Nader Vasseghi's whirlwind year started last summer, when he took a three-day trip to Yosemite National Park by himself to sketch out some ideas for a startup that would optimize data traffic in metropolitan networks. He drew up a detailed list of the values he wanted all of his future employees to share, and began making calls to get people on board.
The company he helped start on that trip, AuroraNetics, was acquired by Cisco Systems last week in a stock deal worth about $150 million, the first acquisition Cisco has made all year.
How did Vasseghi and his team go from an idea to a $150 million acquisition in less than 12 months? You can credit a lot to the company's product. AuroraNetics, based in San Jose, Calif., develops silicon chips for metropolitan fiber networks that ship Internet traffic at 10Gbps, invaluable technology for Cisco as the company vies to increase its stake in the burgeoning metropolitan area networks market. Vasseghi believes strategic staffing was also a key contributor to AuroraNetics' success. "I put a lot of emphasis on the best talent," he says. "Once you bring in the right people who are committed to excellence, the products and customer service will follow. After the first day of my stay, I started making the key phone calls to the people I wanted on my team."
Just as important, the 42-year-old Vasseghi says, was the planning that went into the company after the initial team was established. "A lot of startups just go at it ad hoc, and then toward the end come up with a bunch of problems," he says. "From day one, I didn't want anyone to enter code unless we had a plan for methodology and infrastructure established. For the first two months of the company, we detailed every task, and broke it down into a period of a week or less. We had a 25-page schedule." The planning paid off: Cisco has been a customer since late last year, and plans to license AuroraNetics' technology to other vendors when the acquisition gets final approval, scheduled for August.
This latest achievement for Vasseghi, who grew up in Tehran, Iran, comes after a longtime devotion to science that started when he was a high school student. "You should have seen my room," he says. "One section of it was an engineering laboratory, and the other section of it was a chemistry laboratory. I was doing all kinds of experiments." In 1976, Vasseghi came to the U.S. and, having started school early and skipped a grade, enrolled at the University of California at Santa Barbara at the age of 16. He excelled at engineering and eventually went on to get a master's degree in engineering from the University of Southampton, England. But it was Vasseghi's part-time interest in psychology that eventually prepared him to lead a company. "Over time, when I started working in the industry, I got more and more interested in management, and the psychology of organizational development," he says. "Instead of reading novels, I read management books."
AuroraNetics is Vasseghi's first startup, though he has more than 20 years of chip-design experience. His first job after college was at General Instruments in 1981, where he worked in optical electronics. After stints at microprocessor maker AMD - working on network controllers - and MIPS Technologies - working on high-performance microprocessors - Vasseghi spent eight years leading microprocessor projects at Silicon Graphics, (after it acquired MIPS), and eventually became VP of engineering at Sebring Networks, a switch-fabric solutions startup that was acquired by semiconductor company PLX Technology last year. Vasseghi left Sebring after that acquisition, and a few months later was asked to join the company that later became AuroraNetics as a co-founder and vp of engineering. The venture had already attracted a $6.5 million round of funding from the broadband incubator Raza Foundries. A month after coming on board, Vasseghi was named acting
