David Ross Cheriton (born March 29, 1951) is a Canadian computer scientist, mathematician, billionaire businessman, philanthropist, and venture capitalist. He is a computer science professor at Stanford University, where he founded and leads the Distributed Systems Group. He is a distributed computing and computer networking expert, with insight into identifying big market opportunities and building the architectures needed to address such opportunities. He has founded and invested in technology companies, including Google, where he was among the first angel investors; VMware, where he was an early investor; and Arista, where he was cofounder and chief scientist. He has funded at least 20 companies. Cheriton was ranked by Forbes with an estimated net worth of US$8.8 billion, as of April 2021. He has made contributions to education, with a $25 million donation to support graduate studies and research in the School of Computer Science (subsequently renamed David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science) at the University of Waterloo, a $7.5 million donation to the University of British Columbia, and a $12 million endowment in 2016 to Stanford University to support Computer Science faculty, graduate fellowships, and undergraduate scholarships. Education Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Cheriton attended public schools in the Highlands neighborhood of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He briefly attended the University of Alberta where he had applied for both mathematics and music. He was rejected by the music program, and then went on to study mathematics and received his Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree from the University of British Columbia in 1973. Cheriton received his Master of Science (M.S.) and Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degrees in computer science from the University of Waterloo in 1974 and 1978, respectively. He spent three years as an assistant professor at his Alma mater, the University of British Columbia, before moving to Stanford. Research Cheriton was involved in creating three microkernel operating systems (OSes). He was one of the early principal developers of Thoth, a real-time operating system, and then the Verex kernel. He then founded and led the Distributed Systems Group at Stanford University, which developed a microkernel OS named V. He has published profusely in the areas of distributed computing and computer networking. He won the prestigious SIGCOMM award in 2003, in recognition for his lifetime contribution to the field of telecommunications networks. Cheriton was the mentor and advisor of students such as: Sergey Brin and Larry Page (founders of Google), Kenneth