John Scarisbrick
Chairman
John Scarisbrick is a highly successful senior leader in the semiconductor industry. He has broad experience in creating value in start-up, growth phase and top-tier semiconductor businesses having held executive management and independent director positions. He currently serves on the boards of ARM PLC, the world's leading microprocessor intellectual property firm, Intrinsity Inc. in Austin, Texas, the world leader in Dynamic Logic design technology for high speed/low power microprocessor designs and Innovative Silicon, the world leader in floating body effect (Z-RAM) memory technology in Lausanne, Switzerland.
He has served as the CEO of CSR PLC and also worked at Texas Instruments for 25 years in Texas, France and England. As Senior Vice President at TI, John was responsible for all aspects of their $5 billion World Wide Application Specific Products chip business in Dallas - including wireless, DSP, broadband, ASIC, SPARC and LCD. Additionally, he led the team which created TI's Digital Signal Processor business in Houston and established dominant market share for TI DSPs. He served as President of Texas Instruments Europe. He retired from TI in 2000.
He served on the boards of SonIM in San Mateo, UbiNetics in Cambridge, as well as chaired the Cambridge Positioning Systems board in the UK. John is 56, married with three children and keeps homes in New York and England.
Niel Viljoen
Chief Executive Officer
Niel Viljoen has been active in the computing and networking equipment industry for the past 20 years. Primary areas of focus include IP, ATM, security and system design. Before becoming involved with Netronome Systems on a full-time basis in July 2003, Niel was an active business angel, investing in, amongst others, Nujira, Intune and Azuro. He serves on the board of Nujira.
Between 2000 and 2001, Niel was CTO of the Marconi group. Niel joined Marconi after the acquisition of FORE Systems, where he was part of the management team. At FORE, Niel's roles included Senior VP & GM of the Service Provider Division, Senior VP Product Marketing, VP Engineering, Senior Director and GM of the Adapter group. Niel joined FORE through the acquisition of Nemesys Ltd where he was the CEO. Nemesys developed a range of video encoding devices for broadband networks. Prior to that, Niel developed and created a number of businesses, developing products like network security devices and large distributed memory processor complexes.
Niel has received a number of industry awards. He has attended the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa and Cambridge University in the UK.
Harry Fitzgibbons
Top Technology Ventures Ltd.
Harry was a director of Hambros Bank from 1972 to 1983 with responsibility for United States corporate finance and for Hambros' portfolio of international unquoted investments. He was instrumental in establishing Boston Hambro Capital Company and Hambro International Venture Fund, both of which were venture investors in the United States. He left Hambros for two years to set up the London subsidiary of L.F.Rothschild, Unterberg, Towbin, an American investment bank before returning in 1986. Harry was educated at Harvard College and Trinity College, Oxford and is a graduate of Harvard Law School. After briefly practicing law in New York, he served as an officer with the United States Special Forces and with the Department of State, Washington, D.C. Before joining Hambros in 1972, he was an international banker for four years with Lehman Brothers in New York.
Robert Sansom
Cambridge Angels
Dr. Robert Sansom is an active angel investor and mentor to start-up businesses in the UK and US. He is a member of the board of directors of Azuro, Inc., a start-up developing tools to reduce power requirements on integrated circuits; Tenison Technology, which delivers software tools that enable hardware and software engineers designing integrated circuits to work together; Fetch, Inc., which delivers tools and services that integrate Internet-available data sources; and Ubisense, Ltd, which is the market leader in indoor, 3D location-detection systems. In September 2001, he co-founded, and currently is chairman of, Cambridge Angels, a group of seasoned technology and bio-technology entrepreneurs who invest in and mentor technology start-ups in the Cambridge area.
In 1990, Dr. Sansom co-founded FORE Systems, a data communications company which became the leading developer of ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) networks. Dr. Sansom was initially responsible for FORE's finance and business strategy, including raising venture capital, then ran the software engineering group, building it up to a team of 200 engineers, and finally became responsible for technical strategy as Chief Technology Officer. Dr. Sansom was also a member of the board of directors of FORE. In 1999, when it employed over 2000 employees and had annual revenues of over $600 million, FORE was sold to Marconi (previously GEC plc) for $4.5 billion. Dr. Sansom continued as Marconi’s Chief Technology Officer until April 2000.
Dr. Sansom has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA and an M.A. in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge, England.
Krishna Visvanathan
Encore Ventures
Krishna has been a Venture Capital investor for over 10 years. He was previously a Partner in 3i's Venture Capital team and was responsible for several successful investments including Ezurio Ltd, Ubinetics Ltd, Blue Lithium Inc, E2V plc, Fastnet Systems Ltd and BTN Ltd.
He started his career at Ernst & Young before founding Optika Fibre Technologies, a polymer fibre and display technology start-up based in SE Asia. He currently sits on the boards of Icera Inc, Netronome Systems Inc, Taptu Ltd, The Cloud Networks Ltd, Light Blue Optics Ltd and Cambridge Semiconductor Ltd.
He has a degree in Management Sciences from the University of Manchester Institute of Science & Technology and is a qualified Chartered Accountant.