I want to tell you a story I don't talk about often enough. Not because it is painful, it no longer is. But because the lessons in it are the ones that have shaped every decision I have made since 2003.
In 1997, I founded a company called Chip2Chip, which eventually became Velio. We built SerDes technology, the high-speed serial communication infrastructure that modern data centers depend on. I had tracked down Professor Bill Dally and Professor John Poulton, the authors of the definitive textbook on digital systems engineering, and after months of persistent convincing, brought them on as core technologists. The technology was genuinely exceptional, an order of magnitude better than anything else in the market.
Sequoia led our Series A. Redpoint joined. We raised $100M across three rounds. By the second quarter of 2001, we were shipping $5M per quarter in crossconnect chips. The business was working.
Then 9/11 happened. The telecom bubble collapsed. The market we were serving evaporated almost overnight.
In 2002, there was pressure to sell the company to Cisco. I did not want to sell to Cisco. Not because Cisco was wrong for the technology. Because I had given personal verbal commitments to Lucent, Tellabs, Ciena, Fujitsu, Marconi, and others who had bet on Velio to be their supplier. They had built roadmaps around our chips. They had trusted us at a moment when trust was a significant commitment.
I was eventually forced to choose between betraying those commitments and stepping down. I chose to step down. The company's assets were sold to LSI and Rambus. Sixteen members of my Velio team eventually found their way to Nvidia, where Bill Dally is now Chief Scientist.
The lessons I took from that experience have driven every decision since.
The CapEx world is binary. You need the technology to be right, the team to be excellent, and the market to be there simultaneously. I had the first two. The third was outside my control. No amount of integrity or technical excellence protects you from macro forces in a capital-intensive, market-dependent business model.
The OpEx world is different. It is built for continuous, operational adaptability- the exact foundation of true cyber resilience. Every month of delivering genuine value compounds. Customer relationships deepen. The product gets smarter from being used. Time is your ally rather than your enemy. The risk profile is fundamentally different.
Commitments matter more than commercial convenience. Always. A customer who trusts you when they don't have to - who chooses you over better-capitalized alternatives, who builds their roadmap around what you are building - deserves the full weight of your commitment in return.
I have carried this into everything at Netenrich. We bootstrap because the organic path produces discipline the funded path does not. We honor commitments because I know personally what it costs when commitments are broken. And we build for the long term cyber resilience because the long term is where genuine value accumulates.
Some lessons you learn once and carry forever.
*Part of my ongoing series on data science and the future of security operations.*