Raman Khanna
Co-Founder, Diamondhead Ventures

Mr. Khanna is an experienced information technology executive with over 22 years of experience in Internet infrastructure and enterprise computing. He has been involved with more than 30 start-ups in roles such as investor, board member, and advisor.

In mid-2000 Raman co-founded Diamondhead Ventures, a $140 million early-stage venture capital fund specializing in bringing to market information technologies spinning out of leading research universities and corporations. Raman is actively involved in the following Diamondhead Ventures portfolio companies: firstRain, RedClover Networks, Intraspect and Cavium Networks.

In the past, Raman served as an advisor to many companies including Berkeley Networks (acquired by Fore Systems), Siara Networks (acquired by Redback), Terabeam, Support.com (IPO), Selectica (IPO), Luminous Networks, Mergent Systems (acquired by CommerceOne) and Portola Communications (acquired by Netscape).

Prior to co-founding Diamondhead Ventures, Raman worked at Stanford University for 16 years in various roles, including Chief Information Officer (CIO), Chief Technology Officer (CTO), and Executive Director of Computing and Communications. As Stanford CIO, he managed an organization of 450 professionals responsible for deploying and managing Stanford's IT infrastructure and applications for support business and academic activities of the university. Stanford University's IT infrastructure is comprised of 50,000 network nodes and 35,000 phone lines.

Raman was one of the early believers and adopters of the Internet and was a founding member of the Internet 2 project. (Internet 2 is a consortium of 180+ universities working in partnership with industry and government to develop and deploy advanced network applications and technologies, accelerating the creation of tomorrow's Internet.) Raman has served on the Internet 2 Steering Committee and is currently a member of The IndUS Entrepreneurs (TiE), a global network of entrepreneurs. He was a member of the Working Council for CIOs and other professional groups that brought together CIOs from large IT organizations. He also served on Advisory Boards of global corporations such as Cisco, IBM, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems.

Raman's undergraduate degree was in Electrical Engineering and he holds Masters degrees in Computer Science from Virginia Tech and Business Management from Golden Gate University.