Board of Directors

Chris Rust joined USVP as a General Partner in November 2004. At USVP, Chris focuses on early stage investments in component, software and systems for consumer and networking applications. He currently serves on the Board of Mahi Networks and LVL7. Chris joined USVP from Mahi Networks, where he held the position of President and CEO since November of 2001. Chris co-founded Mahi in September of 1999 as an incubated seed investment, then joined the company on a full time basis in November 2001, where he successfully led the company through the networking equipment sector collapse.

Prior to Mahi, Chris spent over four years at Sequoia Capital, with two years as an associate and two years as a Partner. Chris was instrumental in funding 19 early-stage startups focused on components, software, and systems for enterprise and carrier networking applications. Mr. Rust served as a Founding Director of Afara WebSystems (acquired by Sun Microsystems, NASDAQ: SUNW), MEMX, Nexsi Systems (acquired by Juniper Networks, NASDAQ: JNPR), Santur, SwitchOn Networks (acquired by PMC-Sierra, NASDAQ: PMCS), Turin Networks, and VxTel (acquired by Intel Corporation, NASDAQ: INTC). He also led Sequoia’s investments in Mellanox, Onetta, and Syndesis, and was an active Board Observer to Abrizio (acquired by PMC-Sierra, NASDAQ: PMCS), Avanex (NASDAQ: AVNX), Nightfire, Santera, Springbank (acquired by Cacheflow, NASDAQ: CFLO), and Telera/Callnet (acquired by Alcatel: ALA). Mr. Rust also served as Interim CEO at Nexsi Systems.

Before entering the early stage venture capital community, Chris spent 11 years in engineering, technical marketing, and product management positions at Carrier Access Corporation (NASDAQ CACS), Sourcecom (acquired by ACT Networks), US WEST Advanced Technologies, and MITRE Corporation. He holds a B.S. and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering with honors from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, and an M.S. in Telecommunications Engineering, as well as an M.S. in Engineering Management, each with honors from the University of Colorado at Boulder.