|
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
 |
David Liddle Venture Partner |
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
When David E. Liddle joined USVP in 2000, he'd already had a long association with the firm. Having served for nearly 10 years on USVP's Technical Advisory Board, David left his post as president and CEO of business incubator Interval Research Corporation and was persuaded by long-time friends Irwin Federman and Phil Young to "just come in and look at a few deals."
David hasn't looked back. He'd worked with many venture capitalists in his career—he first met Irwin and Phil while serving as CEO of Metaphor Corporation and interacted with them because they all shared the same venture backing—and was impressed with the USVP difference.
"It's the process here, and the chemistry between partners, that makes the difference," notes David. "That difference extends to the way we work with entrepreneurs, such as going the extra mile to really leverage our network for them."
David enjoys the role of coach and mentor to entrepreneurs. "It's rewarding to offer experience or advice that helps entrepreneurs avoid pitfalls I learned about during my own operating experience," says David. "It's a good time to be an entrepreneur," David says. He sees no lingering affects from the post-bubble downturn. In fact, today's entrepreneurs— some of them battle-scarred but ever more determined—are stronger and savvier for it.
"Quite a few good companies are getting funded now. Pragmatism and prudence have returned to the venture community, and entrepreneurs are being pressed for bringing solid expertise and experience to the table."
David is especially passionate about the mobile and wireless space, having invested in semiconductor components and software for those markets. "I'm interested in technologies that can make cell phones work better and do more things well," he says.
Prior to co-founding Interval with Paul Allen, David founded Metaphor which was acquired by IBM in 1991, which named him Vice President of Business development for IBM Personal Systems. David's extensive experience in research and development has focused largely on human-computer interactions and includes 10 years at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), from 1972 to 1982. He has been a director of Sybase, Broderbund Software, Borland International and Ticketmaster, and is currently on the board of the New York Times Company. His board involvement at USVP includes Axiom Microdevices, Caspian Networks, CipherMax, Gear6, Klocwork, MaxLinear, Optichron, PacketHop and T-RAM. David has served on the DARPA Information Science and Technology Committee, and as chair of the NAS Computer Science and Telecommunications board.
David earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in EECS at the University of Toledo, where his dissertation focused on reconfigurable computing machines and theories of encryption, encoding and signal recovery. His contributions to human-computer interaction design earned him the distinction of Senior Fellow at the Royal College of Art.
David served on the board of the Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose through 2004. He is on the boards of the Colleges of Engineering at Stanford University, UC Berkeley and the University of Michigan. An avid hiker, David and wife Ruthann Quindlen enjoy travel, especially to Italy and Spain, and Santa Fe, where he once chaired the board of the Santa Fe Institute, an organization that promotes the sciences.
U.S. Venture Partners
2735 Sand Hill Road
Menlo Park, CA 94025
Telephone: (650) 854-9080
Fax: (650) 854-3018
www.usvp.com