Forest Baskett (born May 11, 1943) is an American
venture capitalist
Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which ha ...
, computer scientist and former professor of electrical engineering at
Stanford University.
He is a venture capitalist at
New Enterprise Associates
New Enterprise Associates (NEA) is an American-based venture capital firm. NEA focuses investment stages ranging from seed stage through growth stage across an array of industry sectors. With ~$25 billion in committed capital, NEA is one of the w ...
. Baskett designed the operating system for the original Cray-1 super-computer and was an original pioneer of
Very Large Scale Integration
Very large-scale integration (VLSI) is the process of creating an integrated circuit (IC) by combining millions or billions of MOS transistors onto a single chip. VLSI began in the 1970s when MOS integrated circuit (Metal Oxide Semiconductor) ...
.
Baskett received a
BA in
Mathematics from
Rice University
William Marsh Rice University (Rice University) is a private research university in Houston, Texas. It is on a 300-acre campus near the Houston Museum District and adjacent to the Texas Medical Center. Rice is ranked among the top universities ...
, a
Ph.D.
A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...
in Computer Science from the
University of Texas at Austin
The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,07 ...
.
He became a member of the
National Academy of Engineering
The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of ...
in 1994 for his vision and leadership in the development of hardware and software for high-performance workstations.
Baskett was the doctoral advisor of computer scientist
Andy Bechtolsheim while at Stanford, and was involved in the founding of
Sun Microsystems.
References
American computer scientists
Rice University alumni
University of Texas at Austin College of Natural Sciences alumni
Living people
American venture capitalists
1943 births
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