| University of Kent (UK), BA (hons) | 1976 |
| Sociology & Political Science |
Keith Teare is President of fotonauts Inc. A stealth startup co-founded by Jean-Marie Hullot, former CTO of Apple’s applications division. fotonauts is expected to launch late in 2008
Teare was a founder or co-founder of two companies that achieved $billion valuations or greater.
The EasyNet Group plc: UK. Founded in 1994 as one of the first ISP’s in Europe, Teare was CTO and co-founder. It went public on the AIM exchange in London in 1996 and by 1999 was trading at a valuation of more than $1 billion. In 2007 it was acquired by Rupert Murdoch’s B Sky B where Teare’s co-founder, David Rowe is still CEO of the division, for around $400million.
RealNames Corporation, founded in Palo Alto in 1998. Teare was founder and CEO. The company created a multi-lingual naming system, with distincy national namespaces, sitting on top of the DNS. It used natural language keywords, mapped to URI’s to allow native language navigation. Teare raised more than $130m in venture funding and filed for an IPO (led by Morgan Stanley, with Mary Meeker as lead analyst) in 1999. After negotiating a world-wide agreement to include RealNames in the Microsoft browser in early 2000, the company filed an amended S1, and had an implied valuation of more than $1.5bn. The bursting of the Internet bubble meant the company stayed private, but prospered. By 2002 it was responsible for over 1 billion keyword navigations per quarter. it had agreements in Japan, China and Korea and was responsible for supporting the nascent multi-lingual DNS system run by Verisign. In Q1 2002 Microsoft decided to cease to support the technology. 1 billion page views previously resolved by RealNames were redirected to the MSN search service. This resulted in the closure of the company in Q2 2002.
In addition to these 2 very large projects Teare is credited with also being the founder of edgeio corporation; the seed funder of NetNames (the world’s first domain name registrar, created by Ivan Pope); the founder of cScape, a leading UK systems integrator; and co-founder of CYBERIA, the world’s first Internet Cafe.
