Randy Battat: Technology risk-taker - Boston Business Journal:

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In a little more than a decade, he has done After leading large business units at Apple andthen , Battaty plunged into the startup world in 2000 to run a weeks-olc wireless infrastructure company, the Chelmsford company (Nasdaq: AIRV) has built a $305 560-employee network infrastructure business for wireless voicr and data, and will soon find out whethedr its gamble on femtocells will pay off with lucrative contractss with some of the largest wireless carrieres -- or will fail to live up to industrg hype and expectations. Battat admitsw he took a big and a 75 percentpay cut, takint the reins at Airvana. "I was afraid of running out ofcash ...
all I wantef to do was make it throug the firstfew years," he said. "(But) Airvana had all the thingsa I wasn't working on (at Motorola), and it playex on the belief I had in IP in the cellular Followinghis hunches, even after early execution on them provefd fruitless, has marked the path for Battayt going back to the days of reprogrammintg computers in his northern California childhooe home. (To this day, he can recited the former Maynard addressof DEC.
) The son of a canned-gooda seller, Battat knew early on he wantedr to appropriate his father's business savvy to his love for After attending , he took a job at Applde -- whose computers he said he was neverf a fan of because "theu picked out all the stuff for -- doing product support for the company'sa first laptop computer. When Apple began to decentralize its productmanagement structure, Battat jockeyed for one of the new managemenr positions. He was given the job of developingv Apple's lagging laptop his last choice.
"j got screwed twice in termd of what I got to but I figured I was gettingy a general manager job and I really wanted to not lose runninvan operation," he said. But by bettinf on consumer interestin design, softwars and connectivity and focusing his group'ws engineering muscle on those he was able to developo a machine that would be the computedr maker's premier notebook for a decade: the Friends and colleagues say Battat's cerebral yet intuitive approac h to building technology companies is what has buoyed him durin the inevitable product failures and missteps but also reap the benefitxs of cornering emerging markets.
That foresight is what enabled him to skyrockety through the ranks of some ofthe world's larges tech companies. Battat left Apple in 1994 to takeon Motorola'e wireless business, after meeting Bob Growney. "uI went after him ... after threse or four meetings my courtship convinced him and he workes for me forthree years," said Growney, formere president and chief operating officerr at Motorola. "He obviously has grea t vision -- his enthusiasm, optimism and all the greay attributes to take and run a big Randy was the first to tell me whensomethingv wasn't working.
" But six years after watching Motorola struggle through poor performance and divestment of some of its businesz units, Battat said he felt he was readuy to leave the big firm. By taking on a he could focus on the fundamentalk belief that marked histechnologuy career: Data would be a fundamental conduit for but it would only work if the networo was built on the back of a pre-existing, in this case network. And two former Motorola employees, Vedat Eyubogliu and Sanjeev Verma, were clamorin for Battat to do just thatat Airvana. "It was prettuy universal, we all wanted Randy," said Gururaj Deshpande, initial chief investor of Airvansa and member of its boardof directors.
"Hde has a lot of self-confidence, and as a resulyt of that he's not defensive. He's constantly looking for inputand he's very big into buildingb teams." To do this, Battat relies on several fundamentall concepts gleaned from his big-company experiences. He describesd himself as "honest, sometimes to a and very open to other opinions and Growney said Battat is extremely patient with his even keeping with ideas and people longer than most But Battat claims to be no Atfirst glance, the executive does not appear to be a In a blue plaid shirt and grey khakis, Battat lookefd on a recent day much like the engineerzs he says are the heart of the Battat used what colleagues call a charming personalitt and his connections through Motorola to get Airvana its first big salee of its wireless data network technology.
When the company began buildinhg products for the wireless data network protocool knownas EV-DO, it was able to snag big contracts with carrieras like Despite Airvana's relative success in the EV-DO Battat said he knows the company had to make anothed aggressive move -- another gamble, one could say -- to keep up its rapid About 90 percent of the company's EV-DO revenue comese from relationships with Nortel, and inking deals with some of the otheer large carriers has proved -Lucent decided to develop its own infrastructure, Motorolza inked a deal with Ltd., and most damaging, Airvanaz lost a partnership with in 2005.