I guess I have always been a big geek (See my high school graduation photo above, bottom right) . I grew up in a rural town in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, and my high school was a small one and didn’t have an AV club, but if it did, I am sure I would have been its president. I started playing with computers in 1979, in a math class taught by Mr. McCoubrie - a teacher who had a huge impact on me. At this rural high school I attended, he somehow managed to get a Wang vacuum tube computer and a few of us were learned to program it. We also programmed Radio Shack TRS-80’s and TI 51 programmable calculators. When I applied to colleges in 1981, I was determined to study computer science and ended up at The University of Vermont.

UVM in the 1980’s was a great place to study CS - we were sponsored by IBM, AT&T, DEC and others, which gave us a lot of computing power for a small university. I took a job at Bell Labs in Whippany NJ, in 1986 and went there to develop secure networking systems for department of defense customers (“I can tell you but then I’d have to kill you” kind of work). I liked the people I worked with, but not the context of the work. The project was mired in the bureaucracy that any defense-type work has to be (I guess), but I didn’t like the pace or politics at all and left in 1989. The most fun I had there was a 7 month assignment at a sister-site in Chicago, where I wrote and implemented TCP-IP, way before you could download the code from SourceForge.

I moved to Boston and joined an networking equipment startup called Chipcom, intending to stay for a year, while I hung out with friends before heading to Georgetown for law school. Six weeks into Chipcom, I called Georgetown and told them I wasn’t coming. Chipcom was a magical place and the team was brilliant, motivated and fun. Several of us joined to start a new program called OnLine (and yes we had a trademark on the name!) that was among the first enterprise network systems. We grew the revenues for OnLine from $0 to $300m over the next five years and Chipcom went public in 1991. The team went from about 65 when I arrived to more than 1000 by the time I left in 1995. At Chipcom I started as a software engineering developing bridging and routing software. As the company grew I was promoted to a manager and started a group that developed new products based technology licensed into Chipcom (from Cisco, Wellfleet, others) and developed products for licensing out (IBM, DEC, Ascom TimePlex, others). In my last role I led a skunk-works effort to build one of the first hardware-based Ethernet switches in the industry. Ultimately, as much as I loved Chipcom, it got too big and I started to see glimpses of the politics of Bell Labs - and it was time to go.

I had such a great time when Chipcom was very small that I wanted to learn other aspects of the business - namely marketing and strategy - that would help me learn how to start my own company from square one. So I went back to Harvard Business School to get my MBA, beginning in Sept 1994, while finishing up some tasks at Chipcom. HBS was a great time and I had the fortune to learn from amazing professors and incredible students.

During my first year of business school the Internet v1.0 was taking form, and a group of investors contacted me and put me together with a fantastic entrepreneur named Dave Rae. They gave us seed money, with the goal for us to create an Internet business they could fund. After a few missteps (looked into selling US state lottery tickets over the web, which would have been very profitable, and very illegal) we came upon the idea of starting the Yahoo! for video and computer games. I found a team in Issaquah, WA, that had created the most popular site of the day for games - HappyPuppy.com. Dave and I flew out to meet them and within a few weeks we structured a new company, calling it The Attitude Network (catchy name I thought of, huh?) and HappyPuppy became the centerpiece. I wasn’t completely comfortable with the “eyeballs” business model at that point in time, and I returned to HBS to complete my MBA as planned. Dave stayed on to run the company, (eventually selling it to TheGlobe.com in 1999, but that is another story ... ) and he has gone on to great successes at a few other companies since.

So I set upon trying to find a great startup to join; the problem was, I couldn’t find one that felt right. In the middle of my search, I was introduced to the team at Greylock and they kept inviting me back to spend more time with them. I figured the longer I spent with them. the greater my chances they’d point me at one of their great companies. Bill Nussey, my close friend from HBS was also interviewing for the position at Greylock, and given his qualifications, I didn’t think they’d offer me a job and after my snoozer with the other firm, I wasn’t really interested in taking it. Greylock ended up hiring both Bill and me, and we assumed Bill would stay forever and I would leave after a year to go to one of their startups. Bill left after a year and a half to run a startup he invested in called IXL, and I ended up staying for more than nine years.

Greylock was an amazing place and I owe my former partners a huge debt of gratitude for the opportunity to have worked there. I found out that venture capital was far more interesting and fast-paced that my initial VC experience indicated. I had the chance to learn the business from some of the best at it and had the opportunity to work with incredible entrepreneurs. During my tenure, I experienced the heights of the craziness of the Internet/Telecom bubble, and the depths of despair when it burst. I was continually amazed at the creativity and commitment of great entrepreneurs and