David Ross Cheriton (born March 29, 1951) is a Canadian computer scientist, businessman, philanthropist, and venture capitalist. He is a computer science professor at

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

, where he founded and leads the Distributed Systems Group. He is a

distributed computing Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems, defined as computer systems whose inter-communicating components are located on different networked computers. The components of a distributed system commu ...

and

computer network A computer network is a collection of communicating computers and other devices, such as printers and smart phones. In order to communicate, the computers and devices must be connected by wired media like copper cables, optical fibers, or b ...

ing expert, with insight into identifying big market opportunities and building the architectures needed to address such opportunities. He has founded and invested in technology companies, including

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

, where he was among the first

angel investor An angel investor (also known as a business angel, informal investor, angel funder, private investor, or seed investor) is an individual who provides capital to a business or businesses, including startups, usually in exchange for convertible de ...

s; VMware, where he was an early investor; and Arista, where he was cofounder and chief scientist. He has funded at least 20 companies. As of 2025, ''

Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine founded by B. C. Forbes in 1917. It has been owned by the Hong Kong–based investment group Integrated Whale Media Investments since 2014. Its chairman and editor-in-chief is Steve Forbes. The co ...

'' estimated Cheriton's net worth at US$19.8

billion Billion is a word for a large number, and it has two distinct definitions: * 1,000,000,000, i.e. one thousand million, or (ten to the ninth power), as defined on the short scale. This is now the most common sense of the word in all varieties of ...

while ''

Maclean's ''Maclean's'' is a Canadian magazine founded in 1905 which reports on Canadian issues such as politics, pop culture, trends and current events. Its founder, publisher John Bayne Maclean, established the magazine to provide a uniquely Canadian ...

'' estimates his worth at $18.64 billion. He has made contributions to education, with a $25 million donation to support graduate studies and research in the School of Computer Science (subsequently renamed David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science) at the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a Public university, public research university located in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on of land adjacent to uptown Waterloo and Waterloo Park. The university also op ...

, a $7.5 million donation to the

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a Public university, public research university with campuses near University of British Columbia Vancouver, Vancouver and University of British Columbia Okanagan, Kelowna, in British Columbia, Canada ...

, and a $12 million endowment in 2016 to Stanford University to support Computer Science faculty, graduate fellowships, and undergraduate scholarships.

Education

Born in

Vancouver Vancouver is a major city in Western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the cit ...

British Columbia British Columbia is the westernmost Provinces and territories of Canada, province of Canada. Situated in the Pacific Northwest between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains, the province has a diverse geography, with rugged landscapes that ...

, Canada, Cheriton attended public schools in the Highlands neighborhood of

Edmonton Edmonton is the capital city of the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian province of Alberta. It is situated on the North Saskatchewan River and is the centre of the Edmonton Metropolitan Region, which is surrounded by Central Alberta ...

Alberta Alberta is a Provinces and territories of Canada, province in Canada. It is a part of Western Canada and is one of the three Canadian Prairies, prairie provinces. Alberta is bordered by British Columbia to its west, Saskatchewan to its east, t ...

, Canada. He briefly attended the

University of Alberta The University of Alberta (also known as U of A or UAlberta, ) is a public research university located in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. It was founded in 1908 by Alexander Cameron Rutherford, the first premier of Alberta, and Henry Marshall Tory, t ...

where he had applied for both mathematics and music. He was rejected by the music program, and then went on to study mathematics and received his

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, B.S., B.Sc., SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree that is awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Scienc ...

(B.S.) degree from the

in 1973. Cheriton received his

Master of Science A Master of Science (; abbreviated MS, M.S., MSc, M.Sc., SM, S.M., ScM or Sc.M.) is a master's degree. In contrast to the Master of Arts degree, the Master of Science degree is typically granted for studies in sciences, engineering and medici ...

(M.S.) and

Doctor of Philosophy A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of Postgraduate education, graduate study and original resear ...

(Ph.D.) degrees in computer science from the

in 1974 and 1978, respectively. He spent three years as an assistant professor at his alma mater, the University of British Columbia, before moving to Stanford.

Research

Cheriton was involved in creating three

microkernel In computer science, a microkernel (often abbreviated as μ-kernel) is the near-minimum amount of software that can provide the mechanisms needed to implement an operating system (OS). These mechanisms include low-level address space management, ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

s (OSes). He was one of the early principal developers of

Thoth Thoth (from , borrowed from , , the reflex of " eis like the ibis") is an ancient Egyptian deity. In art, he was often depicted as a man with the head of an African sacred ibis, ibis or a baboon, animals sacred to him. His feminine count ...

, a

real-time operating system A real-time operating system (RTOS) is an operating system (OS) for real-time computing applications that processes data and events that have critically defined time constraints. A RTOS is distinct from a time-sharing operating system, such as Unix ...

, and then the Verex kernel. He then founded and led the Distributed Systems Group at

, which developed a microkernel OS named V. He has published profusely in the areas of

and

ing. He won the prestigious SIGCOMM award in 2003, in recognition for his lifetime contribution to the field of

telecommunications network A telecommunications network is a group of Node (networking), nodes interconnected by telecommunications links that are used to exchange messages between the nodes. The links may use a variety of technologies based on the methodologies of circuit ...

s. Cheriton was the mentor and advisor of students such as: Sergey Brin and

Larry Page Lawrence Edward Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American businessman, computer engineer and computer scientist best known for co-founding Google with Sergey Brin. Page was chief executive officer of Google from 1997 until August 2001 when ...

