The Top 25: #19 Faran Nouri, Lam Research Capital
Faran Nouri is a founding member of Lam Research Capital, the corporate venturing arm of US-based wafer fabrication equipment and services provider Lam Research. She joined Lam Research in 2014, when the firm was looking to set up a corporate venturing unit. She put together the venture team.
Nouri’s initial responsibilities included drawing up Lam Research Capital’s vision and mission and specifying the areas of investment of strategic relevance to the parent company. She set up an evergreen fund with a run rate of $50m a year and hired investors with domain expertise. Today, the unit invests in early-stage companies worldwide.
In her day-to-day role as a corporate venturer, Nouri said there was never a dull moment – the job was “extremely stimulating and interesting”. She is keen to meet creative thinkers to update her knowledge of new technologies. But she feels at ease with the task as she leverages her technical skills in an industry in which she has been involved for two decades.
Being a relatively young fund, Nouri said the unit had yet to establish a strong track record, but it had “several exciting companies in its portfolio”, ranging from medtech to semiconductors – Antheia, Echopixel, KaiaTech, Reno Subsystems and TetraVue.
She said her ambition was to invest in still more “companies that make a difference”. Her greatest accomplishment to date in the unit, she added, was “establishing the group, developing best practices and forming a network of partners to build a healthy pipeline”.
Nouri sais she saw corporate venturing as a long-term commitment. “It requires faith on the part of the company in the early years until we demonstrate our strategic value to Lam Research.” Thanks to her team’s perseverance and dedication, she said, she was now able to pinpoint the value Lam Research Capital delivers to its parent.
Nouri has bachelor’s and a master’s degrees in electrical and electronics engineering from University of Colorado Boulder. She began her career as an engineer, first at Hewlett-Packard and TMA, before being appointed as a technology developer at NXP Semiconductors, then known as VLSI Technology and later as Philips Semiconductors.
She said: “I was a long-time semiconductor industry technologist when I dropped out of the industry to attend Stanford’s graduate school of business.” She was a director at industrial manufacturing equipment provider Applied Materials for 11 years before returning to university to gain her second master’s degree, this time in management.
“Following graduation, I tried my hand at a startup, learned a lot about the startup world and its challenges,” she said, having been a co-founder and adviser at crowdfunded solar energy startup 98lumens. She said she “ultimately decided that I would make a better investor than a startup founder”.
