5g
(25)
Mansoor Khan’s other network
He helped bring two engineering businesses together as Veltris’s founding CEO. His career also runs through another kind of network: the alumni, collaborators and younger founders he keeps bringing into the conversation.
Satish Dhanasekaran and the business of being early
Before a new technology can change your life, someone has to find out whether it works. From early smartphones to 6G, Satish Dhanasekaran has built a career on that inconvenient little detail.
John Stankey’s long way back to the connection
He helped take AT&T into Hollywood, then helped lead it out. After four decades in telecom, John Stankey is betting the company’s next chapter on fiber, wireless and the patience to build.
Steve Vondran took the long way up
He joined American Tower as a lawyer in 2000. Twenty-four years later, Steve Vondran became CEO, carrying an education in leases, steel, and the business of keeping people connected.
Udy Kashkash and the art of keeping things running
From engineering labs to the CEO’s office at RAD, Udy Kashkash has built a career around a practical question: how do you move a network forward while keeping it working?
Ronny Haraldsvik Has Spent a Career Selling the Invisible
From Flarion’s mobile-broadband bet to Cohere’s pitch for smarter spectrum, Ronny Haraldsvik has built a career translating radio engineering into decisions that operators, partners and investors can act on.
Dawn Callahan Built a Career by Saying Yes Before She Felt Ready
A production creative became a service-quality fixer, a cable marketer and the long-serving CMO who helped guide Boingo from startup to public company to private ownership. Her operating system is disarmingly simple: notice the problem, volunteer an idea and get comfortable being uncomfortable.
Donna Johnson Makes Invisible Infrastructure Make Sense
An electrical engineer became the marketer translating 5G, wireless WAN and cloud-managed connectivity into decisions people can actually make. At Inseego, Donna Johnson is applying that unusual career arc to a company preparing for a much larger global stage.
Shekar Ayyar Is Betting the AI Boom on the Part Nobody Sees
After helping VMware turn strategy into more than 60 deals, Shekar Ayyar chose a smaller stage and a harder problem: freeing networks from the boxes that contain them. Now AI is making his once-technical argument feel rather urgent.
Eva Hedfors and the art of making invisible networks feel human
After two decades inside Ericsson, three countries and a string of assignments that once felt almost too hard, Eva Hedfors has learned to translate telecom's hidden machinery into moments people can see, feel and use.
Seyed Tabatabaei
Seyed A. Tabatabaei is the founder, chairman and CEO of mmTron, a Redwood City fabless semiconductor company building high-linearity millimeter-wave MMICs for 5G, 6G, SATCOM, instrumentation and defense. A PhD engineer who has worked in mmWave since 1986, he spent decades at M/A-COM, Hewlett Packard, and Endwave before starting the design house Teramics and then founding mmTron in 2020. In April 2026 the company closed a $45M Series A led by Maverick Silicon.
Tashinga Musiyazviriyo
Tashinga Musiyazviriyo is the Founder and CEO of The Singular, a Johannesburg-based digital transformation company building purpose-driven IoT, AI, and private 5G network solutions across industries including mining, telecommunications, manufacturing, smart cities, and healthcare. With a career forged inside Ericsson's core network engineering teams and a deep grounding in mobile network design and performance, Tashinga brings both technical precision and entrepreneurial drive to the challenge of connecting Africa's industries to the future.
Jeff Gower
Jeff Gower is the CEO of MarketSpark, the Bannockburn, Illinois company betting that the millions of copper phone lines humming inside American buildings are on borrowed time. Since 2020 he has led the enterprise POTS-replacement business, swapping static, costly analog lines for managed 4G/5G-ready wireless that keeps elevators, fire alarms and fax machines talking after the copper is gone. An engineer by training with an MIT Sloan MBA, Gower spent two decades scaling mobility and B2B services businesses across the globe - Siemens Mobile, Brightstar, Samsung Electronics and Trux - before turning the unglamorous plumbing of enterprise telecom into a growth story backed by a $7M Series B.
Ross Ortega
Ross Ortega is VP of Product Management at Microsoft, currently leading Discovery and Communications initiatives. He previously built a $1 billion portfolio of Azure networking services - including ExpressRoute, Virtual WAN, Application Gateway, and Web Application Firewall - and then led Azure for Operators, Microsoft's 5G and edge computing platform for telecommunications providers. Before Microsoft, he co-founded Consystant Design Technologies and served as President and CTO of GraniteEdge Networks. A career technologist with roots in embedded systems and networking, Ortega has spent over two decades at Microsoft shaping how enterprises and telecoms connect to the cloud.
Alfonso Villanueva
Alfonso Villanueva is the EVP, Chief Transformation Officer and Interim CEO of Verizon Consumer Group - the largest consumer wireless carrier in the United States. A former McKinsey Senior Partner and PayPal EVP, he joined Verizon in November 2025 at the invitation of new CEO Dan Schulman, his former PayPal colleague, to lead a sweeping $5B+ operational transformation. With roots in strategy consulting across Asia-Pacific and two decades of experience in telecom, media, and technology, Villanueva brings a rare blend of corporate venture expertise, AI-driven data strategy, and global transformation leadership to one of America's biggest companies.
Yuxing Li
Yuxing Li is listed as an Interim CEO connected with Huawei, the Shenzhen-headquartered telecommunications and consumer electronics giant. Based in Redwood City, California, Yuxing sits at the intersection of two of the most scrutinized technology ecosystems in the world: Silicon Valley and Shenzhen.
