Profile

Rich Mironov is considered one of Silicon Valley’s pre-eminent experts in technology product management and corporate-focused technical marketing. As an enterpreneur, early-stage employee and consultant, he has worked at/with dozens of technology companies in Silicon Valley and around the country. He’s literally written the book on tech product management. His experience includes:

Roles at three major technology companies
early product/marketing leadership at four VC-backed start-ups including two profitable exits in enterprise networking, security and services
serving as an interim executive, consultant and mentor to a variety of start-ups and well-established tech companies - independently and as CMO of Enthiosys.

Rich serves on the board of SVPMA and is actively advising one stealth start-up. He’s chaired the Product Management/Product Owner track at Agile 2009/Chicago and been on the executive education faculty of the Haas School of Business, and . He is a sought-after speaker on product management, organizational strategy and Agile. Rich pioneered the product management meet-ups now known as P-Camps or Product Camps.

Household Technology Names

Starting with a software engineering role at HP, Mironov spent more than a decade at large Silicon 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. Rich has been the “product guy” and market strategist at four venture-backed companies with corporate-focused Internet services and networking products. The first was Wayfarer Communications, which survived the “push” wars and was acquired by Vantive.

Next, he headed Product Management/Product Marketing for iPass, the world leader in Internet roaming (NASDAQ: IPAS). He helped increase revenues nearly 100x while reaching users in more than 150 countries. Rich was also VP Marketing at Slam Dunk Networks, an early entrant in web services focused on guaranteed message delivery for corporate and back-office applications.

Later, he was VP Marketing & Product Management at AirMagnet, the leader in Wi-Fi security and performance management software which was later acquired by Flunk Networks.

Consulting and Mentoring

Since 2001, Rich also has been an interim executive, consultant or advisor to dozens of early-stage companies and larger technology firms including Yahoo, Cisco, Varian and VeriSign. From 2007 to ‘09, he was also CMO of Enthiosys. Consulting and mentoring roles for clients have included:

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

His Product Bytes series covers software, startups, product strategies, Silicon Valley, and the inner life of product managers. Since 2002, nearly two thousand tech-related folks have added themselves to the distribution list.

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).