David Cheriton

David Cheriton
Born	David Ross Cheriton (1951-03-29) March 29, 1951 Vancouver
Education	B.A. University of British Columbia M.S. University of Waterloo PhD University of Waterloo
Occupation	investor
Net worth	US$1.7 billion (March 2013)[1]
Spouse(s)	Iris Fraser (divorced)
Children	four

David Ross Cheriton (born March 29, 1951) is a Canadian-born computer science professor at Stanford University who has investments in technology companies. With an estimated net worth of US$1.7 billion (as of March 2013), Cheriton was ranked by Forbes as the 20th wealthiest Canadian and 882nd in the world.^[1]

Education

Born in Vancouver, Cheriton attended public schools in the Highlands neighborhood of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.^[2] He briefly attended the University of Alberta where he had applied for both mathematics and music. Having being rejected by the music program, Cheriton went on to study mathematics and received his bachelor's degree from the University of British Columbia in 1973.^[3] Cheriton received his Masters and PhD degrees in computer science from the University of Waterloo in 1974 and 1978, respectively. He spent three years as an Assistant Professor at his alma mater, the University of British Columbia, before moving to Stanford in 1981.

Research

Cheriton founded and led the Distributed Systems Group at Stanford University, which developed the V operating system.

Industry

Cheriton co-founded Granite Systems with Andy Bechtolsheim, a company developing gigabit ethernet products; Granite was acquired by Cisco Systems in 1996.^[4]

In August 1998, Stanford students Sergey Brin and Larry Page met with Bechtolsheim on Cheriton's front porch. Bechtolsheim wrote the first cheque to fund their company, Google, at the meeting, and Cheriton matched his $100,000 investment.^[5]

In 2001 Cheriton and Bechtolsheim founded another start up company, Palo Alto based Kealia. Kealia designed Magnum, a high capacity InfiniBand switch; Galaxy, a range of blade servers based on AMD's Opteron microprocessor; and Thumper, an enterprise grade network attached storage system.^[4] Kealia was bought by Sun Microsystems in 2004, with Thumper becoming the Sun Fire X4500.^[4][6]

Later, David Cheriton co-founded (again with Bechtolsheim) and was chief scientist of Arastra (now Arista Networks), a maker of 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches.^[7][8]

Cheriton is an investor in and advisory board member for frontline data warehouse company Aster Data Systems,^[9] an early investor in in-video advertising company Zunavision,^[10] and he founded OptumSoft.^[11]

Lifestyle

Although the Google investment alone would be worth over US$1 billion, Cheriton has a reputation for a frugal lifestyle, avoiding expensive cars or large houses. He was once included in a list of "cheapskate billionaires".^[12] On November 18, 2005, the University of Waterloo announced that Cheriton had donated $25 million to support graduate studies and research in its School of Computer Science. In recognition of his contribution, the school was renamed the "David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science."

On January 18, 2010, Cheriton donated $2 million to the University of British Columbia, which will go to fund the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative (CWSEI).

Personal life

In 1980, Cheriton married Iris Fraser; they divorced in 1994. They have four children.^{[13] [14]}

References

External links

• Stanford University Distributed Systems Group
• podcast with David Cheriton