Farhat Jahangir
Farhat Jahangir is the Founder, President & CEO of GS Microelectronics (GSME), a San Jose-based semiconductor solutions company he founded around 2021-2022. With 25+ years in semiconductor manufacturing, operations, and chip design, he previously served as VP & General Manager at ON Semiconductor and SVP of Manufacturing at Quantenna Communications, where he helped steer the company through its 2016 IPO and a $1.1B acquisition. GSME raised a $35M Series B in January 2026, backed by Maverick Silicon, and has since made two strategic acquisitions - Sinble Technology Vietnam and Muse Semiconductor - to build a vertically integrated semiconductor services platform spanning chip design, MPW services, and advanced process node capabilities.
Karl Meyer
Karl Meyer is General Partner and Managing Director, Head of Global Portfolio Operations at Digital Alpha, an alternative asset manager focused on digital infrastructure - the backbone of the digital economy spanning next-generation networks, cloud, and IoT/Smart Cities. Bringing two decades of enterprise technology experience from Cisco, Kleiner Perkins, HPE, and Incorta, Meyer joined Digital Alpha in October 2021 to build a world-class operations function and drive measurable value creation across the firm's portfolio companies. He currently serves on the boards of Energybox and PacketFabric, where his enterprise software and go-to-market expertise helps portfolio companies scale into Global 2,000 accounts.
Upal Basu
Upal Basu is a General Partner and Managing Member at NGP Capital, a Nokia-backed venture capital firm in Palo Alto. A three-time wave rider of mobile transformation - first as an engineer, then as the founder and CEO of Mformation Technologies (which became the world's largest mobile device management company, managing 500M+ devices before being acquired by Alcatel-Lucent), and now as a lead investor in the 5G and connected enterprise era. With an engineering degree from Imperial College London, an MS from Stanford, and an MBA from Harvard Business School, Basu brings a rare blend of operator grit and institutional rigor to backing founders in cybersecurity, AI, autonomous robotics, satellite navigation, and industrial technology.
Bobby Bahl
Bobby Bahl is the founder and CEO of teleSys Software, Inc., a San Mateo-based telecommunications software company he established in 1997. With over 40 years of industry experience, he led the deployment of the first SS7 signaling network in the United States at Sprint and managed the creation of Equal Access, the nation's first long-distance network. Under his leadership, teleSys has grown into a global provider of carrier-grade multi-generation signaling solutions, with 400+ installations serving 100+ operators across 80+ countries supporting more than 1 billion active subscribers.
Derek Ting
Derek Ting is the co-founder and CEO of TextNow, the Waterloo-based company he started in 2009 at age 19 with classmate Jon Lerner while studying computer engineering at the University of Waterloo. What began as a scrappy solution to outrageous carrier text messaging fees has grown into the only U.S. mobile provider offering unlimited talk, text, and free essential data on a nationwide 5G network. The TextNow app has been downloaded more than 200 million times worldwide, making Derek one of the most consequential quiet disruptors in American telecommunications - building a profitable, venture-light company that serves millions of users who can't afford traditional phone service.
Dhrupad Trivedi
Dhrupad Trivedi is the President, CEO, and Chairman of A10 Networks (NYSE: ATEN), a San Jose-based cybersecurity and application delivery company. With a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and an MBA in Finance from Duke's Fuqua School of Business, he brings over 30 years of deep technical and operational expertise across networking, cybersecurity, and telecommunications. Since taking the helm in December 2019, Trivedi has repositioned A10 as an AI-era security company — landing Microsoft as a customer to protect mission-critical generative AI infrastructure — while driving double-digit revenue growth and expanding the company's portfolio to include AI firewalls, DDoS protection, and next-generation web application firewalls.
Jun Shi
Jun Shi is CEO and President of Accton Technology, the $7.9B Taiwanese ODM powerhouse behind much of the world's white-box networking hardware. A 25-year veteran of Silicon Valley's networking giants — Cisco, Juniper, and F5 — he shepherded startup Volterra from inception through its $500 million acquisition before joining Accton in 2023. Now he's steering the company's ambitious pivot: from hardware maker to full-stack open infrastructure provider, anchored by Nexvec, a turnkey AI-ready infrastructure solution launched in May 2025.
Sunil Kaul
Sunil Kaul is the CEO of Airlinq, a Silicon Valley-based enterprise IoT platform company serving automakers, mobile network operators, and enterprises with a secure, scalable, AI-powered platform for connected vehicle and IoT ecosystem management. With over 20 years in telecommunications, Kaul has grown Airlinq into a globally recognized leader in IoT connectivity management, earning top rankings from Kaleido Intelligence, Counterpoint Research, and Frost & Sullivan, while forging partnerships with major names like Volvo, Verizon, NTT DOCOMO, Jio, and Tata.
Kush Gulati
Kush Gulati is the Co-founder, President, and CEO of Omni Design Technologies, a Milpitas-based semiconductor IP company he founded in 2015. A serial entrepreneur on his fifth venture, he holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT and has spent over two decades pioneering ultra-low power analog circuit design. His proprietary SWIFT technology powers data conversion IP used in 5G, autonomous vehicles, AI infrastructure, satellite communications, and LiDAR applications by tier-one customers worldwide. Omni Design raised a $35M+ Series A in September 2025.