Sherry Wei: "Here Comes the Sun"
This Week's Guest: Sherry Wei
ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Sherry Wei, the soft-spoken but gritty founder of Aviatrix Systems, shares her story of emigrating from China and starting her career coding for Cisco Systems, and the steps that convinced her to jump into the unpredictable world of startups in 2013. From taking Aviatrix Systems from a bootstrap startup to a company with $25 million in venture investments, Sherry conveys what that experience taught her about not giving up and learning to trust yourself.
Sherry has candid tips for start-up founders as they struggle with funding, vision, and allocating time to their business. Should you quit your day job? Should you keep going when you’re reaching dead ends? From someone who’s been there, her wisdom is informational and inspirational.
Find Sherry on LinkedIn.
More About Sherry Wei
Sherry Wei bootstrapped the hybrid cloud start-up Aviatrix after quitting her job at Huawei in 2013. The idea behind the Aviatrix technology is to extend the enterprise data center to AWS without touching the underlying network infrastructure. Aviatrix was able to acquire a number of enterprise customers using its hybrid cloud solution before receiving funding. Prior to Huawei, Sherry worked at Cisco for 13 years. She led and developed a few Cisco first generation products, among them the first Intel-based Cisco Integrated System Router (ISR) and the first Cisco T1/E1 Voice and WAN Interface Module. Sherry joined Cisco as part of the acquisition of Ardent Communications where she was the first employee and wrote a significant amount of code. Prior to Ardent, Sherry was an early employee at Centillion Networks that was acquired by Bay Networks (Nortel). Sherry holds a PhD from Purdue University in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.
