But before that, Rob Malan was planning a company built around it.

Malan, co-founder and chief technology officer at Lexington-based Arbor Networks Inc., launched the network security provider in 2000 with University of Michigan professor Farnam Jahanian. Today its customers include more than 70 percent of the world’s Internet service providers.

“Our vision of the company was kind of wrapped around saving the Internet from denial-of-service attacks, to be able to flag when something bad was happening and to be able to work together to trace it back,” said Malan, who notes that it took years to sell individual ISPs on an idea that required interdependence and collaboration. “You can’t collaborate until you install it, and then getting them to collaborate once they install it — it’s hard to get carriers to work together,” said Malan, noting that the reactive process involved phone conversations and e-mails among far-flung people who had no knowledge of one another or their companies.

Malan began his career as a researcher on the Mach operating system project at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering. He also holds a master’s degree and doctorate in computer science from the University of Michigan.

Arbor began as an idea when the 1990s — and Malan’s graduate research — were drawing to a close. With a research grant from the U.S. Department of Defense, the founders began to approach venture capitalists for funding, and ultimately transitioned the university technology into Arbor Networks. Once they had the cooperation of the ISPs, Malan created the Fingerprint Sharing Alliance, which enables telecom companies to share attack data automatically and better protect customers and one another from threats.

Malan later worked to develop the Active Threat Level Analysis System (ATLAS), Arbor’s global threat analysis network, and Arbor Peakflow SP, its anomaly detection platform. Eight years after its launch, Arbor has three U.S. offices as well as international locations in France, Germany, Sweden, China, Japan and Korea. Early this year, Arbor acquired Merrimack, N.H.-based traffic management company Ellacoya Networks.

The former teen computer buff — he was writing code and simple programs in his early teens — says his greatest satisfaction is in building things that have an impact, and that impact has increased exponentially as business and communications have become more Internet-driven and -dependent.

“So much of our communications infrastructure was divorced from the Internet and has been pushed onto the Internet,” Malan said. “As the world’s economy and communications infrastructure becomes more dominated by the Internet — telephones, cable TV, mobile phones — the security of those networks has become critical, and saving those is absolutely critical from an availability perspective — so it’s not just security but its twin brother, availability.”

So, he says, in a world of bad intent and an ever-changing threat, the goal is simple: “If someone is trying to take you down, you have to know about it and be able to do something about it.”

Jay Rizoli is a freelance writer in Franklin.

Michael Stonebraker

Software

Setting the foundation for today’s database

THE JOB: CTO and co-founder, Vertica Systems Inc.
THE ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Co-invented INGRES, an early relational database system; Founded six companies including Billerica-based Vertica Systems Inc.; Won the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) lifetime achievement award

“As a researcher, you want your ideas to make a difference and the only way to do that is by commercialization.”

BY CATHERINE WILLIAMS, Special to Mass High Tech

Database pioneer and serial entrepreneur Michael Stonebraker said his career path evolved by chance, and he stumbled upon a career in computer science.

“The technology bug was all accidental. Life is a lot of happenstances,” he said.

Generally recognized as a founding father of relational database systems, Stonebraker founded six companies while maintaining teaching positions at two of the nation’s most prestigious universities. Fond of hiking, bluegrass music and his five-string banjo, Stonebraker said he believes in keeping things simple, especially when dealing with complex database system problems. The “Keep It Simple Stupid” motto is one he’s followed throughout his career. “Always look for simple solutions,” said Stonebraker.

Born in New Hampshire, Stonebraker and his family moved to Newbury at the urging of his father — an engineer — so that Stonebraker and his brothers could attend Governor Dummer Academy.

Stonebraker earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1965. Faced with life decisions, Stonebraker stayed in school and earned a master’s degree and then a Ph.D. in computer information and control engineering from the University of Michigan in 1971.

“It wasn’t planned. It was happenstance,” said Stonebraker.

