Team

Shirish Sathaye understands the intimate inner workings of technology start-ups. He joined two tech companies—FORE Systems and Alteon Networks—when they were still nascent, and led the design and development of their core products. Both companies pioneered important new product categories and had very successful IPOs.

As a venture capitalist, Shirish works closely with entrepreneurs to assist them with developing and refining concepts and strategies and putting together strong teams. In some cases, as with Aruba Networks, Shirish will get involved very early, before the idea for the company has been fully formed.

He attended the Institute of Technology in Varanasi, where he studied electrical engineering, and interned at Siemens AG, the world’s largest engineering conglomerate. After graduation, Shirish flew to the U.S. with the dream of becoming an entrepreneur. He arrived on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 1984. Shirish obtained a Master’s degree in engineering in 1986, and then joined Digital Equipment Corporation. Four years later, Shirish began his doctorate in electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon while still working at DEC. He worked at DEC for a total of eight years, earning experience in networking ASICs and software.

Shirish moved on to FORE Systems, where he ran engineering for the ATM switch group. In 1997 he noticed a fundamental shift: Ethernet connections were gaining speed, eclipsing ATM. He left FORE to join Alteon Networks, a young Ethernet switch maker backed by Matrix Partners, as its vice president of engineering and later, its chief technology officer. As the promise of the Web unfolded, Alteon began to load-balance Web servers for Internet companies. Alteon went public in 1999 and the next year sold to Nortel for $7.8 billion.

Andrew Verhalen, a general partner at Matrix and an Alteon board member, recruited Shirish into Matrix in mid-2001. Shirish’s first investment was a wireless enterprise networking company called Aruba Networks, which he helped incubate in Matrix Partners’ Silicon Valley office during the last economic down turn. The company went public in March 2007.