David Cheriton

Early life

David Ross Cheriton was born March 29, 1951 in Vancouver, Canada.

Education

David Cheriton attended the University of British Columbia earning a Bachelor of Arts and Science degree. Cheriton pursued his education further, obtaining a Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy from 1974 to 1978 at the University of Waterloo. He spent three years as an assistant professor at his Alma mater, the University of British Columbia, before moving to Stanford University.

Career

David Cheriton, also known as “Professor Billionaire”, is a Canadian computer scientist, mathematician, billionaire businessman, philanthropist, and venture capitalist. Cheriton is a computer science professor at Stanford University, where he founded and leads the Distributed Systems Group. His research focuses on the areas of high-performance distributed systems, and high-speed computer communication with a particular interest in protocol design. He leads the Distributed Systems Group in the TRIAD project, focusing on understanding and solving problems with Internet architecture. He has also been teaching and writing about object-oriented programming, building on his experience with OOP in systems building. Cheriton is a distributed computing and computer networking expert, with insight into identifying big market opportunities and building the architectures needed to address such opportunities. He has founded and invested in technology companies, including Google, where he was among the first angel investors, investing $100,000 when it was just getting started; VMware, where he was an early investor; and Arista, where he was co-founder and chief scientist. Throughout his lifetime, Cheriton has funded at least 20 companies.

Net Worth

David Cheriton has an estimated net worth of $10.6 billion, making much of his fortune from an early investment in Google. In 2017 Cheriton was ranked No.50 on Forbes Richest In Tech and in 2021, he was ranked No.269 on Forbes Billionaires List.

Achievement

Cheriton, who has been teaching at Stanford since 1981, has also been a technical advisor to many companies, including IBM, Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems, and Google. He was co-founder of Granite Systems, which was acquired by Cisco Systems in 1996, and co-founder of Kealia Inc, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2004. In 2003, Cheriton was given the Waterloo University Faculty of Mathematics Alumni Achievement Medal for his extraordinary research contributions to computer science and for successfully commercializing his research results. In 2005, the University of Waterloo renamed their Computer Science program to the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science in honor of his generous Endowment for Excellence in Computer Science. In 2006, Cheriton was asked to speak at the first David R. Cheriton Research Symposium and continues to speak at seminars today. As a graduate student of the University of Waterloo, Cheriton enriched the computer science graduate program with an exceptional gift of $25 million.