In 1971, Stonebraker took a job as an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California at Berkeley. He collaborated with professor Eugene Wong to develop a relational database system known as INGRES (Interactive Graphics and Retrieval System). Their work — inspired by research by IBM Corp.’s E.F. Codd — became a platform for modern databases.

Stonebraker’s string of startups began in 1980, with the founding of Ingres Corp. of California, to commercialize the technology he and Wong developed. Stonebraker served as chief technology officer at Ingres.

In 1992 Stonebraker founded California-based Illustra Corp., created to commercialize his next generation of relational database research, the open source POSTGRES, known commercially as PostgreSQL.

In 1997, Stonebraker founded Cohera Corp. — a provider of data federation systems — also in California.

All the while, Stonebraker was teaching at Berkeley, up until 1999. Since 2002, he has served as an adjunct professor at MIT.

Back on the East Coast now, Stonebraker in 2003 founded Lexington-based StreamBase Systems Inc., which specializes in software to analyze large amounts of data for the federal government, capital markets and the telecommunications industry. In 2005, Stonebraker founded Billerica-based Vertica Systems Inc., which develops analytic database management systems.

His latest venture, Byledge Inc., is in stealth mode. Stonebraker declined to detail the technology behind the company named after the street in New Hampshire where he lives.

In 2005 Stonebraker won the John von Neumann Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for lifetime contributions to computer science. Yet he understands how important his contributions to the business of technology are.

“As a researcher, you want your ideas to make a difference and the only way to do that is by commercialization,” said Stonebraker.

Catherine Williams is a freelance reporter in Boston.

Mitchell Tyson

Energy

From the oil embargo on, Tyson has been green

THE JOB: CEO, Advanced Electron Beams Inc.
THE ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Led PRI Automation through an initial public offering, six acquisitions and eventual sale to Brooks Automation Inc.; Co-founder of the New England Clean Energy Council

“After 20 years in the clean energy industry, on one side it’s kind of discouraging because we haven’t made much progress. On the other hand, I think now, both people and politicians finally get it, and that’s encouraging.”

BY EFRAIN VISCAROLASAGA, Staff writer

Advanced Electron Beams Inc. CEO Mitch Tyson was involved in clean tech long before it was termed as such. As a legislative assistant to U.S. Rep. Paul Tsongas during the oil crisis of the 1970s, he spent many hours discussing the state of energy and environmental concerns with the democratic senator. Even after leaving Washington, D.C. in 1984, he continued to be active in the alternative energy community, eventually landing at Advanced Electron Beams and helping to create the New England Clean Energy Council.

Looking at the recent explosion in clean technology, energy awareness and the “greening” of almost every industry, Tyson looks back on the past two decades with conflicted feelings.

“After 20 years in the clean energy industry, on one side it’s kind of discouraging because we haven’t made much progress,” he said. “On the other hand, I think now, both people and politicians finally get it, and that’s encouraging.”

Unlike the oil crisis of the ’70s, which spurred a swell of interest in alternative energy technologies that, in hindsight, was somewhat temporary, Tyson believes the activity today is here to stay.

The sustainability of that movement is one of the things that brought Tyson to AEB. After 15 years at PRI Automation, where he rose to the position of CEO at the $300 million semiconductor manufacturing equipment maker, Tyson consulted at several local companies, landing on the board of directors of Salem, N.H.-based strained silicon developer AmberWave Systems Corp. and Brookfield, Conn.-based lithography technology developer Photronics Inc. During that time he also got a call from associates at venture firm Atlas Venture, who asked him to help do some due diligence on a startup working on electron beams, or e-beams.

“To be honest, I initially wasn’t interested in going to AEB, but while helping with the due diligence, I fell in love (with the company),” he said. “It was a chance to really change industry, as well as build a corporate culture from the ground up.”

