Bob Metcalfe is University of Texas at Austin Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship and serves as Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise in the Texas Innovation Center, which he founded in 2010. He is an internet pioneer, entrepreneur, and educator. A year before graduating with a PhD from Harvard in 1973, Metcalfe joined the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). There, in collaboration with David Boggs, he invented and developed the Ethernet local-area network (LAN), which evolved to become the “plumbing” for today's internet.
In 1979, Metcalfe founded 3Com Corporation in Silicon Valley, taking the company public in 1984. During the 1990s, he served as CEO/Publisher at IDG’s InfoWorld Magazine, and for eight years, his column, From the Ether, attracted more than a million readers each week. In the 2000s, he was a partner at venture capital firm Polaris Partners in Boston.
In 2005, Metcalfe received the National Medal of Technology. In 2008, he received CHM’s Fellow Award and he is a member of the Internet Hall of Fame and the National Academy of Engineering, an Emeritus Life Trustee of MIT, and a board member of The Academy of Medicine, Engineering, and Science of Texas.
