- Dado Banatao
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Diosdado Banatao (born May 23, 1946, Iguig, Cagayan, Philippines), popularly known by his nickname Dado, is a well-known Filipino serial entrepreneur and engineer working in high-tech industry. A three-time start-up veteran, he co-founded Mostron (PC Motherboards), Chips and Technologies (PC Chip Sets, eventually acquired by Intel), and S3 Graphics (originally 2D graphics chips, renamed to SonicBLUE). It is Silicon Valley folklore that he chose the company name S3 to mean "Start-up number 3".
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Early Years
Dado Banatao was born on May 23, 1946 to a rice farmer and housekeeper where he grew up in a little barrio named Malabhac in the farming town of Iguig in Cagayan Valley Province. When he was a kid, Banatao used to walk barefoot to school along the dirt roads. He then went to Ateneo de Tuguegarao and at 15 pursued college education at Mapua Institute of Technology where he graduated cum laude with an Electrical Engineering degree.
Dado was then offered a job after graduation at Meralco but then he turned down the offer after knowing the starting salary. He instead applied as a pilot trainee at Philippine Airlines, which paid much more. Little did he know that a turning point of his career will come when Boeing pirated him as a design engineer and brought him to US.He then enjoyed engineering and later on pursued further studies taking a Masters in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University, which he completed in 1972 to be trained properly on his craft.
After graduating with his Masters degree, Dado then worked at some of the leading-edge technology companies that include National Semiconductor, Intersil, and Commodore International where he designed the first single chip, 16-bit microprocessor-based calculator. In 1981, while he was working at Seeq Technology, the inventor of Ethernet approached the company to look for a more efficient way of linking computers. Banatao was then assigned with the task that led him to his breakthrough discovery of by putting the Ethernet controller on a single chip instead of big boards. That was then the first 10-Mbit Ethernet CMOS with silicon coupler data-link control and transreceiver chip.
Success
With that breakthrough discovery, Dado then decided to start his company and be his own boss. With US$500,000 seed capital that came mostly from friends, he put up Mostron in 1985 to develop chip sets. As a start up company, he had to be cost efficient and resourceful. He then used equipment from another company that wasn’t used on weekends to debug chips. Later his hard work and dedication paid off when his company developed the first system logic chip set for the PC-XT and PC-AT, which lowered the cost of building the personal computer and made it much more powerful.
About the same time, Dado started his second company named Chips and Technologies (C&T), which created enhanced graphics adapter chip sets. With its success, sales during the first quarter amounted to US$12 million. In less than a year, the company went public by listing its shares in the stock market and the market’s response was remarkable. It was one of the fastest Initial Public Offering (IPO) listings in the history of US stock market. In 1996, multinational semiconductor giant Intel bought C&T making Banatao richer by US$430 million. But even before this huge success, Banatao had already reached millions when he started his third company named S3. It was a company that pioneered the local bus concept for the PC in 1989 and introduced the first Windows accelerator chip in 1990. Way back in 1993, S3 was then considered as the third most profitable technology company in the world when it went public having an IPO worth of US$30 million.
Dado Banatao is now a multimillionaire investor. He invested in a lot of networking companies that were eventually sold before he joined the venture capital firm Mayfield Fund in 1998. After two years, the company offered him to promote to a general partner but Dado refused it and instead decided to start his own venture capital firm named Tallwood Venture Capital with a capital of US$300 million, all of which came from his own pocket. He then believed that independence is more important than security.
Today Dado Banatao manages several businesses. His Cielo Communications is developing the vertical cavity surface emitting laser or Versel, which speeds the transmission of data along optical lines. His SIRF Technology is designing a chip for a global positioning system which utilizes satellites to locate objects. His Marvell Technology had a highly successful public offering with the stock price soaring more than 300% during its first day of trading. He has proven to be a master investor and venture capitalist. He invests, oversees, and sells several companies that include Cyras Systems acquired by Ciena; Newport Communications acquired by Broadcom; Acclaim Communications acquired by Level One; Stream Machines acquired by Cirrus Logic; Marvell Technology Group and New Moo software.
He has more than three homes in the US, including resort properties in Lake Tahoe and Sonoma San Francisco. From his childhood roots of walking barefoot, he now drives his high-performance luxury cars and he flies his own fast jets. Yet despite these blessings, Dado Banatao still contributes to the society and to the country. His Banatao Filipino American Fund assists Northern California high school students of Filipino heritage in pursuing a college education in engineering. Aside from this, he also went back to his childhood town of Iguig in Cagayan Valley where he built a computer center at his grade school making it the only public school with the most modern computer network. Currently, Dado also serves as the Chairman of the Board of the Philippine Development Foundation, a public charity that focuses on building an ecosystem of science and technology-based entrepreneurship and innovation for social and economic development in the Philippines.
Works
He worked on the following technologies as have several hundred other engineers and does not claim having invented or innovated any of these technologies.
- First single-chip, 16-bit microprocessor-based calculator (while at Commodore in 1976. Note: The first single-chip 16-bit microprocessor was the 1976 TMS 9900 by Texas Instruments. Texas Instruments also came up with the first pocket calculator in 1972. (Was Commodore the first to come up with the single-chip 16-bit calculator?)
- First 10-Mbit Ethernet CMOS with silicon coupler data-link control and transreceiver chip; got 3Com into the Ethernet PC add-in card business (while at Seeq in early 1980s)
- First system logic chip set for the PC-XT and the PC-AT (while at Mostron in 1984 and Chips and Technologies in 1985)
- First enhanced graphics adapter chip set (while at Chips and Technologies in 1985)
- Pioneered local bus concept for PC (while at S3 in 1989)
- First Windows Graphics accelerator chip (while at S3 in 1990)
He is a managing partner of Tallwood Venture Capital. Prior to Tallwood he was a venture partner with the Mayfield Fund. He has served on the board of directors and as chairman of several emerging companies, including Marvell Technology Group, SiRF (acquired by CSR plc), NewPort Communications (acquired by Broadcom), and Cyras Systems (acquired by Ciena Corporation).
On June 15, 2011, Banatao was elected Interim President and CEO of Ikanos Communications Inc.
Banatao holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Mapua Institute of Technology in the Philippines and a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Stanford University.
References
Categories:- 1946 births
- Living people
- American people of Filipino descent
- People from Cagayan
- Filipino inventors
- Filipino businesspeople
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