(founders of Google), Kenneth Duda (founder of Arista Networks), Hugh Holbrook (VP Software Engineering at Arista Networks), Sandeep Singhal (was GM at Microsoft, now at Google), and Kieran Harty (CTO and founder of Tintri). As of 2016, Cheriton is working with Stanford students on

transactional memory In computer science and computer engineering, engineering, transactional memory attempts to simplify concurrent programming by allowing a group of load and store instructions to execute in an linearizability, atomic way. It is a concurrency control ...

, making memory systems that are resilient to failures.

Industry

Cheriton cofounded Granite Systems with Andy Bechtolsheim. The company developed

gigabit Ethernet In computer networking, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE or 1 GigE) is the term applied to transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of a gigabit per second. The most popular variant, 1000BASE-T, is defined by the IEEE 802.3ab standard. It came into use in ...

products. It was acquired by

Cisco Systems Cisco Systems, Inc. (using the trademark Cisco) is an American multinational corporation, multinational digital communications technology conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, m ...

in 1996. In August 1998, Stanford students Sergey Brin and

met Bechtolsheim on Cheriton's front porch. At the meeting, Bechtolsheim wrote the first cheque to fund their company,

, and Cheriton joined him as an angel investor with a $200,000 investment. Cheriton was also an early investor in compute

virtualization In computing, virtualization (abbreviated v12n) is a series of technologies that allows dividing of physical computing resources into a series of virtual machines, operating systems, processes or containers. Virtualization began in the 1960s wit ...

leader VMware, which was later acquired for $625M by EMC in 2004. VMware had a successful public offering in 2007. In 2001 Cheriton and Bechtolsheim founded another start-up company, Palo Alto based Kealia. Kealia designed a high-capacity streaming video server; Galaxy, a range of servers based on AMD's Opteron microprocessor; and Thumper, an enterprise-grade

network attached storage Network-attached storage (NAS) is a file-level computer data storage server connected to a computer network providing data access to a heterogeneous group of clients. In this context, the term "NAS" can refer to both the technology and systems ...

system. Kealia was bought by

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

in 2004, with Thumper becoming the Sun Fire X4500. In 2004, Cheriton cofounded (again with Bechtolsheim) and was chief scientist of

Arista Networks Arista Networks, Inc. (formerly Arastra) is an American computer networking company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. The company designs and sells Multilayer switch, multilayer network switches to deliver software-defined networking (SDN) ...

, where he worked on the foundations of the Extensible Operating System (EOS). Arista had a successful public offering in 2014. Cheriton is an investor in and advisory board member for frontline data warehouse company Aster Data Systems, which was acquired by

Teradata Teradata Corporation is an American software company that provides cloud database and Analytics, analytics-related software, products, and services. The company was formed in 1979 in Brentwood, California, as a collaboration between researchers a ...

in 2011 for $263M. Cheriton is also one of the earliest investors in Tintri, a storage virtualization company founded by his student Kieran Harty. Cheriton was also an early investor in in-video advertising company Zunavision, and he founded OptumSoft. In 2014, Cheriton cofounded and invested in Apstra, Inc. In 2015, he cofounded and invested in BrainofT, Inc. (Caspar). He currently serves as the Chief Data Center Scientist at

Juniper Networks Juniper Networks, Inc. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. The company develops and markets networking products, including Router (computing), routers, Network switch, switches, network management so ...

Lifestyle

Although the Google investment alone would be worth over

US$ The United States dollar (Currency symbol, symbol: Dollar sign, $; ISO 4217, currency code: USD) is the official currency of the United States and International use of the U.S. dollar, several other countries. The Coinage Act of 1792 introdu ...

1 billion, Cheriton has a reputation for a frugal lifestyle, avoiding costly cars or large houses. He was once included in a list of "cheapskate billionaires". On November 18, 2005, the

announced that Cheriton had donated $25 million to support graduate studies and research in its School of Computer Science. In recognition of his contribution, the school was renamed the '' David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science''. In 2009, he donated $2 million to the

, which will go to fund the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative (CWSEI). He more recently donated $7.5M to fund a new chair in computing, and a new course on computational thinking. Cheriton has also funded two graduate student fellowships and one undergrad fellowship at Stanford, and donated several millions of dollars to Stanford to fund research. He campaigned against

Asynchronous Transfer Mode Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) is a telecommunications standard defined by the American National Standards Institute and International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T, formerly CCITT) for digital trans ...

(ATM) that was favored by telephone carriers, preferring

Ethernet Ethernet ( ) is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

, which he saw as a simpler, proven option. Ethernet gradually superseded alternatives.

Personal life

In 1980, Cheriton married Iris Fraser. They divorced in 1994. According to public record, Cheriton has made donations to Republican causes including the party, candidate PACs, senators, and made a total of over $5,000 donations to the presidential candidate

Donald Trump Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is an American politician, media personality, and businessman who is the 47th president of the United States. A member of the Republican Party (United States), Republican Party, he served as the 45 ...

References

External links

*
Stanford University Distributed Systems Group

Founder of Intent Based Networking Company Apstra

David Cheriton speaks at the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) Great Debate
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cheriton, David 1951 births Living people Businesspeople from Vancouver Canadian billionaires Canadian computer businesspeople Canadian computer scientists Canadian expatriate academics in the United States Canadian mathematicians Canadian technology chief executives Canadian technology company founders Canadian venture capitalists Scientists from Vancouver Stanford University School of Engineering faculty University of British Columbia Faculty of Science alumni Academic staff of the University of British Columbia University of Waterloo alumni Kernel programmers