Rob L Soni

The son of Indian immigrants, Rob grew up in the suburbs of Rochester, NY; RTP, NC; and Atlanta, GA. In high school, in addition to being valedictorian, he competed in national tennis tournaments as part of America’s greatest tennis generation, playing (and occasionally winning!) against the likes of Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi, Jim Courier, Michael Chang, Malavai Washington, and David Wheaton. He studied physics with Professor Karl Strauch, then head of CERN, and switched to Social Studies at Harvard College. Rob earned a fellowship to study U.S. nuclear policy in New Zealand, and then joined The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), where he worked in the automotive, health care services, pharmaceutical, and media markets. In 1994 he signed on with Bessemer Venture Partners. Still in his mid-twenties, Rob founded the firm’s early stage data communications practice. One of the first businesses Rob backed was Aptis, a data networking equipment maker. The company sold within 24 months to Nortel for $290 million. This was followed by Maker Communications, which was bought by Conexant for $1 billion after going public on Nasdaq. Among the other companies Rob helped launch: Element 14, a maker of high speed telecommunications chip sets (sold to Broadcom for $600 million), Sirocco, an optical networking outfit (sold to Sycamore Networks for $3.6 billion), Powertel, a wireless service provider (bought by VoiceStream Wireless for $6 billion), and Bladelogic, (bought by BMC Software for $800 million). In 1999, while still at Bessemer, Rob co-founded Intersect Software, a maker of project, portfolio and resource management software. He remains the company’s chairman. Rob officially joined Matrix Partners in 2003. His current portfolio includes start-ups in network security, data center virtualization, analog and programmable semiconductors, and industrial waste reclamation.