Today marks a bittersweet milestone. On the one hand, it’s a day for celebration, as Mist Systems announces its acquisition by Juniper Networks for over $400M. On the other hand it marks the end of my journey and partnership with Sujai Hajela, Bob Friday, and Brett Galloway, the founders of Mist Systems.
In five short years, Bob, Sujai, and the exceptional team they assembled have changed an industry. It’s been an honor to have partnered with them from the very beginning.
Mist Systems is a classic Silicon Valley story.
Sujai and Bob are both networking experts with highly complementary skills. Before co-founding Mist, Bob was the CTO of Cisco’s wireless networking business and a technical legend in the industry. Sujai was Bob’s business partner at Cisco, where he ran Cisco’s enterprise networking business. Brett was their consigliere and coach, having groomed them at Cisco. Together, they knew everyone in the industry and had deep insights into how enterprise wireless technology needed to evolve.
Like many great ideas, their key insight was sitting in plain view. Specifically, no one had attempted to built a modern, cloud-first enterprise wireless system since 2005. In a post-iPhone and post-AWS (amazon web services) world, the Fortune 2000 still ran on ancient, legacy hardware. The technology pioneered by industry legends like Cisco, Aruba, and Meraki worked, but was dangerously outdated in a cloud / mobile first world.
And like many great ideas, the Mist Systems founders added a twist. Back in 2014, before AI had become a buzzword, Bob and Sujai realized that wireless networks were a goldmine of data… and that if they ran their own machine learning models on this data, they could build a self-driving network. This concept was revolutionary, and to this day remains an industry-first.
At Lightspeed, we were incredibly impressed by this team and their vision to change an industry. We first seeded Bob Friday when he left Cisco in early 2014 to lay the groundwork for Mist Systems. And a few months later, we co-led, with our friends at Norwest, the company’s $14.4M Series A financing.
Now, in 2019, Mist Systems is widely recognized as the pioneer of AI for IT. Their wireless networks are quietly powering some of the largest and highest profile enterprises in the world. 3 of the Fortune 10 and 20 of the Fortune 500 companies trust Mist to run their networks. And behind these industry heavyweights, hundreds more customers are constantly delighted by the stability and reliability of their AI powered networks.
And so, today, as Mist joins Juniper Networks, I’d like to thank Sujai, Bob, Brett, for the amazing partnership. The past five years have been a lot of fun… from first hire to first customer, from first product prototype to the latest massive customer shipment, we celebrated many small milestones together. And today, I raise a glass to celebrate a final milestone for me and Lightspeed, but one of many more for the company as they lead the “AI for IT” charge and continue to shake up the networking industry. I look forward to partnering with you again soon!
Arif Janmohamed is a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. He focuses on investments in enterprise IT and infrastructure and sits on the boards of a number of rapidly scaling companies, including Netskope, TripActions, Qubole, Appzen, Mist, Split, and OverOps. In his free time, Arif plays ice hockey with his wife, who yells at him for never passing the puck to her.
Lightspeed is an early stage VC firm focused on accelerating disruptive innovations and trends in the enterprise and consumer sectors. Lightspeed has backed 350+ companies globally in the past two decades including Nutanix, AppDynamics, MuleSoft, Snap and Nest.
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