Robert Drost

Robert Drost is Head of R&D at Consensys Mesh. As a 12-year-old, I started my relationship with computers on a Commodore 64, teaching myself to program machine language, assembly, and even C. My constant interest in why things work and how to make them better naturally led to my career in computer science and engineering. With over 150 patents and dozens of publications, I’m passionate about finding great solutions to interesting problems. I spent my early career at Sun Microsystem's Product and Research divisions while also earning my PhDs in EE and CS at Stanford. Later, after a brief time in Oracle, I decided it was my time to build a startup. Having seen first-hand the challenges in conventional, hardware-based IP networking, I co-founded a software-defined startup to move networking to the 21st Century. In addition to building great tech, being an entrepreneur, scaling a business from nothing, and operating a P&L has been my real life MBA. Through my startup, I’ve honed my skills in building world-class teams in tech as well as sales & marketing and raised over $100 million of venture capital. In a sense, my earlier curiosity in tech alone has grown to include the human and business organizational side of building great teams, partner and customer relationships, and eco-systems that are greater than the sum of parts. I enjoy a balanced environment, where individual work plus a tight collaborative team environment leads to shared successes that we communicate and educate the world about. I’m always learning new things as I’ve found change is the constant in technology. Resultantly, I bring my breadth and depth of knowledge to new areas with a fresh perspective and my understanding of application and data paradigms, protocols and API levels, programming language patterns, OSes, all the way to drivers, firmware, system and even chips and transistors. As always, it's a great time to be in tech!