Brian L. Hinman (born August 22, 1961 in

Bethesda, Maryland Bethesda () is an unincorporated, census-designated place in southern Montgomery County, Maryland. It is located just northwest of Washington, D.C. It takes its name from a local church, the Bethesda Meeting House (1820, rebuilt 1849), which i ...

) is an entrepreneur and investor in high technology businesses, especially the computer-based communications industry. Hinman founded three successful (annual revenues greater than $500 million) high technology companies;

PictureTel Corp. PictureTel Corporation, often shortened to PictureTel Corp., was one of the first commercial videoconferencing product companies. It achieved peak revenues of over $490 million in 1996 and 1997 and was eventually acquired by Polycom in October ...

(

Videoconferencing Videotelephony, also known as videoconferencing and video teleconferencing, is the two-way or multipoint reception and transmission of audio signal, audio and video signals by people in different locations for Real-time, real time communication. ...

), Polycom (

Conference call A conference call is a telephone call in which someone talks to several people at the same time. The conference call may be designed to allow the called party to participate during the call or set up so that the called party merely listens into ...

), and

2Wire 2Wire, Inc., was (between 1998 and 2010) a home networking Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) manufacturer that provided telecommunications companies with hardware, software, service platforms, and remote CPE management systems. The company was hea ...

(

digital subscriber line Digital subscriber line (DSL; originally digital subscriber loop) is a family of technologies that are used to transmit digital data over telephone lines. In telecommunications marketing, the term DSL is widely understood to mean asymmetric d ...

). Both

and Polycom had initial public offerings. Hinman and his co-founders took PictureTel public in November 1984, only three months after the company was founded, and two years before the first product was shipped.

was acquired by set-top box maker Pace in July, 2010. Technologies where Hinman has been granted patents include video compression and

conference call A conference call is a telephone call in which someone talks to several people at the same time. The conference call may be designed to allow the called party to participate during the call or set up so that the called party merely listens into ...

Early life and education

Hinman, the son of Earl E Hinman, Jr and Roberta D. Hinman, grew up primarily in Wheaton, Maryland Brian received a BSEE from the University of Maryland, College Park in December 1982, and an MSEE from

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

in June 1984. Hinman later sponsored an entrepreneurship program at University of Maryland, College Park called the "Hinman CEOs".

Career

From 2006 to 2015, Hinman worked at Oak Ventures as a venture partner where he worked with Cleantech investments such as algae company Aurora Algae and solar technology companies

eSolar eSolar is a privately held company that develops concentrating solar power (CSP) plant technology. The company was founded by the Pasadena-based business incubator Idealab in 2007 as a developer of CSP plant technology. The company aims to deve ...

and GreenVolts. Hinman has also been involved with public-private partnerships by buying and funding an underfunded fire station in Los Gatos. In 2012, Hinman co-founded Mimosa Networks, a gigabit wireless hardware company based in Santa Clara, CA. Hinman served as Co-Founder, CEO and President at Mimosa Networks. In November 2018, Mimosa merged with Airspan Networks, a leader in 5G mobile technologies.

Awards

Brian Hinman received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year Award in 2004 and was a national finalist in 2005. The Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year© award is the world's most prestigious business award for entrepreneurs, spanning more than 140 cities and 50 countries worldwide. In 2011, the Rochester Institute of Technology awarded him an honorary doctorate of science.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hinman, Brian Living people American venture capitalists 1961 births People from Bethesda, Maryland MIT School of Engineering alumni University of Maryland, College Park alumni