K. Gozie Ifesinachukwu – CEO

Gozie is the CEO and a co-founder of Tempo Semiconductor, Inc. Gozie is a veteran of three start-ups with over 25 years of experience in general management, marketing, engineering management, analog design, digital and analog signal processing, software development and system architecture in the semiconductor industry.

Prior to co-founding Tempo Semiconductor, Gozie was with Ambiq Micro as the first VP of engineering where he hired the engineering and development staff and successfully completed and put into production Ambiq’s first set of products in 18months. Prior to Ambiq Micro, was Operation/Product manager of the Integrated Components Group (ICG) in the Freescale Strategic and Incubation Business Unit.

Prior to joining Freescale via acquisition, Gozie was the Director and General Manager of the Integrated Component Group at SigmaTel, Inc. responsible for the P&L, inventory management and product road map among other responsibilities. Gozie successfully revived a dying organization and grew sales while acquiring such important strategic customers as Samsung and keeping them happy. Before joining SigmaTel, Gozie was with Tensleep Design where he was the software system architect and the manager of the software team and helped grow the team from 2 to 47 employees before it was acquired by Zilog. Gozie understands the rigors, demands and complexity of start-up and the start-up culture. These experiences shaped his appreciation for all facets of running a start-up and the absolute need for assembling a cohesive team that knows how to work together.

Gozie holds a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University, College Station and a MBA from McCombs School of Business, University of Texas, Austin.

 

Ross Goolsby – Financial Advisor and Board Member

An industry veteran with over 20 years of diverse experience in finance, accounting, information technology, and human resources.  Mr. Goolsby was most recently the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) at Calxeda, Inc., leading worldwide financial operations for the privately held low power server semiconductor company. Prior to joining Calxeda, he served as the CFO for publicly traded Valence, Inc. from 2009 to 2011. Goolsby was also the CFO at publicly traded Healthtronics Inc. from 2007 to 2009 and publicly traded SigmaTel, Inc. from 2001 to 2007.  He was a key member of the management team that turned SigmaTel from losing $20 million annually to profitability.  During his tenure at SigmaTel, the company’s revenues increased from $20 million annually to over $300 million annually.  He led SigmaTel’s Initial Public Offering in 2003 and subsequent follow-on offering in 2004.  During 2005, SigmaTel reached its peak market value in excess of $1.4 billion.

Prior to SigmaTel, Mr. Goolsby held the position of CFO with Utiliserve, Inc. from 1999 to 2001.  He began his career working in the Houston and Dallas offices of Ernst & Young. Mr. Goolsby earned a Bachelor of Business Administration in Accounting from the University of Houston.

John J. Paulos, Ph.D – Technical Advisor and Board Member

Now an independent consultant and Angel investor, John J. Paulos serves as a Director for six start-up companies in Austin, Texas.  Dr. Paulos left Cirrus Logic in August of 2008 after serving as Vice President and General Manager of the Industrial Products Division after  rejoining the company in 2004. There, he was responsible for application specific and general purpose precision ADC’s, ARM-based microcontrollers, and legacy communications products.  Also, during his tenure as VP/GM, Dr. Paulos championed the acquisition of Apex Microtechnology, a provider of precision power solutions, and took principle responsibility for integration of Apex into the Industrial Products Division, bringing annual revenue to over $100M.

Prior to rejoining Cirrus Logic, Dr. Paulos served as Vice President of Engineering for Cicada Semiconductor, where he was responsible for the development of GigaBit Ethernet and T3 transceivers. Introduced in 2002, the Cicada line of single and quad GigaBit Ethernet Phys set industry standards for system performance and power dissipation, leading to the acquisition of Cicada by Vitesse in early 2004.

Dr. Paulos first joined Cirrus Logic through its Crystal Semiconductor subsidiary in 1993 as Design Manager for professional and consumer audio converter products.  In 1996, he became Vice President and Business Unit Director for Consumer Audio.  In 1998, he became Vice President and co-General Manager of the Audio business unit, which combined PC and consumer audio products into a single business unit with revenue in excess of $200M.

Paulos holds B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980, 1980, and 1984, respectively.  He joined the faculty of North Carolina State University in 1984 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1990.  His research program focused on analog integrated circuits, neural networks and MOS device modeling.

 

Ajaykumar (Ajay) Kanji – Vice President of Engineering and Operations

Mr. Kanji is an industry veteran with over 15 years of experience in engineering management, analog design/signal processing, system architecture and implementing cutting-edge chip and system products from concept to production.

Prior to Tempo Semiconductor, Ajay was director of engineering for IDT Audio Business Unit where he managed all aspects of semiconductor development (hardware and software) from concept to production. Prior to returning to IDT, Ajay worked at Ambiq Micro as director of engineering as the only analog engineer where he architected, designed and implemented all key ultra-low power analog components for Ambiq real time clock (RTC) and successfully help put it into production. Prior to Ambiq, Ajay was director of engineering at IDT Audio Business Unit where he designed high fidelity and energy efficient audio products while managing teams of engineers.

Ajay holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University, College Station.

 

Cory Getty – Vice President Worldwide Sales

Mr. Getty is a proven sales professional. With more than 19 years of sales, business development, and senior management experience in the semiconductor industry, Cory Getty brings a strong track record of building long-term customer relationships, solutions, sales strategies, growing revenue and breaking into new market segments. He is well versed in building internal and external global customer/product support teams.

Mr. Getty began his career as an RF design engineer at Special Technologies Laboratory. Shortly after, he joined Cypress Semiconductor where he held multiple roles starting with Applications Engineer, SONET Physical Layer products, Applications Manager SerDes, and ultimately as Senior Product Applications Manager, where he discovered the need for a better, team approach to sales.

In 2012, Mr. Getty joined the iWatt team, a Silicon Valley semiconductor startup as Sales Manager for North America. In his iWatt role, Mr. Getty grew sales revenue across many Tier-1 customers and market segments and led several strategic partnerships.

In 2013, iWatt was acquired by Dialog Semiconductor. Mr. Getty expanded Dialog’s market share in Home Automation and Computation. In his later career with Dialog, he was promoted to Business Development Manager. Cory expanded Dialog’s success for the Home Connectivity market space by developing strategic partnerships with leading global semiconductor SOC suppliers: Marvell, Intel and Broadcom.

Mr. Getty served in the armed forces for 14 years in the Army National Guard. He holds a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, CA.

 

Vinesh Patel – Director of Operations

Mr. Patel has over 17 years of experience and expertise in Operations engineering.  At Tempo Semiconductor he manages all aspects of manufacturing, planning, product and test engineering, quality and vendor relationships for the company’s products.  Prior to Tempo Semiconductor he was the Director of Operations at Ambiq Micro where is he developed the company’s 1st product and setup a 1M units a month manufacturing line from ground up.  Prior to Ambiq Micro, he was the product manager at IDT from 2006 to 2012 where he managed product engineering, assembly and packaging, vendor relationships as well as product quality and reliability efforts.  Earlier in his career, Mr. Patel had driven NPI activities and product yield improvement on Audio codecs, DSP and monolithic memories at SigmaTel, Freescale and Motorola. Vinesh Patel holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from University of Florida and MBA from St. Edwards University.