Lessons From the Start-up Trenches: Interview with Oliver Gunasekara of NGCodec

Oliver’s career encompasses three of the major technology trends that emerged over the past two decades: mobile computing, cloud computing and multimedia technologies. Two of his major team achievements were ARM’s IPO and the acquisition of NGCodec. He is the inventor of two video-related patents. In 1994 he joined ARM, at the time a 60-person startup in the UK. Initially, he pioneered the segment marketing activity by leading the mobile marketing team, which resulted in growing its market share from 0% to over 90%. He lived and worked in Japan for two and a half years. In his last role at ARM as VP of Corporate Business Development and M&A, Oliver championed the acquisition of Falanx in 2006, whose technology (Mali) went on to become the number-one shipping GPU in the world. In 2016 Softbank acquired ARM for $32 billion. In 2012, Oliver founded NGCodec, a start-up focused on next-generation cloud video acceleration, leveraging programmable hardware. As CEO he raised over $15M, grew the team to ~40 people and won SaaS business with Amazon/Twitch. In 2019 the company was acquired by Xilinx’s data center group, returning over 5x to his investors. Oliver holds a Bachelor's degree with honors in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Greenwich, London, UK, and a Mini-MBA from the AeA/Executive Institute, Stanford University Graduate School of Business

Shweta Shrivastava is the chief product officer at Nauto and oversees product and design for Nauto’s fleet, insurance, and automotive offerings. Prior to Nauto, she was the head of product management for Amazon Web Services, as well as various strategy and product management leadership roles at NetApp and Cisco, where she drove the productizing and launch of Cisco’s IoT platform for smart cities. Shweta has an MS in CS from Penn State University and an MBA from INSEAD, France.