Profile

Currently the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of Enthiosys, Rich Mironov has worked with technology companies in Silicon Valley since 1981 and is considered one of the pre-eminent experts in tech product management and corporate-focused marketing. He has worked at:

three large technology players... some of the Valley’s most-respected names
four VC-backed start-ups... in enterprise networking, security and services
and served as an interim executive or mentor consultant to more than two dozen fledgling start-ups

Rich also serves on the board of SVPMA, is on the executive education faculty of the Haas School of Business, and is chairing the Product Management/Product Owner track at Agile 2009/Chicago.

Household Technology Names

Starting with a software engineering role at HP, Mironov spent more than a decade at large Valley companies serving the corporate computing market. This included six years at Tandem Computers managing networking products (and launching Tandem’s TCP/IP offering). With a move to Sybase, he oversaw the product team responsible for database connectivity (Open Client and Open Server) running on more than 40 operating systems. As the Web started its mid-90’s explosion, he created and managed Sybase’s original Internet Products Group, whose web.sql product (1995) was the first commercial solution for dynamic linking of web pages with databases.

Internet Startups

There’s nothing as exhilarating as joining an early venture. Mironov has been the “product guy” and market strategist at four VC-funded companies with corporate-focused Internet services and networking products. The first was Wayfarer Communications, which survived the PointCast “push” wars and was acquired by Vantive in 1998. Next, he headed Product Management/Product Marketing for iPass, the world leader in Internet roaming (NASDAQ: IPAS). As a key contributor, he helped increase revenues nearly 100x while reaching users in more than 150 countries. Today, iPass helps hundreds of thousands of corporate road warriors connect via broadband, wireless and dial-up. Mironov served as VP Marketing at Slam Dunk Networks, an early entrant in web services focused on guaranteed message delivery for corporate and back-office applications. From 2003 to 2005, he was VP Marketing at AirMagnet, a Wi-Fi security and performance management start-up. Founded by the original Sniffer team, AirMagnet is the leader in Wi-Fi security analysis and remote troubleshooting with more than 5000 corporate customers worldwide.

Mentor Consulting

Since 2001, Rich also has been an interim executive or part-time advisor to dozens of early-stage companies and larger technology firms. Now as part of Enthiosys, Rich is helping clients as:

Interim/acting VP Marketing or VP Product Management
Product, market, requirements and pricing strategist
Expert in service-model/product-model decisions and strategies for moving software companies from licensing to service businesses
Product Management speaker, mentor, cheerleader and tireless PM networker
Author of Product Bytes, his occasional newsletter on startups, product strategies, Silicon Valley, and the inner life of product managers

Education

He earned a BS Physics from Yale University with a thesis on dinosaur extinction theories, and an MBA from Stanford, where he was named an Arjay Miller Scholar (top 10% of graduating class).