This Entrepreneur Sold A Company For $400 Million And Is Now Building Solutions To Manage Critical Data Securely

Welcome to the captivating narrative of Jorge Myszne, an entrepreneur whose journey traverses continents, technological frontiers, and entrepreneurial landscapes. Buckle up as we embark on an exhilarating ride through the highs, lows, and pivotal moments that shaped his entrepreneurial voyage.

In this exclusive interview, Jorge talks about the companies he has built, including one he exited for a reported $400M. He also reveals his thoughts on being the first to market a product, raising funding from the industry’s big players, and building a new team.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

Early Beginnings: From Uruguay to Silicon Valley

Born and raised in the vibrant city of Montevideo, Uruguay, Jorge’s journey commenced against the backdrop of a burgeoning passion for engineering and technology. Montevideo is the capital city with around 1.5 million people with lovely weather similar to Silicon Valley, California.

Jorge remembers always wanting to be an engineer and taking a computer course using the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64 to hone his skills. He recalls crafting soccer World Cup championship programs in 1986 to keep scores.

Jorge’s fascination with computers ignited a lifelong pursuit of innovation. It inspired him to go into electrical engineering. Since the only place to research his chosen field was University, he signed up for courses. Soon after, he got recruited into Intel Corp in Israel and packed his bags to move.

Jorge had the option to join the processor scene or a new group that was working on Wi-Fi. This was around 1999 when a small team of 30 people was working on building Centrino, a transformative chipset that revolutionized wireless connectivity.

Together, they created four generations of chipsets on the Wi-Fi side. Sometime in 2007, along with three coworkers, Jorge left the company to start a new company, Wilocity.

Wilocity: Navigating Uncharted Waters

Wilocity’s inception marked the dawn of a groundbreaking era in wireless technology. Their audacious endeavor to develop 60 GHz chipsets, a precursor to 5G millimeter wave, encountered formidable challenges.

Securing seed funding amidst the tumultuous landscape of 2007 was akin to navigating a tempest, yet their perseverance bore fruit with strategic investments from renowned VCs like Benchmark and Sequoia.

Up until that time, the chipsets designed were only up to 5GHz to 6GHz. Any fab that manufactured chips would only offer models of up to 10GHz. That’s what users would use to model their designs.

However, to simulate designs, Jorge and his team needed 60GHz, meaning there were no models, and they had to build their own models.

They just fabricated a chip with basic structures and then had to measure and build models, which required a lot of R&D to get there. This process also meant that Jorge and his team were raising money for 6 months before delivering any real results.

Luckily for them, they were able to land heavy hitters like Sequoia and Benchmark. In a kind of validation, they liked the team of four founders, who were very experienced in the field. Even so, Jorge and his team had to work hard to explain the product they were building.

Once they got people around the idea of what they were trying to do, VCs stepped up with funding worth $100M. This round was the first and was executed in 2007, a little before the 2008 crisis.

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Since they had money in the bank, Wilocity was able to weather the storm, though Jorge did have to slow down some of their plans. The company also had to let go of some employees. However, by 2010, things started to turn around, and the company started to accelerate.

The Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster: Trials and Triumphs

As Wilocity soared, they encountered the inevitable hurdles of entrepreneurship. Racing against time and competition, Jorge and his team grappled with the realities of being first to market. Intel’s foray into a similar domain served as both a validation and a formidable challenge.

It proved that Jorge and his team were on the right path. They tried to speed up development and build the best products they could. However, explaining to customers what the product was all about was easy since Intel was marketing the same products.

However, their unwavering commitment to innovation and customer-centricity propelled them forward. Eventually, Qualcomm’s acquisition of Wilocity for $400M became proof of their technological prowess and market vision.

Before Qualcomm, Atheros, a Wi-Fi semiconductor company, had invested in Wilocity in the second funding round.

Later, Atheros was acquired by Qualcomm, which continued to invest in Wilocity in the subsequent rounds. This factor meant that Jorge and his co-founders had been working very closely with their acquirers.

As Jorge recalls, they started the company with PC products in 2007, well before the iPhone. In 2010-2011, they started transitioning to mobile-centric solutions and working with companies like Samsung and Apple.

These brands also expressed interest in the products Wilocity was developing.

