Dr. Gururaj “Desh” Deshpande is a Trustee of the Deshpande Foundation along with his wife, Jaishree. He is also the President and Chairman of Sparta Group LLC, a family investment office, and the Chairman of Tejas Networks. Desh’s entrepreneurial career spans the last three decades. He was involved as the founder, a founding investor, or chairman of several companies including Cascade Communications, Sycamore Networks, Coral Networks, Tejas Networks, Cimaron, Webdialogs, Airvana, Sandstone Capital, A123 Systems, and Curata. Desh lives in Boston and serves as a life member of the MIT Corporation, and his support allowed MIT to create its Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation.