Christopher Rust

Christopher (“Chris”) Rust, a technology venture investor and entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley, is a founder and General Partner of Clear Ventures. Prior venture capital experience includes partner roles at Sequoia Capital and U.S. Venture Partners. His operational experience includes co-founder and lead architect of Roadrunner (re-branded as Time Warner Cable Internet). Since 1998 he has made early-stage investments in more than three dozen emerging technology companies, with 20 exits that produced more than $32 billion of market capitalization.
Education
Rust attended the University of Lowell (today the University of Massachusetts Lowell) and studied Electrical Engineering, earning a Bachelor of Science degree with distinction and a Master of Science degree for which his thesis was “Heterodyning Techniques For Coherent Optical Detection”. He later attended the University of Colorado Boulder where he earned a second Master of Science degree in Telecommunications Engineering, for which his thesis was “Principals of Echo Cancelling In Modern Telecommunications”. Rust earned a third master's degree, a Master of Engineering in Engineering Management, also from the University of Colorado, Boulder. His third master’s thesis was “The Role of Human Capital Assessment In VC Due Diligence”, which took an in-depth look at the patterns of success and failure in venture-backed technology companies.
Early career
One of Rust’s first technical roles was with Wang Laboratories, where he worked during his undergraduate studies. Rust was then selected by the American Scandinavian Foundation for an engineering position with Nokia in Espoo, Finland. He completed his first master's degree after returning from Finland, then joined MITRE Corporation, a not-for-profit company that operates multiple federally funded research and development centers, as a member of the technical staff.
After completing his second master's degree Rust joined US West Advanced Technologies as a member of technical staff in the Switch Architecture Group. This assignment led to his serving as co-founder of Roadrunner, a venture later rebranded as Time Warner Cable Internet. In 2016 Charter Communications acquired Time Warner Cable, Inc. for $55 billion, which was driven by more than 13 million broadband Internet access customers and created the second largest broadband provider in America.
Later technical management roles included serving as Broadband Product Manager at Sourcecom (acquired by ACT Networks), Director of Product Management at ComCore (acquired by National Semiconductor) and Senior Director of Product Management at Carrier Access Corporation, which went public under the ticker symbol CACS.
Venture career
Sequoia Capital
In 1998 Rust was recruited to Sequoia Capital as an associate and a year later promoted to partner. During his tenure at Sequoia Capital Rust was instrumental to Sequoia Capital’s early stage venture investments in Abrizio, Afara WebSystems, Avanex, Mellanox Technologies, Onetta, SpringBank, SwitchOn Networks, Syndesis, Telera, Turin Networks and VxTel. Although sourced and led by another team member, Rust served as a diligence team member and investment co-sponsor on Sequoia Capital’s early stage investment in NetScreen.
In 2002 Rust transitioned to Sequoia Capital’s active portfolio company Mahi Networks as the acting CEO. Rust led Mahi Networks until 2004, and stayed on the Mahi Networks Board of Directors until it was acquired by Meriton Networks in 2005.
U.S. Venture Partners
Rust was recruited to U.S. Ventures Partners (USVP) in 2004 and was a partner until 2013. During his tenure there Rust was instrumental to USVP early stage venture investments in Appthority, CloudPassage, Dune Networks, GoPro, Kaiam Corporation, LVL7 Systems, PlumGrid and Zerto. These investments spanned the USVP IX and X funds, with the majority being in USVP X. Although sourced and led by other team members, Rust was a diligence team member and investment co-sponsor on investments in AltoBeam, Optichron and Trusteer.
Clear Ventures
Immediately after leaving USVP, Rust began to work with serial software entrepreneur and venture capitalist Rajeev Madhavan in 2014 to create a new technology venture capital firm, Clear Ventures. The two had first co-invested together in VxTel in 1999. Clear Ventures was publicly announced in 2016 with $120 million in committed capital, exceeding the founders’ capital formation target of $80 million. Clear Ventures’ active portfolio companies at the time of the public launch included Cyphort, Espresa, Falcon Computing, Paysa, Reflektion, Robin Systems, Swift Navigation and Vera. Rust was also an individual early stage venture investor in GoEuro.

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu