ABSTRACT:

We celebrate our alumni Mohit Lad and Ricardo Olivera. During their PhD study with Lixia Zhang at UCLA, Mohit and Ricardo conducted research on the Internet’s routing infrastructure. They graduated in 2007 and 2009, respectively, and co-founded ThousandEyes in 2010. ThousandEyes was launched with an NSF SBIR grant of $150K. They drove around recycle areas, scavenged free computer servers, and built the company’s first data center in their proverbial garage with discarded servers.

ThousandEyes’ original customer acquisition plan partially relied on watching people complaining on Twitter about outages, then approaching their companies with the data on the cause and how to fix it. They landed some big customers and learned to run a cash-savvy business. Their utility was so apparent that investors came after them, not the other way around – an unusual success story for Silicon Valley. Unlike many startups, this one ended really well with Cisco announcing they would acquire Thousand Eyes for 1 Billion dollars – a Unicorn!

https://news.crunchbase.com/news/cisco-to-acquire-thousandeyes-in-reported-1b-deal/ speculates that the COVID-19 pandemic had to do with this acquisition. In a blog post, Cisco’s Senior Vice President Todd Nightingale wrote: ” In a time when every meeting is held and every document is shared through connected applications, the need for ThousandEyes technology has never been so high.”

Join them for a fireside chat where they will describe their journey from being PhD students with Lixia Zhang working on tools for detecting BGP hijacks and learning the Internet topology, to building a company of great value. The host will be Len Kleinrock who knows a thing or two about the Internet and building tools of great value. Don’t miss out. You may be the next UCLA entrepreneur who makes us proud!

BIOS:

Mohit Lad (co-founder and CEO) shapes and executes ThousandEyes’ vision. Mohit brings over 10 years of experience in designing and implementing systems to solve hard networking problems. Mohit received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA where he conducted research in the area of large scale network diagnostics. Prior to ThousandEyes, Mohit worked at Nokia where he built a system to monitor mobile services performance. Mohit is an active member of North American Network Operations Group (NANOG) and has served on its Program Committee for 4 years from 2009 to 2013.

Ricardo Oliveira (co-founder and CTO) drives ThousandEyes’ technical vision and innovation strategy. He brings to ThousandEyes over 10 years of experience in the field of Computer Networking. Ricardo received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA where he was the recipient of the Cisco Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award and the Edward K. Rice Outstanding Doctoral Student Award. During his Ph.D., Ricardo developed Cyclops, an open platform to detect attacks on the Internet routing infrastructure. Ricardo has published extensively in top international conferences and journals, and is the lead author of several patents resulting from his work at AT&T Labs, Thomson, and Juniper Networks.

Hosted by Professor Leonard Kleinrock

Via Zoom Webinar