Nick McKeown

McKeown received his bachelor's degree from the University of Leeds in 1986. From 1986 through 1989 he worked for Hewlett-Packard Labs, in their network and communications research group in Bristol, England. He moved to the United States in 1989, and earned a master's degree in 1992 and PhD in 1995 both from the University of California at Berkeley. During spring 1995, he worked briefly for Cisco Systems where he helped architect their GSR 12000 router. His PhD thesis was on "Scheduling Cells in an Input-Queued Cell Switch", with advisor Professor Jean Walrand. He joined the faculty of Stanford University in 1995 as assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science. In 1997, McKeown co-founded Abrizio Inc. with Anders Swahn, where he was CTO. Abrizio was acquired by PMC-Sierra in 1999 for stock shares worth $400 million. He was promoted to associate professor in 2002. He was co-founder in 2003 (with Sundar Iyer) and CEO of Nemo Systems, which Cisco Systems bought in 2005. He became faculty director of the Clean Slate Program in 2006, and was promoted to full professor at Stanford in 2010.

In 2007, Casado, McKeown and Shenker co-founded Nicira Networks, a Palo Alto, California-based company working on network virtualization, acquired by VMWare for $1.26 billion in July 2012.