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M&A, Venture Capital, and Private Equity: A Thriving Investment Climate
Moore’s Law Applied to Venture Investing
Vinod Dham is known first and foremost in Silicon Valley and in
India as “the father of the Pentium chip,” reflecting a 16-year
career at Intel Corp. that began in 1979 and culminated in the design
of the first PC microprocessor to become a household name.
The Pentium (or X86) launched in the mid-1990s and ushered in
the era of Internet access via the World Wide Web. Dham was also
instrumental in flash technology development at Intel.
But Dham’s career path entails a larger narrative and a common
one in the Bay Area Indian community—the restless technology
entrepreneur who finds himself at a plateau in the senior management
of a major Silicon Valley firm and ultimately trades security
for an opportunity to do cutting edge work in his field or to grow innovative
new companies.
“The best thing I ever did in my life was to join Intel,” Dham says
today. “The second best thing I ever did in my life was to leave
Intel. In the Valley, there’s always the urge to get involved with a
startup, to step out of the shadow of the large corporation with all
that money and infrastructure and go out on your own. Once you’re
a vice president in a large company, that’s the optimum time to
leave the company; if you stay a few more years and become an
EVP or SVP, you’re a company man, and you may not be able to
roll up your sleeves and get down in the trenches. I felt that if I
didn’t go, I might always be looking back and wondering what
might have happened.”
After leaving Intel in 1995, Dham served as COO of NextGen, a
young company designing a potential successor chip to the
Pentium; proposed a Pentium-compatible solution for the NextGen
processor that would eventually result in acquisition of the company
by Advanced Micro Devices; joined AMD as group vice
president for its microprocessor business; and launched the K6
chip that would bring down PC prices by half.
Dham left AMD in November 1997 to become an entrepreneur
again, and in April 1998, he became CEO of Silicon Spice, a
developer of voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) signal processors
funded by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, New Enterprise
Associates (NEA), Cisco Systems, and others. Broadcom bought
Silicon Spice in August 2000 for $1.2 billion in stock. While at
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