Team

Shirish Sathaye has been a General Partner in our California office for almost a decade. He came to Matrix after a long operating career at several technology companies. He joined two tech companies—FORE Systems and Alteon Websystems—when they were still nascent, and led the design and development of their core products. Both companies pioneered important new product categories and had very successful IPOs.

Shirish has Ph.D in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon, an MSEE from Virginia Tech, and a Bachelors Degree in Electronics Engineering from IT-BHU, Varanasi, India. He started his career at Digital Equipment Corporation first in the Semiconductor group, and then in the Network Architecture Group, spending a total of eight years at Digital Equipment Corporation. Shirish moved on to FORE Systems, where he ran Engineering for the ATM switch group. In 1997 he noticed a fundamental shift: Ethernet connections were gaining speed, eclipsing ATM. He left FORE to join Alteon Websystems, a young Ethernet switch maker backed by Matrix Partners, as its vice president of engineering and later, its chief technology officer. As the promise of the Web unfolded, Alteon began to load-balance Web servers for Internet companies. Alteon went public in 1999 and the next year sold to Nortel for $7.8 billion.

As a venture capitalist, Shirish works closely with entrepreneurs to assist them with developing and refining concepts and strategies and putting together strong teams. In some cases, Shirish will get involved very early, before the idea for the company has been fully formed. His current areas of investment focus are Wireless and Wireline Networking, Cloud-based Software and Systems, and CleanTech.