The Rocketeer

Ken Biba: Early Internet engineer. Amateur rocketry enthusiast. Guided mobile companies including Sytek, Xircom and Agilis. Now taking aim at Wi-Fi's rising star with wireless infrastructure start-up Vivato.

Both rocketry and a great start-up selectively attract people of vision, energy, self-motivation and discipline who are prepared to act as a team of warriors.

The great thing about building a high-performance rocket is that you do it yourself and it's an unambiguous result — either it works or it doesn't. And you're only a success if your rocket flies not just once, but can be recovered and flown again and again. It's a detailed bit of work to lay the foundation for a recovery system so you can relaunch it. The challenge is to build a foundation that gives you sustainable growth.

The Internet, corporate Ethernet networks and Wi-Fi have strong similarities, and the key piece is that data is king. We used to think about largely voice-dominated networks like ISDN, ATM and even 3G. But none of those will influence us the way the Internet, Ethernet and now Wi-Fi will.

Wi-Fi probably has the fastest adoption curve of almost any technology without support from major carriers or huge IT organizations — it's happening largely on its own, and that speaks to its fundamental value and power.

Ethernet business networks and the Internet grew because individuals made networking decisions locally and then tied them together with others doing the same thing. Rather than a top-down architecture, these were bottom-up architectures that were glued together. Great technologies like that come along very rarely, and Wi-Fi has fallen into that category because people can do it themselves — they don't have to wait for permission from someone else to do it.

Wi-Fi is following the same track as Ethernet, which has grown to become the de facto wired network standard in just about every office in the world. Our focus at Vivato is on providing some of the same tools that grew Ethernet. We think we can take the great penetration of Wi-Fi clients and scale it to enterprises and beyond. And right now is one of the best times to build a new company. There's a great set of talent available, and money is available for the right idea — and the right team. —As told to Chris Sewell