Afara Websystems

Afara Websystems Inc. was a Sunnyvale, California, USA server company whose goal was to build servers surrounding a custom high-throughput CPU architecture, "developing IP traffic management systems that will bring quality-of-service to the next generation of IP access infrastructure." The word "Afara" means "bridge" in the West African Yoruba language.

The company was founded by Kunle Olukotun, a Stanford University professor. First employee to be hired was by Raza Foundries Board Member - Atul Kapadia. It was Neil Sadaranganey who was the sole business person at Afara Web Systems. He was hired out of Real Networks. Subsequently, Les Kohn (employee #2) a microprocessor designer for: Sun Microsystems UltraSPARC; Intel i860 and i960; National Semiconductor Swordfish took the basic idea and developed a product plan.

Olukotun was talking with people running data centers in 2000 and understood the problem of those centers running out of power and space. Olukotun believed that multiple processors on a chip in conjunction with multi-threading could resolve those problems. Olukotun searched for venture capital support, on the basis that a new architecture could lead to a 10x performance increase in server processing capabilities. Pierre Lamond, a partner at Sequoia Capital, introduced Olukotun to microprocessor architect Les Kohn, who designed microprocessors for Sun, Intel and National Semiconductor (where Les worked for Pierre). Les introduced Fermi Wang, one of his colleagues at C-Cube Microsystems, to be the acting CEO and to lead the company. It was a classic Silicon Valley startup - the headcount grew to 100 with 95 engineers to focus on engineering development and one marketing director.

Two meetings with venture capitalists were scheduled on September 11, 2001. The meetings in New York City were interrupted by the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, but one of them resumed 2 days later. Available capital for funding the server company had vanished, as the economy started to dip into a new recession in 2001.

Rick Hetherington left Sun to create a start-up company. Venture capitalists Sequoia Capital introduced Hetherington to Olukotun. When Hetherington's startup failed, he returned to Sun. Hetherington wrote memos to Mike Splain, CTO of the Processor group at Sun, encouraging technology acquisition of Afara Websystems. Hetherington became Chief Architect for Horizontal Systems at Sun, which develops and sells servers for data centers and Web systems.

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