Why I joined the Aria Networks board

I am excited to share that I have joined the board of directors of Aria Networks. I want to explain why, because this is not a decision I made lightly.

Having spent more than 30 years building networking and security products, and leading the engineering teams behind almost every major network operating system powering enterprises, the internet, and now AI buildouts, I have learned that the hardest problems in networking are rarely about speed alone. They are about what happens when a new workload arrives that the existing stack was never designed for. That is exactly where we are today with AI.

AI factories are the largest buildout of compute in history, and the network has become the bottleneck. Every percentage point of GPU utilization and every token per second maps directly to revenue, and the network determines a lot of that. Clusters are growing faster than operations teams can grow. Training and inference traffic looks nothing like the enterprise and cloud traffic our networks were built for. And at this scale the network has to become self-aware and self-operating, because people cannot keep up with the pace of change. Reliability and performance here is as much a software and operations problem as a hardware one.

Most of the industry is still treating AI networking as a faster version of what came before. Aria is not. Mansour and the team are rethinking the whole stack for this workload, combining purpose-built Ethernet with high-resolution telemetry and AI agents that operate the network. It is rare to find a team with this depth in switching, operating systems and operations that is also willing to start from the workload and work back. That is what attracted me to Aria, and it is why I decided this was a company I wanted to help build.

Aria has the opportunity to define a new category, where the network is designed, instrumented and operated end to end for AI, and where token efficiency is the metric that matters. I look forward to helping the team on product strategy, scaling engineering and operations, and building the kind of customer relationships that matter in infrastructure.

I am grateful to Mansour and the Aria board for the invitation, and I am looking forward to the work ahead.