Sam Srinivas: Profile

Sampath 'Sam' Srinivas is an independent consultant based in Bangalore, India. He consults with select early stage startups that interest him and helps them hone their business plans, focus their execution and raise funds.

Earlier, Sam Srinivas was Vice President & Chief Technologist for the Bangalore Development Center of Juniper Networks reporting to the Vice Chairman and CTO at US headquarters. During his tenure there, Juniper India grew significantly from about 150 people to nearly 500 people. Sam was also a key external spokesman for Juniper in India and neighboring markets. Prior to moving to India in 2005, Sam was Vice President & Chief Technologist at the Sunnyvale, California headquarters for Juniper. During this period, he helped get some key products off the ground, such as the Universal Access Control (UAC) LAN security product line.

Sam came to Juniper through the acquisition of Neoteris Inc, a company he founded with three founding partners. Neoteris' product line was, and continues (as part of Juniper) to be the world market share leader in the area of SSL-VPN. SSL-VPN products provide simple secure web-browser based remote access to corporate networks -- Neoteris is credited with inventing this category of security products.

As the founding CEO of Neoteris, Sam led the founders through one year of self funded progress which culminated in multiple competing funding offers in 2001 -- a time when the post-bubble crash was in full force. After bringing in a full-time CEO, Sam ran the product line as the Vice President of Product Management. Working with a world class team that came together at Neoteris, Sam saw the product line through 4 full release cycles, three rounds of funding, and two years of rapidly expanding revenues which culminated in Neoteris being acquired for $295 Million in 2003.

Prior to founding Neoteris, Sam was an early recruit at Healtheon, a company founded in 1996 to bring the efficiencies of Internet connectivity to the various players in the Healthcare space. He ran the initial deployments of the first two products to come out of Healtheon and played a hybrid role spanning customer deployment, account management and product management. Before Healtheon, Sam was an early recruit into Microsoft Research. At Microsoft, Sam worked on using probabilistic modeling techniques in solving issues in next generation computer interfaces.

Sam has a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University. His research focus was on an emerging probabilistic modeling technique called Bayesian Networks. Sam was one of the early and established members of the Bayesian Network research community. In addition to being one of most published members of the community at that time, he also developed an open-source toolkit called IDEAL, which was the standard toolkit used by researchers of the time to implement new ideas in this field (See Research and Publications). Before his stint at Stanford, Sam was a research programmer at Rockwell International's Palo Alto labs. Sam came to Rockwell after an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley  where he was a Regent's fellow. Sam has an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.

Sam is married and has two young children. Sam is a keen follower of Indian Classical Music and a recreational runner. He has run a marathon and a few half marathons and hopes to continually improve his performance.

Sam can be reached at sam@cs.stanford.edu.

Last updated:  Mar 2008