Chris Rust

Chris Rust is the partner of U.S. Venture Partners.

Chris's current areas of interest include enterprise/data center infrastructure， cloud， mobile， and consumer. Chris currently serves on the Board of Directors or is an active Board Observer on Akros Silcon， Blekko， Clustrix， GoPro and Kaiam. His past investments and board seats include Abrizio （PMC Sierra）， Afara （SUN）， Avanex （Nasdaq: AVNX）， Commerce5 （DRIV）， Dune Networks （Broadcom）， LVL7 （Broadcom）， Mellanox （Nasdaq: MLNX）， Santur， Stratalight （Opnext）， SwitchOn Networks （PMC Sierra）， Telera （Alcatel Lucent）， and VxTel （Intel）. Chris gravitates to investments pursuing high growth potential emerging markets that can yield large businesses of enduring value. He invests in the passion of the founders， and believes the best CEOs are often first time Founder-CEOs from humble beginnings. In addition to his US-focused activities， Chris is an active investor in Israel and India. He has been involved with establishing over a dozen R&D centers in these geographies.

Over his career as an investor and entrepreneur， Chris has helped define， build， and bring many market leading products and services to market. From 2001 to 2004 he was the CEO of Mahi Networks （Meriton）. From 1998 to 2002 Chris was a partner at Sequoia Capital. From 1984 to 1998 Chris held a variety of engineering and product management roles in the networking and communication fields， including running product management and customer support at telecom equipment vendor at Carrier Access Corporation （Nasdaq: CACS） and at IC vendor ComCore （National Semi）. Chris was a broadband network architect at US WEST Advanced Technologies， where he was a founder and network architect of Time Warner Roadrunner， now one of the largest broadband service providers in the world. Chris spent 4 years as a member of technical staff designing military communications systems at MITRE， and started his career as an electrical engineer at Nokia in Espoo Finland.

Chris received a B.S. and M.S. Electrical E