Biography|Patrick Lo — Netgear Was Opened as a Bay Networks Subsidiary on This Parkway

People treat Netgear as a garage startup that always had its own letterhead. The first books belonged to Bay Networks.

Lo left Hewlett-Packard in 1995 after the company declined to fund a consumer-internet hardware push he wanted. In August 1995 he joined Bay Networks, then headquartered at 4401 Great America Parkway in Santa Clara.

Bay was fighting Cisco for enterprise margins. Lo argued the home and small-office market would clear twenty to thirty percent, not fifty, and needed its own books.

NETGEAR, Inc. was incorporated in Delaware on 8 January 1996 as a wholly owned Bay subsidiary. Early press placed the new line in Santa Clara, on this parkway beside California's Great America.

Mark G. Merrill co-founded the unit with him. The brief was cheap, fast hardware that let households and small firms share a high-speed internet connection.

Nortel announced a stock deal for Bay in June 1998 and closed the merger on 31 August 1998. Netgear stayed a neglected subsidiary until Nortel sold its remaining interest in 2002.

The office park changed tenants. OpenStreetMap now labels 4401 Great America Parkway as a Palo Alto Networks building.

The date that still belongs to this curb is the incorporation. That is when the consumer networking line got its own name.

Photo: Great America–Santa Clara Station, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Router: Marie-Lan Nguyen, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons