Anthony J. Wood (born 1965) is an English-born American

billionaire A billionaire is a person with a net worth of at least one billion (1,000,000,000, i.e., a thousand million) units of a given currency, usually of a major currency such as the United States dollar, euro, or pound sterling. The American busi ...

businessman who is the founder, chairman, and CEO of

Roku, Inc. Roku, Inc. ( ) is an American publicly traded company based in San Jose, California, that manufactures a variety of digital media players for video streaming. Roku has an advertising business and also licenses its hardware and software to other ...

Personal life

Wood grew up in

Manchester Manchester () is a city in Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 552,000 in 2021. It is bordered by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and the neighbouring city of Salford to the west. The ...

, England, and then in

Georgia Georgia most commonly refers to: * Georgia (country), a country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia * Georgia (U.S. state), a state in the Southeast United States Georgia may also refer to: Places Historical states and entities * Related to the ...

and

Texas Texas (, ; Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2020, it is the second-largest U.S. state by ...

in the United States. Wood earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from

Texas A&M University Texas A&M University (Texas A&M, A&M, or TAMU) is a public university, public, Land-grant university, land-grant, research university in College Station, Texas. It was founded in 1876 and became the flagship institution of the Texas A&M Unive ...

. Wood met his wife Susan at

, where she studied environmental design. They have three children, and live in

Palo Alto Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. The city was es ...

, California.

Career

While in college Wood started SunRize Industries which developed software and hardware for the Commodore Amiga. From September 1997 to August 2001, he was president and CEO of

ReplayTV ReplayTV was a former DVR company that from 1999 until 2005, produced a brand of digital video recorders (DVR), a term synonymous with ''personal video recorder'' (PVR). It is a consumer video device which allows users to capture television progr ...

, which he sold in 2002 to

SONICblue SONICblue Incorporated (NASDAQ:SBLU) was a public company based in Santa Clara, California. The firm was a manufacturer of home audio/video equipment with an estimated revenue of $100M - $250M and approximately 700 employees. SONICblue first fil ...

. Wood founded Roku in October 2002, has been the CEO since then, and chairman since February 2008. As of November 2017, Wood owned 27.3% of Roku.

References

Living people Texas A&M University alumni American billionaires American company founders 1960s births British emigrants to the United States Businesspeople from Manchester {{US-business-bio-1960s-stub