Diosdado Banatao

Mr. Banatao, also known as “Dado”, is a Filipino

technopreneur who rose from poverty to wealth. After acquiring
his master’s degree, he worked for different tech companies,
and later excelled and developed...
…the first 10-Mbit Ethernet CMOS with silicone coupler data-
link control and transceiver chip
…the first system logic chipset for IBM’s PC-XT and the PC-
AT
…the local bus concept and the first Windows Graphics
accelerator chip for PC’s
He co-founded three tech companies, he has spent time
with engineers and professors at Homebrew Computer Club and
he is providing scholarships to engineering and technology
students.

His Success Story

Dado Banatao was considered as the Filipino version of Bill Gates since both came up
from a technical background, introduced technologies that transformed the computer industry,
and built large successful companies from the ground up.

Dado Banatao was born on May 23, 1946 to a rice farmer and housekeeper where he
grew up in a little barrio named Malabhac in the farming town of Iguig in Cagayan Valley
Province. When he was a kid, Banatao used to walk barefoot to school along the dirt roads. He
then went to Ateneo de Tuguegarao and at 15 pursued college education at Mapua Institute of
Technology where he graduated cum laude with an Electrical Engineering degree.

Dado was then offered a job

after graduation at Meralco but then he
turned down the offer after knowing the
starting salary. He instead applied as a
pilot trainee at Philippine Airlines,
which paid much more. Little did he
know that a turning point of his career
will come when Boeing pirated him as a
design engineer and brought him to US.
He then enjoyed engineering and later
on pursued further studies taking a
Masters in Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science at Stanford
University, which he completed in 1972
to be trained properly on his craft.
 After graduating with his Master’s degree, Dado then worked at some of the leading-edge
technology companies that include National Semiconductor, Intersil, and Commodore
International where he designed the first single chip, 16-bit microprocessor-based calculator. In
1981, while he was working at Seeq Technology, the inventor of Ethernet approached the
company to look for a more efficient way of linking computers. Banatao was then assigned with
the task that led him to his breakthrough discovery of by putting the Ethernet controller on a
single chip instead of big boards. That was then the first 10-Mbit Ethernet CMOS with silicon
coupler data-link control and transreceiver chip.

With that breakthrough discovery, Dado then decided to start his company and be his
own boss. With US$500,000 seed capital that came mostly from friends, he put up Mostron in
1985 to develop chip sets. As a startup company, he had to be cost efficient and resourceful. He
then used equipment from another company that wasn’t used on weekends to debug chips. Later
his hard work and dedication paid off when his company developed the first system logic chip
set for the PC-XT and PC-AT, which lowered the cost of building the personal computer and
made it much more powerful.

About the same time, Dado started his second company named Chips and Technologies
(C&T), which created enhanced graphics adapter chip sets. With its success, sales during the first
quarter amounted to US$12 million. In less than a year, the company went public by listing its
shares in the stock market and the market’s response was remarkable. It was one of the fastest
Initial Public Offering (IPO) listings in the history of US stock market. In 1996, multinational
semiconductor giant Intel bought C&T making Banatao richer by US$430 million.

But even before this huge success, Banatao had already reached millions when he started
his third company named S3. It was a company that pioneered the local bus concept for the PC in
1989 and introduced the first Windows accelerator chip in 1990. Way back in 1993, S3 was then
considered as the third most profitable technology company in the world when it went public
having an IPO worth of US$30 million.

Dado Banatao is now a multimillionaire investor. He invested in a lot of networking

companies that were eventually sold before he joined the venture capital firm Mayfield Fund in
1998. After two years, the company offered him to promote to a general partner but Dado
refused it and instead decided to start his own venture capital firm named Tallwood Venture
Capital with a capital of US$300 million, all of which came from his own pocket. He then
believed that independence is more important than security.

Today Dado Banatao manages several businesses. His Cielo Communications is

developing the vertical cavity surface emitting laser or Versel, which speeds the transmission of
data along optical lines. His SIRF Technology is designing a chip for a global positioning system
which utilizes satellites to locate objects. His Marvell Technology had a highly successful public
offering with the stock price soaring more than 300% during its first day of trading.

He has proven to be a master investor and venture capitalist. He invests, oversees, and
sells several companies that include Cyras Systems acquired by Ciena; Newport
Communications acquired by Broadcom; Acclaim Communications acquired by Level One;
Stream Machines acquired by Cirrus Logic; Marvell Technology Group and New Moo software.
He has more than three homes in the US, including resort properties in Lake Tahoe and Sonoma
San Francisco. From his childhood roots of walking barefoot, he now drives his high-
performance luxury cars and he flies his own fast jets. Yet despite these blessings, Dado Banatao
still contributes to the society and to the country. His Banatao Filipino American Fund assists
Northern California high school students of Filipino heritage in pursuing a college education in
engineering. Aside from this, he also went back to his childhood town of Iguig in Cagayan
Valley where he built a computer center at his grade school making it the only public school with
the most modern computer network.

SOURCES:
https://hanap.org/most-successful-filipino-technopreneurs/
https://jlfgalindo.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/dado-banatao-success-story.pdf