David MacMillan

David MacMillan is President and founder of Capital Ideas. He is also an active angel investor and Board Member of Sand Hill Angels, and is a former Venture Partner with BlueRun Ventures (a $1 billion early stage global VC fund).

Mr. MacMillan has over 25 years of management experience with technology-based companies, including founder, CEO and Board roles.

At Capital Ideas, Mr. MacMillan has helped form a variety of businesses in areas including cellular communications systems, data communications chips, data mining, decision support enterprise software, fiber optics, test systems, and voice recognition.

Consulting projects often involve interim executive management roles. For example, Mr. MacMillan has served as President - North America of Deeya Energy (power storage), President & CEO 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 Ideas, 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).

Prior to Gazelle, Mr. MacMillan was a Marketing Executive with GigaBit Logic, the company that provided gallium arsenide technology to the Cray 3 supercomputer. Earlier, Mr. MacMillan held market development and product planning responsibilities at Advanced Micro Devices.

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. For his undergraduate thesis, Mr. MacMillan led a team of engineers in the design and construction of a new parallel computer.

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