Steve Bell is Founding blogger and Producer at StartupTrek.net. He joined Bell Telephone Laboratories in Dec, 1977 and attended UC Berkeley (1978-79) on a Bell Labs scholarship. At Bell Labs, he recieved patents for the design of mixed-signal IC circuitry, and for co-inventing a new optical touch sensitive screen technology (1982/86).
During the “Intrapreneurial” era at Bell Laboratories (shortly after Gifford Pinchet’s book “Intrapreneurship” was published) he co-founded the Resound hearing aid venture at Bell Labs’ 6,000-employee Holmdel facility, where he also served as President of the running club. He also worked on developing the initial ISDN line protocols and echo cancellers, station set development, and telecom system engineering. In 1986 he moved to Sunnyvale, California with AT&Tto open an ASIC design center.
After stints at Western Digital, Chips and Technologies, National Semiconductor, Hughes LAN Systems, and Make Systems (working at smaller and smaller tech companies in Silicon Valley), in 1994 he launched “Bell Consulting Group” (BCG), a boutique tech consultancy focused on C-level and Board level issues in strategic business development. BCG became one of the most sought-after consultancies in silicon valley, serving hundreds of clients.
In 1998 he founded and provided the Angel funding for the Silicon Valley Networking Lab (SVNL), which grew to become a large-scale, very busy network computing software and hardware interoperability testing center. After landing the exclusive interoperability agreement to test and certify products for the Wi-Fi Alliance, in 2000 Steve sold the Silicon Valley Networking Lab to HP/Agilent. SVNL went on to perform the 2-day, $15k Wi-Fi certification process on more than 7,000 Wi-Fi products from hundreds of companies in Europe, Asia, the US, and ROW.
Today Steve is a Tech Industry blogger, with a special interest in helping very early stage startups prepare to attract initial funding and succeed in the marketplace. He is also an active Angel investor as a member of the Keiretsu Forum, the world’s largest and most successful Angel investment group with over 750 members (accredited investors) in 18 Chapters from Bejing to Seattle to New York, London, Barcelona, and Paris. Steve is in the early stages of co-authoring a book, and producing a film about the Keiretsu Forum, in conjunction with Randy Williams, the founder & CEO.
Steve’s a runner, photographer, genealogist, mobile computing and web 2.0 enthusiast, and the Dad of two little comedians: Alexander Bell, 6 and Annette Bell, 8. His long-form bio is available on this VisualCV page.