Since joining AEB in 2005, Tyson has helped the company raise more than $34 million in private funding, including a recent strategic round with GE Energy Financial Services. The company has brought its electron beam technology to market, and has penetrated several industries, including the pharmaceutical, food and beverage packaging and industrial coatings industries.

AEB’s e-beam technology features an emitter that uses a stream of negatively charged particles, projected at high speeds, to initiate chemical reactions or break chemical bonds. Executives at AEB hope the system can make an impact in the “greening” of industrial processes that traditionally use large amounts of heat, power, water or potentially harmful chemicals.

Tyson remains on the boards of AmberWave and Photronics, and also chairs the CEO committee for the New England Clean Energy Council, which he co-founded. He is also active in a number of other organizations, including serving on the executive and governing boards of the John Adams Innovation Institute, the Mass High Technology Council Board, UMass High Tech Executive Council, and the Massport Security Advisory Council.

Susan Windham-Bannister

Life Sciences

Destined to work in health care

THE JOB: President and CEO, Mass. Life Science Center
THE ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Initiated the Landmark Sciences Talent Initiative Workforce Study; Consultant on the Clinton Task Force on Health Reform; Led life sciences “listening tour”; Ford Foundation Fellow

“Business has to work in a world of policy, but policy shouldn’t be created in a vacuum.”

BY STEPHEN DESANTIS, Staff writer

When Susan Windham-Bannister learned that she had been picked out of a list of 200 candidates to head the newly created Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, she was overjoyed because she knew she had amassed the right combination of policy, business and life science experience but surprised at the breadth of the pool of applicants.

“When I was invited to interview for the position, I had no idea how exhaustive the search was. I was truly shocked when I found out. It made me feel extremely honored to have been chosen,” she said.

The appointment was the challenge of a lifetime, she said, given Gov. Deval Patrick’s $1 billion life science pledge gave. The agency took shape with the funding and hit the ground running with Windham-Bannister’s hiring in June with a war chest to help invest in the dynamic life sciences industry.

Born in St. Louis, she is the daughter of a physician and grew up in a medically minded household. Her brother is also a doctor and served at the Centers for Disease Control.

“I wasn’t by inclination a scientist, but I knew pretty early on that I was really interested in working in health care,” she said.

In 1972, only months after earning a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Wellesley College, she was made director of a social services unit at the Mary Mahoney Neighborhood Health Center in Boston. Deciding to pursue her growing interest in health policy, she went on to gain her Ph.D. from Brandeis University’s Florence Heller School for Advanced Studies in Public Policy in 1977.

The career that followed allowed her to collaborate with just about every aspect of the life sciences industry. It gave her a deep background in public policy, 20 years of commercial strategy experience and a history of working with pharmaceutical, biotech, medical device and diagnostic companies. She co-authored two books, including “Competitive Strategy for Health Care Organizations.”

“I think that was one of the things that was appealing about me as a candidate and why I am taking such a broad perspective at this job,” Windham-Bannister said.

After receiving her Ph.D., Windham-Bannister joined Abt Associates, which began as a large public policy think tank.

In a post-doctoral fellowship at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in the Institute of Politics, she focused on incentive structures in the managed-care area. She next became a management consultant, working closely with clients like the New England Medical Center, Beth Israel Hospital and Rockefeller University Medical Center. She worked alongside health care luminaries like John Kingsdale, now CEO of Mass Health Connector and Dr. Mary Jane England, now president of Regis College.

In 1985, Windham-Bannister returned to Abt Associates to help the organization create a new health-focused commercial business. There she worked with leading life science companies such as Genzyme and Pfizer.

She led a team that built “from scratch” the firm’s Life Sciences Division, which eventually spun off to become Abt Bio-Pharma Solutions.

Her rich knowledge of the life sciences sector, business strategy, and politics shaped the unifying philosophy she carries with her today.

“Business has to work in a world of policy, but policy shouldn’t be created in a vacuum. We want to manage the public good, but that is also tied together with how well our economic engine is performing,” she said.