Telegent hires former Agere CEO Ford Tamer

Mobile entertainment technology maker Telegent, which canceled its IPO last month, has brought on board an accomplished CEO who plans to make the firm a billion-dollar company. Don’t laugh; he’s pulled off feats like this several times already.

Ford Tamer (at right in photo), who packs multiple engineering degrees from MIT, co-founded Agere Systems in the dot-com era after growing two smaller companies and bringing them to profitable exits. He then grew Broadcom’s Infrastructure Networking Group to $1.2 billion in annual revenue.

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Most recently, Tamer was a partner at Khosla Ventures, where he focused on cleantech efficiency investments.

In a phone interview, Tamer said he had been looking around for a company to run again. “My background has been 20 years in operations and 10 of that in semiconductors,” he said. “So it’s going back to my roots in a way.”

His 120-day plan for Telegent is aggressive. But he’s already worked things out with co-founder Samuel Sheng, who had run the company for a while but is now stepping back to his original CTO role.

“First thing you need to do is partner with the people you’ve got, Tamer said. “The goal is to build a leader in mobile entertainment. It’s a lot easier to build upon a foundation rather than to start from scratch.”