Dominique Trempont

He spent the first 14 years of his career as a key executive at Raychem, a company focusing in material science and a precursor of the cleantech space, with worldwide responsibilities and a focus on large scale turnarounds in the United States, China, India, Japan, Latin America and Europe. Raychem was a billion dollar company operating globally in 80 countries and was later acquired by Tyco.

In 1993, Steve Jobs recruited Trempont to turn around NeXT, first as CFO^[1] then to lead operations, while Steve Jobs focused on Pixar. Dominique led NeXT's shift from hardware to Internet focused software and brought the company to profitability. He successfully restructured the company financially, organizationally and strategically, and sold NeXT to Apple in 1997 for $462M.

In 1997, Trempont joined hands with the founder of Gemplus (now renamed Gemalto), world leader in smart cards, and became CEO of Gemplus Corp. He built a highly profitable $150M new business in two years by focusing on the convergence of mobile consumer applications, micro-payments and on-line security. Gemplus has since gone public and is now a 2 billion dollar company.^{[citation needed]}

In 1999, Trempont became chairman and CEO of Kanisa, an early-stage enterprise natural language search & knowledge management software start-up. He focused the venture on customer self-service, contact center, and peer support applications. The company merged with ConsonaCRM in 2007.

Between 1996 and 1997, Trempont sat on the board of Verity (NASDAQ: VRTY), in enterprise search.^{[citation needed]}

In 1998, Trempont became a founding investor in Signio, an online payment platform. Signio was sold to Verisign for $700M in 1999 and, a couple of years later, was acquired by eBay/PayPal.

In 2006, he joined the board and chaired the Finance and Audit Committee of 3Com (NASDAQ, COMS), a global computer networking solutions company; 3Com was acquired for $3.3B by Hewlett-Packard in 2010.

• Profile on Forbes.com