Gopi Gopinath

My mother taught me math.

My wife Karin is a ceramic artist—we've been married since 1968. Both math and ceramics are hard but they last. I want to do work that endures.

I didn't start school until I was 11—my family couldn't afford it before then. I graduated at 14, earned my Bachelor's in Mathematics at 18, and my M.Sc. in Mathematical Physics at 20. Stanford came next: a Master's in Electrical Engineering at 21, and a Ph.D. at 23.

In 1966, while still at Stanford, I invented the Gopinath Observer—already named in Stanford University reports. Today, its applications range from advanced spacecraft and fighter jets to maglev trains and coffee machines. Hundreds of millions of induction motors are now produced with integrated Observer SOC (System on a Chip).

Around the same time, I worked on another problem: understanding speech production. The Gopinath-Sondhi equation allowed reconstruction of the vocal tract's shape as it voiced sentences, helping implement early speech synthesis algorithms.

After my Ph.D., I left Stanford to join the mathematics research team at Bell Laboratories. I spent most of my professional life there, working on problems ranging from symbolic math to solve hard queuing problems, to network management algorithms and architectures for large systems. I held many patents in communication technology. IEEE awarded me Life Fellow for contributions to Network Performance Management.

Every once in a while, I took time off to teach. I was the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, and later left Bell Labs when invited to be State of New Jersey Professor at Rutgers University. I was fortunate to mentor some of the brightest Ph.D. students during those years. Many are now professors themselves; others are Fellows at major technology companies.

Teaching was rewarding, but one day AT&T called. They needed help building a custom business billing system. I've always been interested in building large, complex systems, so I formed a company to build it. I liked it so much that I left teaching. The business grew into what is Lotus Interworks Inc. today. Lotus went on to architect SONET network management systems for AT&T and then Fujitsu—projects involving hundreds of developers. Beyond network management, Lotus built HR systems, Video On Demand systems, and Mobile Games Platforms.

Even though I had left Bell Labs, I continued inventing. I hold more than 30 patents in areas including personalization, intelligent switching, and object composition.

In 2009, I got interested in AI. I learned about specific nuances in language used in classified ads like Craigslist—well-known professors had published a book on the topic. Using their work, Lotus launched Simplia in 2009, the first AI marketplace for services. You could find a plumber for fixing your kitchen sink by chatting with Simplia. We couldn't compete with Google at the time, but the site is still in the Internet Archives on the Wayback Machine.

After that 2009 experiment, a few of my team and I spent about 10 years building a platform, from the ground up, for AI and humans to collaborate. We called it Oxygen. Ray Stata, the founder of Analog Devices Inc. (ADI, Nasdaq), and I have known each other since the late '90s. Ray got interested in the project in 2019, and we formed Simplia anew. Simplia built a business around the huge but challenging market of selling services to small businesses. Since "ARR is the true north" for tech startups, Simplia focused on ARR and reached $325K per month in revenue in early 2025. But then, due to board-level dysfunction, Simplia tanked into bankruptcy. The core team still remains and is taking a breath with great sadness.