Duda (founder of Arista Networks), Hugh Holbrook (VP Software Engineering at Arista Networks), Sandeep Singhal (was GM at Microsoft, now at Google), and Kieran Harty (CTO and founder of Tintri). As of 2016, Cheriton is working with Stanford students on transactional memory, making memory systems that are resilient to failures. Industry Cheriton cofounded Granite Systems with Andy Bechtolsheim. The company developed gigabit Ethernet products. It was acquired by Cisco Systems in 1996. In August 1998, Stanford students Sergey Brin and Larry Page met Bechtolsheim on Cheriton's front porch. At the meeting, Bechtolsheim wrote the first cheque to fund their company, Google, and Cheriton joined him as an angel investor with a $200,000 investment. Cheriton was also an early investor in compute virtualization leader VMware, which was later acquired for $625M by EMC in 2004. VMware had a successful public offering in 2007. In 2001 Cheriton and Bechtolsheim founded another start-up company, Palo Alto based Kealia. Kealia designed a high-capacity streaming video server; Galaxy, a range of servers based on AMD's Opteron microprocessor; and Thumper, an enterprise-grade network attached storage system. Kealia was bought by Sun Microsystems in 2004, with Thumper becoming the Sun Fire X4500. In 2004, Cheriton cofounded (again with Bechtolsheim) and was chief scientist of Arista Networks, where he worked on the foundations of the Extensible Operating System (EOS). Arista had a successful public offering in 2014. Cheriton is an investor in and advisory board member for frontline data warehouse company Aster Data Systems, which was acquired by Teradata in 2011 for $263M. Cheriton is also one of the earliest investors in Tintri, a storage virtualization company founded by his student Kieran Harty. Cheriton was also an early investor in in-video advertising company Zunavision, and he founded OptumSoft. In 2014, Cheriton cofounded and invested in Apstra, Inc. In 2015, he cofounded and invested in BrainofT, Inc. (Caspar). Lifestyle Although the Google investment alone would be worth over US$1 billion, Cheriton has a reputation for a frugal lifestyle, avoiding costly cars or large houses. He was once included in a list of "cheapskate billionaires". On November 18, 2005, the University of Waterloo announced that Cheriton had donated $25 million to support graduate studies and research in its School of Computer Science. In recognition of his contribution, the school was renamed the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. In 2009, he donated $2 million to the University of British