Highly regarded for his business acumen and bold moves in the high tech industry, Joe Costello is set to make Silicon Valley history again. This time at the helm of an educational start up called BravoBrava.
BravoBrava is a privately held company with a goal of making a tenfold improvement in the productivity and efficiency of education through the use of technology over the next ten years. BravoBrava will develop fundamental technology that will either be licensed or spun-off into standalone companies. The first spinoff is called SUP, Inc., which has set out to revolutionize how people learn to read using speech recognition technology.

"It was the [...] chasm between the privileged and the rest of society that sowed the seeds of destruction of past Golden Ages."

Joe Costello from "Education: The fuel for tech’s Golden Age" in Electronic Business.

Costello also serves as chairman & CEO of think3, a mechanical CAD company specializing in 3-D design software. He's also chairman of Zamba (NASDAQ: ZMBA), the nation's largest dedicated customer care consulting company; NextNet, a wireless technology start-up company focused on enabling very high speed, low cost wireless DSL services for consumers and small businesses worldwide; and Barcelona Design, an electronic design automation company with the "Holy Grail" of analog design, completely automatic optimization of analog circuits.

In addition, Costello is on the board of Calico Commerce, Inc., (NASDAQ: CLIC), a leader in business to business e-commerce software; Catena Technologies, a broadband DSL company; iCopyright.com, a company that's developing radical new approaches to extracting the value of intellectual property on the web; Reality Fusion that has invented a way to do very low cost, high quality video interaction for large groups of people on the web; Saba, the first company to provide software for managing corporate education; and Simplex, which is solving the physical design problems for the next generation of systems in silicon.
Prior to joining think3, Costello played a pivotal role as president and CEO of Cadence Design Systems Inc. for more than a decade. Under his direction, Cadence grew to be the world's leading supplier of electronic design automation (EDA) software and services. The company's solutions are used to develop semiconductors, computers, networking equipment, telecommunications products and consumer electronics. In 1997, Cadence approached the $1 billion mark in revenue, a first for an EDA manufacturer. This milestone also made Cadence one of the top ten highest-grossing software vendors in the world. In short, Costello helped lead Cadence through a groundbreaking transformation relative to its established business model from a software tool supplier to a provider of complete solutions for electronic product development.
In 1997, Chief Executive Magazine named Costello the top performing CEO of all publicly traded companies in North America. He also made Upside Magazine's 1997 "Elite 100" list of the top executives leading the digital revolution.
Additionally, Costello has demonstrated an active interest in intellectual property (IP) issues. He played a key role in the formation of the Virtual Socket Interface (VSI) Alliance in 1996. VSI is a 150-member consortium dedicated to the development of standards for the development and exchange of IP among high technology firms. Costello has also been a vocal supporter of legal, educational and business reform related to IP issues, and helped strike a breakthrough agreement with the government of Scotland to position that country as one of the leaders in the protection and development of IP related to electronic design.
Prior to the formation of Cadence, Costello served as president and chief operating officer at SDA Systems, one of the two companies that merged in 1988 to help form Cadence. Prior to that, he was president of Electronic Speech Systems, and manager of research and development for digital signal processing and speech at National Semiconductor.
Costello holds a bachelor's of science degree in mathematics and physics from Harvey Mudd college, a master's of science degree in physics from Yale University and a master's of science degree in physics from the University of California, Berkeley.
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