Todays guest is Dr David Snowden a University researcher turned successful entrepreneur

Dr David Snowden

David is the founder of Metamako a Sydney based high-speed switch networking company recently acquired by Arista Networks.

Before I ask you about your background I have let the listeners know back in 2011 you and your team at UNSW broke the Guinness World Book of Records for the worlds fastest solar-powered car, an amazing achievement at the time.

Tell us about what you had to do to get there, solar-powered vehicles are still pretty hard but in 2011 it would have been really hard to do.

You were the chief electrical engineer, what were some of the challenges you had to overcome and how long and did it take you and how many experiments did you need to run to build the right vehicle to get to the target speed?

How did you get started in your career?

Tell us about Metamako, this is probably the most successful networking hardware startup in Australia that almost no one had ever heard of until you got acquired.

So what is a high-speed switch and how is yours different from the typical Cisco kit we can buy from a networking distributor?

HFT, exchanges, speed, why?

What is an FPGA & why do you use these vs the existing processors.

Tell us about how you got the business started and how you ended up selling your switches to major high-frequency traders in New York and Chicago?

What startup lessons have you learned about raising capital, scaling up and selling your business?

What do investors need to understand to invest in the hardware and networking space? What are the traps for young players?

What controversial thing do you disagree with the rest of your peers about?