In 2011, I got a call from longtime friend and colleague Ed Bugnion, who wanted to introduce me to two guys working on a dangerous idea in data center networking – JR Rivers and Nolan Leake.

Krish Ramakrishnan has an uncanny ability to detect fuzzy, early market signals and turn them into clear-eyed strategy. Blue Jeans is the latest example.

Dan and Alex have courage of conviction, which drives them to follow an independent path well outside the industry dogma. We have found that such orthogonal, cross-grain thinking stands behind the biggest entrepreneurial success stories.

I realized that there was a looming existential hurdle to the deployment of broadband networking itself.

Varun Mehta and Umesh Maheshwari founded Nimble Storage based on an observation at the foundation of data storage – the physical media itself. Six years later Nimble became a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company, and along the way helped transform an industry.

I first met Jahangir Mohammed, founder and CEO of Jasper in 2002 when he was the CEO of Kineto Wireless. I was struck by his clarity and audacity.