Rich has spent 30 years riding technology waves from the PC to mobile to cloud
to Asia and now AI.
At Microsoft, he was a key part of the PC revolution. He was the fourth product
manager on Excel for Windows where he was the center of developing new product
features, connecting with customers, developing the business and pricing plan
with responsibility for global revenues and profits. He
pioneered several innovative product (1-2-3 compatibility mode) and marketing
initiatives (Working Models, Excel Seminars) that helped increase the products
share from 5% to 25% in two year.
Ultimately, he became Vice President of
Product Management and member of the Executive Staff for Windows NT for
enterprises, SQL Server, Exchange and BackOffice server suite. During his
tenure, his team pushed for and got key features for the products (integrated
server installation, reduction in memory usage), marketing (integration with
Compaq sales), and business (introduction of capacity pricing) all of which
caused enterprise sales from $49M to $1.2B in 18 months and ultimately to
$12.5B. He co-authored the best-selling Marketing Playbook based on these
experiences to highlight the important of product strategy, customer
understanding and business pricing and partnerships. At that time, there were
fewer than 50 Executive Staff members managing over 100,000 full time equivalent
employees.
In 2000, Rich joined five senior Microsoft executives and five senior AT&T
Wireless to usher in the mobile, cloud and Asia technology revolutions. He
co-founded Ignition Partners with initial backing from QUALCOMM, SoftBank,
Motorola and HP/Compaq to mentor and invest in wireless internet companies. And,
in 2005, co-founded Qiming Ventures Capital to help fuel the explosive growth in
Asia. Today these firms have over $11B under management and were early investors
in major companies such as DocuSign (NSQ:DOCU) and Xiaomi (1810.HK). He led
investments in a variety of companies acquired by Apple, TenCent, HP, Cisco and
others where he focused on product, customer and business strategy.
In 2015, Rich and several Ignition co-founders focus on deep AI technology bets
and created surround.io. In 24 months, they received 23 patents in vision,
distributed camera systems and automotive applications. As a result, the company
was merged into Xevo, Inc, the largest software-only Tier-1 automotive supplier
in the world with customers such as Toyota, Lexus, Honda, GM and Suburu. And
that company was sold in 2019 to Lear Corporation, a $14B Tier-1 automotive
supplier give them software expertise as cars become “computers on wheels”.
By 2021, he worked with the co-founder and key technologists at Xevo to create a
TNE.ai, taking their experience in Automotive to the broader Enterprise AI
market based on the latest Large Language Model innovations with the same focus
on core technology but marrying a partnership strategy in vertical markets.
Rich started his career in research and development. He was Member of Technical
Staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories He earned his MS in Electrical Engineering
from Stanford and held a dual positions as a PhD Candidate at Stanford and as a
Research Fellow at LSI Logic Corporation’s Palo Alto Laboratories. Prior to
that, he was a GM Scholar at Princeton University where earned a BS EECS summa
cum laude Phi Beta Kappa.
He holds 27 patents in computer vision, machine learning and robotics and has
lectured on business, product design and marketing at Stanford, Northwestern
University, University of Washington and Cal Berkeley.
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