As his graduate studies came to an end, ONI Systems founder Rohit Sharma got two job offers from Nortel Networks. He chose, instead, to gravitate to the fast-paced world of Silicon Valley. Sharma relates, “I didn’t think that going to a big company would allow me to do the kind of things I wanted to do. The stuff I was doing in my daily life-on the Net, on the Web-just didn’t seem to connect with what Nortel, as a company, was doing.”