About Prabhat Jain in Detail - Silicon Valley, Monsoon Multimedia and more
Over a span of 30 years in the Silicon Valley, I have been fortunate to have founded companies that have pioneered Multimedia Technologies. In the late 70’s, together with the incredible talent at Atari with Nolan Bushnell, Al Alcorn, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and others, I became Atari’s supply chain specialist and later supplied Jobs and Wozniak with 20 kits to build the first Apple computers. Later, I would supply Apple first and then IBM, with the first color technologies that enabled computers "to go" color.
Roy Kusomoto and I established the first sub assembly plant, Solectron, in 1977 in the Silicon Valley at Elko Drive, Sunnyvale to help Atari make its consoles and service its customers.
Together with Walt Broedner in 1984, I helped found Video-7 that supplied Apple's Steve Jobs with RGB (color) boards-the first of its kind and after significant R&D. Later I collaborated with Campbell’s Chips n Technologies to develop the first VGA in 1985 for the IBM PC. I helped Paradise Systems develop their color cards in 1982.
Together with Jack Tramiel, CEO of Commodore, I established HES, a developer of video games, for the VIC-64. Investors included Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer from Microsoft and Dave Marquat of TVI. I have helped develop over 25 semiconductors for color graphics, audio and video.
At Dazzle Multimedia, my team and I developed the first affordable and mass volume MPEG products for the PC. At Emuzed, I established a highly talented team in Bangalore, India. Emuzed licensed audio and video codecs to mobile players such as Nokia, Motorola and Samsung.
All told, under my guidance, over 600mi devices were sold, 7 global brand names were established and over 10,000 employed by my companies. Over 3,500 patents were issued to the companies I ran. I raised a total of $500mi from Wall Street, Venture Capitalists and Corporations.
