Who the hell am I?

After graduating from Berkeley High School in 1977, I went to Cogswell Polytechnical College in San Francisco and earned a BSEET degree in Engineering Technology. I worked for Advanced Micro Devices from 1984 until joining SynOptics Communications in 1990. The company merged with Wellfleet in 1994 and became known as Bay Networks. I developed the FDDI Concentrator lines for SynOptic Communications, and have since managed many projects ranging from low-end IP and IPX routers to high performance ATM Switches. On September 2, 1998, Bay Networks was purchased by Northern Telecom and then became Nortel Networks. I was Vice President of Engineering for the Enterprise Security and Routing organization and had responsibility for R&D on a range of products such as the Alteon Switched Firewalls, SSL VPN, L2-7 Switches, Contivity IPSec VPNs, WLAN, BayRS Multi protocol Routers, and Blade Server Switches for IBM and HP Chassis. I was also instrumental in developing the entire Wiring Closet set of switches in the BayStack family. I travelled extensively to places like Ottawa, Boston, Santa Clara, Sweden, the UK, Romania, Vietnam, Taiwan, Hong Kong and China.

In October, I left Nortel and joined a two year-old startup called Trapeze Networks as the VP of Engineering. We are building products that support Enterprise WLAN Infrastructures.

I spend my limited free time these days learning to speak Mandarin, genealogy research, walks with my wife, playing guitar, automating my house, traveling, dabbling in the stock market, my Macs, my websites, and spending time with family.

Anyone who remembers me from high school may also remember my wife, Ellen Degnan. We married in July 1983, lived in Oakland, Fremont, Santa Clara, San Jose, and now Saratoga. We have three adult children, aged 20,18 and 18. We currently live in Saratoga California, which is a small community in western San Jose at the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. I have been living in the Silicon Valley since 1987. My eldest son is in his 3rd year at UCLA studying Neuro-science and the twins are starting their first year at Cal Poly and West Valley.

For more ancient history, I lived in Teheran, Iran beginning in 1964 and attended the Teheran American School (TAS) through the 4th grade. While living in Iran, my father, who worked for Standard Oil, took the family on many trips to unheard of places such as the USSR, Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Nepal and many other places in Europe and Asia. In 1970, we returned to Berkeley, CA where I attended Lincoln, Willard, West Campus, and Berkeley High.  

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