The American Dream: Beyond Acquisition

The acquisition heralded a new chapter in Jorge’s journey, epitomizing the quintessential American dream. Yet, amidst the euphoria, Jorge remained grounded, shouldering the responsibility of integrating his team into Qualcomm’s ecosystem.

The allure of entrepreneurship beckoned once more, leading Jorge to helm Kameleon, where he navigated uncharted territories in hardware security solutions.

As he explains, when he moved to the US, he had started the gradual transition from the technical side to the customer engagement and the product world.

Building Kameleon

However, Jorge took on the CEO role at Kameleon. He underscores the importance of sometimes stepping back despite being a technical person and letting other technical people do their thing even though you know better.

At the same time, it’s crucial to ask the team the right questions, understand the challenges, and, basically, work on facilitating operations. At Kameleon, they built hardware security solutions for servers, mainly protecting servers when they were booting or secure booting.

They made sure that nothing was changed, and when you turn on a server, all the software that is loaded before the operating system is loaded, and the authenticity hasn’t been touched. These processes cannot be done in software because this happens at the application or operating system level loads.

The Kameleon product was tailored for cloud providers and server OEMs. Jorge managed to leverage his connections with people he had worked with before in Wilocity and Qualcomm. He also started building an engineering team, though most of it was in Israel, and his partners were in the US.

When COVID hit, everybody moved to the cloud, and the need for the cloud accelerated exponentially.

The cloud providers Jorge and his team were working with had to delay the next-generation projects because they didn’t have enough servers to support the demand that they had now. At the same time, they didn’t have the parts because of the supply shortage.

They couldn’t get the parts to build more servers to support that demand so they had to redesign the servers with whatever parts were available to work and support that demand.

This meant that all the next-generation projects just got delayed. At the same time, it was very clear that there would be a drop after that spike in demand and that the spike was not real.

Soon after, there will just be too much supply and not enough demand, so that’s where Jorge and his team started to get proactive.

They started to plan the right approach for Kameleon and were working with another company. That’s when they made the decision to join forces and merge. Soon after, Jorge decided to take some time off and went back to working as an advisor at a Silicon Accelerator in the Bay Area.

Reimagining the Future: From Kameleon to Niobium Microsystems

Jorge’s entrepreneurial spirit continued to thrive as he embarked on a transformative journey with Niobium Microsystems. Spearheading the development of innovative encryption technologies, Jorge found himself at the forefront of a paradigm shift in data security.

His unwavering resolve to embrace challenges and pioneer groundbreaking solutions underscored his entrepreneurial ethos.

As Jorge explains, Niobium basically computes on encrypted data. It’s a new type of encryption that allows users to basically compute on data that is encrypted without needing to decrypt the data.

Jorge ended up talking to them and deploying a very small team of about 18 people. The company got a grant from Darpa to build an accelerator for fully homomorphic encryption. Jorge enjoyed the challenge of starting from scratch to understand where to take that product and how to work the go-to-market version.

He was also excited about how to build the company and steer it in the right direction.

Lessons Learned and Future Horizons

From humble beginnings in Uruguay to trailblazing ventures in Silicon Valley, Jorge’s journey embodies the spirit of relentless pursuit and audacious ambition.

Through triumphs and tribulations, Jorge’s unwavering belief in the transformative power of technology and the entrepreneurial spirit inspires aspiring innovators worldwide.

In conclusion, Jorge Myszne’s entrepreneurial saga is a beacon of hope and inspiration, lighting the path for future innovators to tread boldly. He has had a remarkable journey, seized opportunities, embraced challenges, and dared to dream beyond the confines of convention.

Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including:

• Jorge’s journey reminds us to embrace opportunities and take the plunge, even into uncharted waters.
• Through funding challenges and market competition, Jorge’s resilience paved the way for success.
• Jorge’s story from Uruguay to Silicon Valley underscores the global reach of entrepreneurial vision.
• Wilocity’s focus on solving real-world problems propelled them to the forefront of technological innovation.
• Jorge exemplifies the importance of flexibility in entrepreneurship by navigating mergers, acquisitions, and market shifts.
• Jorge’s ability to lead diverse teams across continents highlights the universal language of vision and collaboration.
• Jorge’s unwavering resolve to pursue his entrepreneurial dreams shines as a beacon of inspiration through every setback and triumph.

 

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