Rising Tide - Founder's Portfolio

Logos in ancient Greece referred to what is divine, perfect. The Logos of the 12 companies on your left represent neither divinity nor perfection, but the remarkable success of business leaders who strive for success. Roll-over the logos to get a brief overview and click on them for full description and financial history.

In the last 18 years, I have had the privilege of working with the entrepreneurs who led these companies to success.

— Ossama Hassanein

In the early commercial days of the Internet (1997), traffic was doubling every three months. This created an urgent need for an ultra-high-speed backbone to carry the multimedia traffic of data-hungry applications. Only photonics could do it. The leaders in photonics were Drs. Eric Delevaque and Sylvain Boj.

nCipher was founded in 1996 by Alex and Nicko van Someren in Cambridge, UK. Alex and Nicko were convinced, rightly of course, that with the emergence of e-commerce, the Internet would quickly develop as a new and significant sales channel for goods and services.

The Internet was born in 1975 when the US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) commissioned MIT, UCLA and the University of California in Santa Barbara (UCSB) to develop a reliable digital network for computer communication. Dr. Ossama Hassanein assembled the UCSB team that worked on the Internet under contract from DARPA, and launched ACC.

In 1996, Eric Pillevesse was pondering the solutions to an interesting problem: how do you price Internet services? In the old days of telephony, monopoly companies charged on a minute-of-use (MOU) basis. But with the preponderance of internet service providers, content providers, intellectual properties holders, advertisers, portals, and search engines, how would you price a transaction or service?

In 1999, we were actively involved in supporting and financing select European research institutions. In this context, our partner Thao Lane created ETIC, an incubator in Rennes, France. Eric Berthaud was a remarkable resident entrepreneur at ETIC. He identified an exciting opportunity based on technology developed at EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne).

In 1996 two senior managers at Newbridge Networks, a large public company, believed that telecom service providers throughout the world required much more advanced tools to facilitate access (by their subscribers) to their networks. The two founders gained the support of senior management at Newbridge Networks. In 1997, they spun out a new company – Bridgewater Systems.

In 1998, in the process of scouting for unique investment opportunities, we studied France Telecom’s TULIP (Telephone Utilisant des Liaisons IP) project. This R&D project was co-led by Olivier Hersent and Bernard Jannes. They were focused on assessing the application of the nascent voice over IP (VoIP) technology.

In 1998, following years of research, Dr. Thierry Georges, Jerome Faul, and their team at France Telecom R&D pioneered an optical transmission system based on a peculiar physical phenomenon called soliton. A soliton is a “solitary” wave that maintains its shape while it travels at constant speed. Soliton waves are found in many media (fluids, electromagnetic).

In July 2000, fresh out of a successful entrepreneurial
experience, David Marcus was pondering the future. He was convinced that mobile messaging was going to be a big
business. He followed his instinct, launched Echovox in Geneva, and began the development and deployment of a pan-European network to connect mobile operators for short messaging service (SMS), multimedia-messaging service (MMS), and event based billing.

The installed base of IT hardware and software is staggering. Today, there are over one billion computers and servers deployed worldwide and 15 billion intelligent devices in use, including mobile phones, medical devices, and base stations. In addition, the number of software applications running on these devices exceeds 50 billion!

Dave Caputo is a remarkable serial entrepreneur. He Co-founded Pixstream, a successful company which was acquired by Cisco in 2000 for $369 million. Pixstream was spun out from and financed by Newbridge Networks (Alcatel). It developed video-over-DSL products.