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Selina Lo isn’t your typical CEO. As head of Ruckus Wireless Inc. (NYSE: RKUS), a fast-growing Silicon Valley company that provides hardware and software for Wi-Fi networks, she’s the rare female executive in the predominantly male world of high tech. Lo

co-founded a startup that sold for $140 million in stock, and now heads a public company that posted 2012 revenues of $214.7 million.

And for a CEO, she’s disarmingly candid. For one thing, she freely admits that she’s not the greatest manager.

“Some CEOs are great managers; they are organized communicators and consensus builders,” Lo says. “That’s not me. I see myself as a leader, with the common fault of over-imposing my instincts and intuition on others. I need a capable staff that can stand up to me. When you’re CEO, you become the master of nothing. You are an adviser to your staff, but you must be prepared to make the tough decisions.”

The company Lo heads, founded in 2004 by Silicon Valley technologists Victor Shtrom and Bill Kish, is at the center of a hot tech sector. The enter-prise and Wi-Fi service provider market is growing about 20 percent annually, according to the company.

B Y T O M M c N I C H O L | P H O T O G R A P H S B Y R A M O N A R O S A L E S

IN MY OWNWORDSSELINA LOPRESIDENT AND CEO OF RUCKUS WIRELESS

MY IDEA OF A PERFECT DAY OUTSIDE OF WORK IS…Sleep in, eat breakfast in bed, go play some tennis, get a massage, and then sit down and read a novel.

MY GUILTY PLEASURE IS…Reading Vanity Fair.

THE BUSINESSPERSON I MOST ADMIRE…Is still Steve Jobs. He was the imperfect hero.

THE THING THAT SOME-TIMES KEEPS ME AWAKE AT NIGHT IS…The competition. Tormenting myself over changes I have to make that I don’t like doing.

MY FAVORITE MUSIC IS…Puccini’s Turandot.

MY CHIEF STRENGTH IS…Intuition.

MY MOTTO IS… Be true to yourself.

SmartConnec tionSilicon Valley’s Ruckus Wireless wants to make the world safe for Wi-Fi.

Source: Ruckus Wireless

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Silicon Valley’s Gender GapWomen face challenges in the world of tech.

We serve many Tier 1 carriers.... Being a public company gives us financial credibility.”— SELINA LO

RUCKUS

Tech startups nationwide

14.2% womenWomen who form startups do so with

58% less capital than their male counterparts

Ruckus co-founders Victor Shtrom, left, and Bill Kish

She had a very good reputation and a lot of respect in the tech community.”— BILL KISH

In selling Wi-Fi solutions to mobile operators, broadband service providers and corporations around the world, Ruckus has enabled a number of high-profile Wi-Fi installations, including those for the 2012 Democratic National Con-vention, the Sundance Film Festival, and large swaths of the cities of London, Tokyo, Hong Kong and San Jose.

“We’re delivering digital data to the user,” explains Shtrom, now Ruckus’ chief wireless architect. “Our Smart Wi-Fi technology is the best bet to get it delivered quickly, reliably and affordably, despite challenging traffic conditions.”

The features that set Ruckus’ Wi-Fi systems apart are a combination of smart antennae and software algorithms. The smart antennae are able to steer data to the appropriate user and away from interference from other radio signals in the air, long a bane of Wi-Fi networks. The algorithms help determine the best path for the signal to take in response to changing environ-mental conditions such as competing signals from other Wi-Fi networks. The result, says the company, is an intuitive Wi-Fi system that continuously learns from the traffic it sees and reconfigures itself as interference is encountered.

If Ruckus’ equipment does its job, no one notices it. “You basically want people to forget that the network is even there,” says Lo. “Users just touch the app icon on the smartphone and they are connected to it.”

The Wi-Fi market may be hot, but Ruckus has to compete with much larger providers, includ-ing Cisco Systems. (Cisco has approximately 70,000 employees worldwide; Ruckus employs 700-plus.) Ruckus’ strategy to compete with larger rivals is to make its system easier to deploy and more transparent to the users, thus reducing network headaches. And the company believes that its Smart Wi-Fi technology gives it a cost/performance edge over the competition.

Still, to keep pace with the market, Lo says she has to lead the company by “sheer will, brute force and charisma.” Ruckus employees will tell you she concludes every company meeting with a spirited “Now get back to work!”

