Jim is a serial entrepreneur and seasoned telecommunications industry veteran with over 44 years of industry experience.
As an entrepreneur he has founded three high tech startups in the Ottawa region raising USD $245M in funding from Silicon Valley VCs, Canadian VCs and from investors in China.
He was most recently the President and COO of high-tech optical device startup Inpho after being its founding CEO for 10 years.
Prior to that he was CEO of OneChip Photonics, a developer of integrated photonics modules for fiber optic based broadband access networks. Before that, Jim was co-founder and CEO of Catena Networks, later acquired by Ciena Corporation, where he was SVP of the Broadband Access Group. He was co-founder and VP of the Telecommunications Design Centre within Cadence Design Systems, and before that he spent 16 years at BNR, the product R&D organization of Nortel Networks, where he worked on the development of a wide array of access, switching and long-haul fiber products.
Jim was on the Board of directors of the Telecom Industry Association in Washington from 2004 through 2015 including one term as Chairman of the Public Policy Committee.
Over the course of his career Jim has managed the development of over 100 chips of various types, digital, analog and optical in various materials and technology. He has had the opportunity to be the architect of several system level products in a variety of different market segments.
Jim has travelled extensively, especially in the USA and Asia, and has a good understanding of the technology ecosystem in which Canada participates.