Naser Partovi

Biography

Naser Partovi serves as a Managing Director and Partner of Enterprise Partners VI, L.P. Mr. Partovi served as the Chief Executive Officer and President of Sky Mobilemedia, Inc. He served as a Managing Director of Enterprise Partners Venture Capital, where he managed a portfolio of companies in the telecommunications industry including Ascendant Systems, DragonWave, Inc., Quorum Systems, and ReliOn, Inc. Mr. Partovi served as Vice President of Strategy and Business Development at Nortel Networks Corp.'s optical networks business and was responsible for investments in startup companies, acquisition of optical companies and a broad range of partnerships. Mr. Partovi has over 20 years of management and operating experience in telecom. He began his career at Bell-Northern Research, where he helped develop the first large-scale object-oriented program for outside plant planning-technology that has been successfully deployed by several large carriers. He served for Northern Telecom as Senior Manager of its DMS evolution unit. In that capacity, he was responsible for re-architecting and restructuring 25 million lines of code for the main line of Nortel voice switches. He serves as Chairman of the Board of Solus Micro Technologies. Mr. Partovi served as the Chairman of Dragonwave Inc. He serves as Director of Avista Laboratories Inc., Ascendent Systems Inc., Gigabit Optics Corporation and Ascendent Telecommunications. Mr. Partovi served on the Boards of GoBeam Inc., which was acquired by Covad Communications, WIDCOMM, Inc. which was acquired by Broadcom, and Gigabit Optics which was acquired by Oplink. He served as Director of SKY MobileMedia, Inc. He served as Director of NP Photonics, Inc. He served as a Director of Ensemble Communications, Inc., Soapstone Networks Inc., Quorum Systems, Inc., Relion Inc., AirFiber, Inc. and Avici Systems Inc. He serves as Co-Chairman of Capital Markets Special Interest Group and Board Advisor at CommNexus San Diego (formerly San Diego Telecom Council) and previously served as its Director. Mr. Partovi holds a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering from Canada's McGill University.

Source: Bloomberg Businessweek

Interview – April 15, 2004

Interviewed by Joel West & Caroline Simard