Dado Banatao, 79

One of the greatest Filipino entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, Diosdado “Dado” Banatao, died in Stanford, California, on Dec. 25, 2025, from a debilitating neurological disease. He was 79.

Major achievements included successful startups Mostron (1984), Chips and Technologies (1985) and S3 Graphics (1989). Mostron manufactured PC motherboards; C&T developed chipsets for IBM XT and AT computers; S3 made computer graphic cards and accelerator chips. Dado founded the non-profit Philippine Development Foundation (PhilDev) for STEM scholarships.

In July 2000, I had long interviews with Dado, then 54, a fellow Cagayano. Excerpts from my article:

A PAL pilot trainee, he took a psychological test. The verdict: obsessive-compulsive. He became one of Silicon Valley’s best-known and most successful entrepreneurs and a visionary in the PC industry. “Hard work,” snaps Banatao when queried about the recipe for his rise. “I believe, like Edison, that genius is 95 percent perspiration and five percent genius.”

The kid from Iguig, Cagayan walked barefoot to school. By the late 1990s, the engineer-businessman-cum-inventor, Banatao travels by a personal jet for business and a Porsche or two for pleasure. “He is richer than Ayala [Manila’s oldest business family],” reckons Francisco Nemenzo, president of the University of the Philippines, which is harnessing Banatao’s talents and connections to develop its own cyberpark. The president of seven-generation-old Ayala Corp. is rated the country’s richest man after Lucio Tan, with a family fortune estimated at $1 billion.

“Dado has a tremendous mind,” says Ayala chief Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala, who has recruited Banatao as a venture partner for iAyala, to help oversee the group’s foray into information technology and various Internet businesses. “He has a voice out there in Silicon Valley where a lot of things are happening,” adds Zobel. “We thought a mix of the two of us together is a good combination.”

As a scientist, Dado had a strong grasp of the three major technologies of the cyber age: the design and manufacture of chips, which are the brains of computing, cellphones, data servers and the internet; the transmission of vast amounts of data reliably and cheaply at high speed and global positioning systems.

His latest market move involved one of the 18 companies in which he owns a stake, Bermuda-based Marvell Technology. Marvell made its Nasdaq debut on June 27 (2000), at $15 a share – and closed more than 300 percent higher on the first day of trading.

By July 11 the maker of integrated circuits for broadband networks was trading at $48, bringing its market value to $3.8 billion. Marvell is one of just 18 Nasdaq IPOs in the past year to pop to more than 300 percent on the first day, and 11 of those stocks have now at least halved. As well, almost all of those listings were made before the abrupt Nasdaq sell-off in late March. Says Banatao: “Most of what I do now is incubating and funding companies.”

Marvell – already profitable – owns the Ethernet controller chip, which Banatao invented. After graduating cum laude in electrical engineering at Manila’s Mapua Institute of Technology, he decided to go out on a limb and begin training as a pilot. That was interrupted when Boeing recruited him as a design engineer and took him to the US. While there, Banatao “discovered how inadequate my training was” and pursued his master’s in electrical engineering at Stanford University, plus computer science.

Jobs followed at National Semiconductor, Commodore International – where he designed his first chip, for a calculator – and Intersil, all combining Banatao’s software-designing ability and his technical expertise. Then in 1981 he was working at Seeq Technology when the inventor of the Ethernet system asked the company to look for a more efficient way of linking computers. As the engineer assigned to collaborate, Banatao made the breakthrough discovery of doing away with big boards and putting the Ethernet controller on a single chip.

With $500,000, mostly from friends, he founded Mostron in 1985 and began devising chip sets.

Minus any venture-capital funding, C&T went public after 22 months, one of the fastest IPO listings on record. After just one quarter with Banatao’s new graphic chips set in the marketplace, C&T had chalked up sales of $12 million. “When I was designing, I hardly had a social life,” he recalls. “It is not enough that you come up with solutions. It must be a unique solution.”

Intel bought out C&T in 1996. Banatao set up a third vehicle, S3 Inc. S3 has a return on equity of 46.1 percent and is estimated to be the world’s third most profitable technology company.

Banatao was chairman of Cyras Systems, Marvell Semiconductor, New Moon Software and Stream Machine, all private companies. His Tallwood Venture Capital is a partner of Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm that has invested $2 billion in various companies and has another $1 billion awaiting targets.

Banatao markedly lowered the cost of PCs while improving their performance. He recalls that when the world’s most powerful mainframe computer was the IBM 360, his new chip-set design produced 10 times more power at a thousandth of the cost. As well, nine out of 10 graphics accelerators still incorporate his design.

“I’ve done tremendous things for the industry from the technical point of view,” says Banatao. “For every success there are 100 or 200 failures.”

In 2000, Banatao was involved in developing the vertical cavity surface emitting laser, or Versel, which speeds the transmission of data along optical lines, and the chip for a global positioning system (GPS), which utilizes satellites to locate objects. Ayala has invested $1 million in Versel developer Cielo Communications and pumped another $1.6 million into GPS chip developer SiRF Technology. Banatao is the controlling shareholder in both companies. Ayala’s Bank of the Philippine Islands needs superspeed data transmission, while GPS will come in handy for its Globe Telecom wireless services.

“The two most important technologies that enable the creation of products and services in information technology are computing and communications,” Banatao explains. “A year from now, the ubiquitous wireless phone will become the platform for communications and computing infrastructure.”

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