Serial Entrepreneur: Taher Elgamal (Part 4)

Tuesday, March 27, 2007 | 5 comments

Taher and I chart his path from college into the professional world. Entrepreneurs often learn from false starts and moderately successful or unsuccessful experiments. Taher describes some of his.

SM: Was Netscape your first job? TE: No, I graduated in 1984. One of my colleagues was at HP, and he called me and convinced me to join HP Labs. There was not any security work to do there, because security work in the 80’s was only done in secret places. It was all national security related. I worked on graphics and imaging and other interesting things that had nothing to do with security. My boss in 1988 told me he was starting a new company. We were working on some data compression technology in HP and we had sold it to the tape backup division, and they made a bundle of money on it. HP never wanted to do this, so he decided to leave, and I joined him as the third founder of InfoChip in 1988.

SM: Was it a compression chip? TE: It was compression chip and sub-system which could on the fly expand the size of a hard disk in a PC. This was the late 80’s. I was a techy guy, and very academic at the time. I had developed that hardware and software on my own at HP, I did the entire thing.

SM: Was it a successful company? TE: It did not sell for a whole lot, so not a great commercial success.

SM: But you learned to be an entrepreneur? TE: It taught me what it really means, and that is very, very hard to teach.

SM: I think it is fine to do a company as a first step which you get to learn from. TE: I agree, it taught me how to manage things. Before that I was a technical guy, writing algorithms. There I managed half of the company. I taught myself how to manage engineering, and how to be a business guy. I never made it to business school. I learned it on the job.

SM: Me too

This segment is part 4 in a 13 part series Segment 5 →
Jump to part: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

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