Bob Metcalfe, Founder, 3Com Corporation, and General Partner, Polaris Venture Partners

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 international local-area networking standard on which he shares four patents. From 1976 through 1983, he was consulting associate professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. 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, marketing, and sales. 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, "From the Ether," read weekly by 629,000 information technology professionals. He also wrote for American Spectator, Forbes, Technology Review, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired Magazine. He gave frequent speeches, appeared on radio and television, and hosted his own weekly webcast. He held entrepreneurship salons 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).