Charles Giancarlo

Managing Director, Silver Lake

Charles Giancarlo joined Silver Lake in 2007 and is a Managing Director and Head of Value Creation. Mr. Giancarlo has over 25 years of experience in the communications industry. A senior executive at Cisco Systems from 1993-2007, Mr. Giancarlo most recently served as Executive Vice President and Chief Development Officer of Cisco and President of Cisco-Linksys, leading the company’s overall product development and management activities. As Chief Development Officer, Mr. Giancarlo directed the activities of half of Cisco’s employees, and was directly responsible for Cisco’s expansion into a large number of new markets and technologies. His first position at Cisco was Vice President of Business Development, where he developed Cisco’s merger and acquisition strategy and practice. Mr. Giancarlo joined Cisco when the company acquired Kalpana, Inc., the pioneer in Ethernet switching, where he was Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Development. Prior to joining Cisco, Mr. Giancarlo founded four communications equipment companies and successfully sold two of them to larger companies. Mr. Giancarlo was interim CEO of Avaya in 2008 and is currently Chairman of the Board. He was previously on the board of Skype and currently serves on the board of directors of Accenture and Netflix, Inc. Mr. Giancarlo holds a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Brown University, an M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, and an M.B.A. from Harvard University.

What They Say About Us

"The wonderful thing about entrepreneurs is that their passion for starting new companies transcends languages and geographic boundaries."

Ron Conway, Founder and Managing Partner of the Angel Investors LP funds, early stage investor in Google and PayPal

"Networking is very important for start-ups. The challenge for them is often not money: it is mentoring and finding people who can give good advice from experience."

Esther Dyson, Founder, EDventure Holdings

"This conference is clearly a labor of love for a group of dedicated professionals who care deeply about the Eastern European entrepreneurs. From the value-packed educational panels, to the star-studded key note speakers' line up, to an amazing quantity of venture capitalists – this is a not to be missed event for any high tech entrepreneur,"

Richard Guha, President of the Marketing Executives Network and Managing Partner at MaxBrandEquity

"As Stanford MBA students, we were exposed to a lot of VC firms both from the Valley and abroad. It is at Stanford that we met Anna Dvornikova, an absolutely amazing business leader and (by our big luck) our friend, who was the center of the Russian Silicon Valley professional community, and was doing a huge work to connect Russia and the Valley. Anna helped us a lot with kick-starting Wikimart, put us to our first-ever conference, introduced us to most of Russian VCs. And all that happened in a very short time span! It was the beginning of a six-month journey that despite the particularly tough times resulted in an extraordinarily group of investors backing our start-up."

Maxim Faldin and Kamil Kurmakayev,
co-CEOs, Wikimart