Forest joined NEA in 1999 as a venture partner and became a general partner in 2004. Forest focuses on information technology investments. Present board memberships include Aeluros, Arch Rock, Atheros Communications (NASDAQ: ATHR), Audience, Catalytic, Chelsio Communications, Foveon, Fulcrum Microsystems, Luxtera, RingThree Technologies, SiBEAM, Tableau Software, and T-RAM Semiconductor. He also serves as an advisor to Cassatt, Data Domain, PolyServe, Spreadtrum and Telegent Systems. Previous board memberships include, among others, E2O, Nanochip, Newisys and SiTime. Forest also previously held an advisory position with FineGround, ReShape and SMIC.

Prior to NEA, Forest was Senior Vice President of R&D and Chief Technology Officer of Silicon Graphics Inc. He founded and directed the Western Research Laboratory of Digital Equipment Corporation from 1982 to 1986 before joining SGI. Prior to that, he was a professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University from 1971 to 1982. He also spent two years at Los Alamos National Laboratory building an operating system for the original Cray-1 computer and a year and a half at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center as a Principal Scientist doing VLSI research. At Stanford, he worked with Andy Bechtolsheim on the SUN workstation project, with Jim Clark on the Geometry Engine project, and with John Hennessy on the MIPS microprocessor project.

Dr. Baskett received a BA in Mathematics from Rice University, a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.