FIXING THE MOBILE INTERNET’S PLUMBINGBorn in Hong Kong, Lo immigrated to the U.S. in 1977 at the age of 17. She soon enrolled at U.C. Berkeley for computer sci-ence. After graduating in 1982, she joined Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ). She then co-founded a startup, Centillion Net-works, a LAN switching company, which was sold in 1995 to Bay Networks for $140 mil-lion in stock. After that, she signed on with a Web switching company, Alteon WebSys-tems, as VP of marketing and product man-agement. The company was sold to Nortel Networks in 2000 for $7.8 billion in stock.

Lo was an early investor in Ruckus (in 2004) and was asked by the co-founders to become acting CEO. She soon became the perma-nent CEO and president of the company.

“She had a very good reputation and a lot of respect in the tech community,” says co-founder Kish, now Ruckus’ chief technology officer. “The combination of her operational experience and her connections to the investment community was really appealing.”

Ruckus’ original name was Video54 Technologies Inc., but she decided that the name was too limiting if the company want-ed to pursue markets beyond video. The company’s current logo features the name Ruckus next to a barking dog. The canine

theme is repeated in Ruckus’ offices, which sport conference rooms named after dog breeds.

“When you say ‘Ruckus,’ it conjures up action and the indomitability of our spirit,” Lo says. “We chose a barking dog as our logo; the dog is mak-ing a ruckus and is unleashed. That’s very much us. We want to disrupt the status quo.”

Ruckus officially launched in June 2004. The following year, the company closed two rounds of venture capital totaling $12.5 million. During the past several years, Ruckus revenues have shown impressive growth. In 2010, the compa-ny’s revenues were a reported $75.5 million. The following year, revenues increased to $120 mil-lion, and in 2012, they reached $214.7 million, with a GAAP net income of $31.7 million.

ON THE HUNT FOR FASTER SYSTEMSThe company went public in November 2012. Lo believes that becoming a public company gives Ruckus a better standing among key customers.

“We serve many Tier 1 carriers. They want to deal with companies that are going to be around for a long time,” says Lo. “Being a public company gives us financial credibility.”

Much of the future direction of Ruckus comes down to Lo. Co-founder Shtrom calls her a visionary, a leader who saw an opportu-

nity in building better Wi-Fi radios long before many others did. Under her leadership, Ruckus has invested considerably in making Wi-Fi more reliable and customizing feature sets for specific markets, such as hospitality and service providers. With the explosion of mobile devices in recent years, Lo’s hunches have proven to be smart moves.

Lo has managed to be a successful execu-tive in Silicon Valley on her own terms: She understands her own leadership strengths, and at the same time knows how to depend on others who have deeper technical knowledge than she does.

“I’m not a gadget person,” she says. “But I have a deep appreciation of technologists. I can tell who’s good and who’s not.”

Ruckus execs are optimistic that the compa-ny will continue to grow, mainly because of the insatiable consumer demand for more wireless bandwidth. With so many laptops, smartphones and tablets trying to access the Internet at the same time, Wi-Fi will need traffic cops like Ruckus to make sure the signals go to the right place. “This is an explosive market,” says Lo. “We are just at the knee of the curve.”

� Read more about Lo’s thoughts on what makes a great leader on iPad and at nysebigstage.com/leaders/ruckus.

Silicon Valley has always prided itself on hiring the best and brightest people. Yet only 14.2 percent of high-tech startups nationwide are formed by women, according to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. It also found that female entrepreneurs launch technology firms with far less capital than men — about 58 percent less. Years after startup, women-owned high-tech firms continue tolag behind men-owned companies in numerous per-formance measures, including revenues and profits, theorganization found.

Selina Lo says that in her experience, being a woman in Silicon Valley is a mixed bag.

“The plus is that if you carry your own weight, you actually get a little more credit. You’re in the minority, so people tend to get more impressed,” Lo says. “The minus is that women

aren’t paid equally, even in Silicon Valley.”

One key area where women lag in Silicon Valley is in the crucial world of venture capital. Women represent fewer than 10 percent of high-level venture capitalists, and they have been leav-ing the industry at twice

the rate of men, according to the Kauffman Foundation.

“In my experience, the VC industry is certainly male dominated,” Lo says. “They employ women as CFOs and administrators but the limited partners are mostly male.”

Silicon Valley isn’t so much an old boys’ network as it is a young boys’ network. Many times, a venture capital meeting amounts to male twentysomething entrepre-neurs pitching their dream to male thirtysomething VCs. It’s perhaps not surprising that VCs tend to fund what feels comfortable to them.

But Lo sees some promise of change.

“I heard that in the com-puter science department at MIT, it’s fifty-fifty men and women now,” says Lo. “Things are changing, and the statistics are catching up.”

85.8% men