COUNCIL TRUSTEES
Dr. Robert M. Metcalfe
General Partner, Polaris Ventures
Dr. Robert M. ("Bob") Metcalfe is a general partner in our Boston office. Bob joined Polaris in January of 2001. He specializes in Boston area based information technology start-ups.
Bob had three careers before becoming a venture capitalist:
While an engineer-scientist (1965-1979), Bob helped build the early Internet. In 1973, at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, he invented Ethernet, the local-area networking (LAN) standard on which he shares four patents. In 2003, Ethernet’s 30th year, 184 million new Ethernet connections were shipped for $12.5 billion.
While an entrepreneur-executive (1979-1990), Bob founded 3Com Corporation, the billion-dollar networking company where at various times he was Chairman, CEO, division general manager, and vice president of engineering, sales, and marketing.
While a publisher-pundit (1990-2000), Bob was CEO of IDG's InfoWorld Publishing Company (1992-1995). For eight years, he wrote an Internet column read weekly by over 500,000 information technologists. He spoke often; appeared on radio, television, and the web; and produced conferences including ACM97, ACM1, Agenda, Pop!Tech, and Vortex. Bob's book credits include Packet Communication (Thomson), Internet Collapses and Other InfoWorld Punditry (IDG Books), and Beyond Calculation:The Next Fifty Years of Computing (co-edited for Springer Verlag).
Bob graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969 with bachelor degrees in electrical engineering and in management. He received an M.S. in applied mathematics from Harvard University in 1970. In 1973, he received his Ph.D. in computer science from Harvard, where his doctoral dissertation was titled, "Packet Communication."
