Thomas H. Lee - Founder and Director of Advanced Development
Alex Benik - Battery Ventures
Charles Chi - Greylock Partners
Art Collmeyer - Weitek, hi/fn, iWatt
Drew Lanza - Morgenthaler
Thomas H. Lee is concurrently a tenured Stanford University professor, successful entrepreneur, and highly respected engineer. He holds S.B., S.M. and Sc.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and began his career in industry as a circuit designer at Analog Devices building high-speed clock recovery devices. He joined Rambus in 1992 to develop high-speed analog circuitry for CMOS RAMs. Prof. Lee also contributed to the clock and PLL circuitry on several microprocessors, notably the K6, K7 and K8, at Advanced Micro Devices, as well as the StrongARM and Alpha CPUs at Digital Equipment Corporation.
In 1994, Prof. Lee joined the Electrical Engineering faculty at Stanford University, where his research focuses on gigahertz communication circuits, both wireline and wireless. He is the author of the widely used textbooks The Design of CMOS Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits (Cambridge University Press, 1998; second edition, 2004), and Planar Microwave Engineering (Cambridge Press, 2005), as well as four other books on RF circuit design, and is the recipient of a coveted Packard Foundation Fellowship.
Prof. Lee has won the ISSCC Best Paper Award twice — an award considered to be among the most prestigious in semiconductor circuit design — as well as several other conference Best Paper awards. He has been a IEEE Distinguished Lecturer of two separate IEEE societies, is a member of the Solid-State Circuits Society AdCom, and has been granted forty-two U.S. patents.
Prof. Lee co-founded Matrix Semiconductor in 1998, and was instrumental in the design of the first 3-D Memory chip. Matrix was acquired by SanDisk in January of 2006.
Alex joined Battery in 2001 and currently works out of Battery's Waltham, Massachusetts office. From 2001 through November 2006, he was based in Menlo Park. Alex focuses on investments in networking hardware and services, computing and semiconductors. During his tenure at Battery, Alex has been involved with several of the firm's investments including Achronix, Anobit Technologies, Aurora Networks, MaxLinear, Optichron and Veraz Networks (NASDAQ: VRAZ).
Prior to joining the firm, Alex was an Analyst at The Yankee Group, where he performed market research and consulting focused on local, wide area and transport networks. While in this position, he executed strategic marketing and competitive analysis for clients including major telecommunications equipment and service providers. Alex earned a BA in Government from Wesleyan University.
Charles joined Greylock in 2000. His area of focus is systems, semi-conductors and related software for communications, computing and storage for the enterprise, service provider and consumer markets.
Prior to Greylock Charles held executive positions in the communications sector that spanned both service providers and equipment suppliers. He joined Greylock from CIENA Corporation where he was vice president of marketing. Previously Charles had co-founded and led marketing at Lightera Networks, Inc., a market defining optical core switching company acquired by CIENA. Before Lightera he held marketing, sales engineering and engineering roles at Cisco, StrataCom, AT&T Canada and Bell Canada. During his tenure he developed and launched a number of new products and services based on new technologies.
Charles represents Greylock on the boards of Aquantia, Kickfire, ReFocus Imaging, SiTime and ZeroG Wireless. Charles' previous investments include Calista Technologies (acquired by Microsoft), Quorum Systems (acquired by Spreadtrum), Espial (TSX: ESP.TO), Sanera Systems (acquired by McDATA) and Siliquent (acquired by Broadcom).
Art Collmeyer is a true industry visionary and veteran in the fields of semiconductor and high-tech research.
With over 35 years of industrial and entrepeneurial experience, Art brings world-class credentials to ZeroG Wireless. Since 2000, Art has been actively involved in the founding and development of several technology companies, including iWatt, Iridigm (since acquired by Qualcomm), and ZeroG Wireless. In 1996, Art founded Hi/fn to fill the market need for compression, encryption, authentication, and application recognition technologies. As CEO, Art grew the organization from a team of four to a fully operational public company in two years.
The first company that Art helped create was Weitek, famous as the first company to implement the fabless semiconductor business model. He served as the company's CEO from its founding in 1981 through its public offering in 1988, becoming Chairman in 1992. At CALMA, Art was instrumental in quickly growing the company's annual sales by over $100M, and eventually saw the company sold to General Electric.
Art has served as the CEO and on boards of directors for several other high tech companies, helping them grow significantly and eventually go public. Art has BS, MS and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering.
Drew, based in Menlo Park, CA, joined Morgenthaler in 2000 and became a Partner in 2001. Drew focuses on semiconductors and components, and he also works with materials and devices and large systems. He is currently a Director of Brion Technologies, Cortina Systems, Overture Networks, Ultradots Inc. and Unity Semiconductor. He also regularly attends Wave7 Optics and Xoomsys board meetings. Drew spent 15 years in senior operating positions in the telecommunications industry starting companies in both the components and the systems sectors of that industry. He served as Senior VP of Marketing at MAYAN Networks, building aggregation systems for the metropolitan edge market. Prior to that Drew was a founder and VP of Engineering at E/O Networks where he helped to design and produce a long reach rural fiber optic telephony system. Drew started his optical telecommunications career in 1986 at Raynet, a pioneering company in the development of fiber to the home technologies. Drew's many roles at Raynet included VP of Marketing and VP of International Development. Drew was the founding CEO of Lightwave Microsystems, a leader in the design and manufacture of high volume optical integrated circuits. Drew graduated magna cum laude from Harvard with an MBA in 1987. He received his BSEE & MSEE degrees from Stanford in 1979.