Judith Estrin

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Judith "Judy" L. Estrin (born 1954/1955) [1] is an American entrepreneur, business executive, and philanthropist. She co-founded eight technology companies. Estrin worked with Vinton Cerf on the Transmission Control Protocol project at Stanford University in the 1970s. [2] [3] She was the chief technology officer of Cisco Systems from 1998 to 2000. [4] Since 2007, Estrin has been the CEO of JLABS, LLC, a privately held company focused on furthering innovation in business, government, and nonprofit organizations. [5]

Contents

Early life and education

Estrin's parents, Thelma and Gerald Estrin, were computer scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles. Estrin is the middle of three sisters, each recognized for successful careers. Her sister, Deborah Estrin, is a professor of computer science.[ citation needed ] Growing up, Estrin focused on academics, developing her knowledge and following the model of her parents. Estrin was passionate about folk dance in high school. [6]

Estrin earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science from UCLA and a master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1977. [7] [8] At Stanford, Estrin worked with the research group headed by Vinton Cerf, an Internet pioneer often called one of the "fathers of the Internet". Cerf's team developed the specifications for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, also known as TCP/IP. [2] Her specific role within the research team was to help with the initial tests of the TCP working with University College London. [6] [9] She also investigated Ethernet technology, which connected computers in the local area together. [10]

Career

After Stanford, she worked at a startup semiconductor company called Zilog Corporation that had separated from Intel, where she contributed to the design of the Z8 and Z8000 microprocessors. [11] She led the team that developed one of the first commercial local area network systems [12] called Z-net. [13]

At Zilog, Estrin decided to create a company focused on networks, which were experiencing a boom at that time. She wanted to work in a marketing role, where she could explain what networks did and how they worked. [14] In 1981, Estrin co-founded Bridge Communications with her husband, whom she later divorced. [15] Bridge Communications manufactured network routers, bridges, and communications servers. Bridge became a publicly traded company in 1985, and merged with 3Com in 1987. While her husband focused on administration, Estrin ran the technology and engineering side, and became director of marketing and sales. After the merger with 3Com, Estrin and her husband had problems co-managing, and left the company nine months later. [14] In 1988, they offered to join the founding team of Network Computing Devices (NCD) as executive vice president, later becoming president and CEO in 1993. [16]

In 1995, six months after leaving NCD, Estrin co-founded Precept Software, Inc., which developed networking software. She served as its president and CEO until its acquisition by Cisco Systems in 1998, [17] when she became its chief technology officer and senior vice president of Cisco Systems until 2000. [18]

Estrin was listed as one of the "50 most powerful businesswomen in the United States" by Fortune in 1998. [1]

In 2000, Estrin co-founded Packet Design, LLC, a networking technology company, with her husband William N. Carrico, Jr., with $24 million in funding from the venture firm Foundation Capital and private investors, including Estrin, Carrico, James Barksdale, Bill Joy, and Frank Quattrone. [19] Packet Design later spun out three venture-backed startups, including Packet Design, Inc. [20] At Packet Design, she worked on advanced network technology. During this time, she divorced her husband. [21] She served as CEO of Packet Design, LLC, until it was dissolved, distributing its assets to investors in late 2007. After Packet Design, she created JLABS, LLC, which she considered a way to pursue her interests in innovation and leadership. [22] She became the CEO of Evntlive, a tech company founded by her son David Carrico, in 2013. [23]

Author

Estrin is the author of Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy (McGraw-Hill; Hardcover, September 2008), which challenges national, academic and business leaders to work together to make the United States competitive again. [24] [25]

Board positions

Estrin served on the boards of FedEx Corporation (1989-2010), [4] Rockwell Automation (1994-1998), Sun Microsystems (1995-2003), [26] as well as the Walt Disney Company, where she served for fifteen years (1998-2014). [27] She served on the Innovation Advisory Board of America COMPETES in 2011. [28]

Related Research Articles

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Deborah Estrin is a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell Tech. She is co-founder of the non-profit Open mHealth and gave a TEDMED talk on small data in 2013.

William "Bill" N. Carrico Jr. is an American computer scientist and businessman who founded several technology companies in Silicon Valley. He was the president and CEO of 3Com, senior vice president of Cisco Systems, and chairman of Packet Design.

Bridge Communications, Inc. was founded by Judy Estrin and Bill Carrico in 1981 and was based in Mountain View, California. Bridge Communications made computer network bridges, routers, and communications servers. They specialized in inter-connecting different kinds of networks.

Packet Design was an Austin, Texas-based network performance management software company credited with pioneering route analytics technology. This network monitoring technology analyzes routing protocols and structures in meshed IP networks by participating as a peer in the network to passively “listen” to Layer 3 routing protocol exchanges between routers for the purpose of network discovery, mapping, real-time monitoring and routing diagnostics.

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The International Network Working Group (INWG) was a group of prominent computer science researchers in the 1970s who studied and developed standards and protocols for interconnection of computer networks. Set up in 1972 as an informal group to consider the technical issues involved in connecting different networks, its goal was to develop an international standard protocol for internetworking. INWG became a subcommittee of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) the following year. Concepts developed by members of the group contributed to the Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication proposed by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in 1974 and the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) that emerged later.

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References

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  10. ARTIFACT DETAIL - Carrico, Bill and Judith Estrin interview. Computer History Museum. 23 June 1988.{{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
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  13. Estrin, Judy (1980). "Z-NET a microprocessor based local network". Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGSMALL symposium and the first SIGPC symposium on Small systems - SIGSMALL '80. pp. 15–17. doi:10.1145/800088.802817. ISBN   9780897910248. S2CID   24910495 . Retrieved 2014-03-04.{{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
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  18. "Cisco Systems press release, April 3, 2000". newsroom.cisco.com. Archived from the original on 2001-11-29. Retrieved 2014-03-04.
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  21. "Judy Estrin: History of Packet Design: Importance of Adapting | Stanford eCorner". ecorner-legacy.stanford.edu. Retrieved 2018-01-20.[ permanent dead link ]
  22. "5 tips for innovative parenting". ABC7 San Francisco. Retrieved 2018-01-20.
  23. "'With $2.3M From Vint Cerf & More, Tech Pioneer Judy Estrin Unveils EvntLive, The Web's New Interactive Concert Hall". techcrunch.com. February 6, 2013. Retrieved 2014-03-04.
  24. "Diversity in Innovation". startup-cafe.fr. Archived from the original on 2015-09-22. Retrieved 2014-03-04.
  25. "2008 June Podcast Interview". JLabs. Retrieved 2018-01-20.
  26. "Judith L. Estrin". nndb.com. Retrieved 2012-04-04.
  27. "Jack Dorsey Elected Walt Disney Company Board". businesswire.com. December 23, 2013. Retrieved 2014-03-04.
  28. "Meet the Innovation Advisory Board". commerce.gov. Archived from the original on 2012-01-11. Retrieved 2014-03-04.

Further reading