David MacMillan
David MacMillan is President and founder of Capital Ideas.
Mr. MacMillan has over 25 years of management experience with technology-based companies, including founder, CEO and Board roles.
Mr. MacMillan has helped form a variety of businesses in areas including semiconductors, datacom and telecom, wireless systems, software, the Internet, and energy storage.
He has also been active on the investment side and is a former Venture Partner with BlueRun Ventures (a $1 billion early stage global VC fund) and a former Board Member of Sand Hill Angels.Capital Ideas consulting projects typically involve significant implementation responsibilities. As a result, they are often structured as interim executive management appointments. For example, Mr. MacMillan has served as President - North America of Deeya Energy (electricity storage), President of Anthology Systems (disk systems), VP Optical Networking at Flextronics (optical system design and manufacturing), and VP Marketing at Orbital Data (networking equipment, acquired by Citrix).
Prior to Capital Idea, Mr. MacMillan founded Gazelle Microcircuits, a high performance semiconductor company. Mr. MacMillan founded Gazelle based on the idea of offering gallium arsenide chips that are as easy to use as silicon chips, but with 3 to 10 times faster performance.
Mr. MacMillan originated the Gazelle business strategy, raised funding from leading venture capital firms including Kleiner Perkins, established the company's manufacturing partnerships, and built the marketing and sales organization. Customers included IBM, Compaq, Apple, Sun, Silicon Graphics and HP.
Gazelle was widely viewed as a world leader in its field. Mr. MacMillan initiated the development of the world's first 1 gigabit/second data communications chipset, which led to the 1 gigabit Fiber Channel standard. Mr. MacMillan also co-invented zero skew clock distribution on circuit boards, a technique for eliminating skew that is now used throughout the industry. Recognizing Gazelle as a national asset, DARPA made a unique investment in the company to keep its technology stateside. Gazelle merged with a subsidiary of Tektronix in 1991, and is now traded on NASDAQ as TriQuint (TQNT).
Mr. MacMillan has an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he was named a Baker Scholar for academic distinction. His undergraduate degree is a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Queen's University in Kingston, Canada.
