Many people regard Li as one of the brightest minds in the IP networking industry. A self-proclaimed perfectionist, he acknowledges that some colleagues find him "difficult," which could explain why he has left all three of these companies amid some controversy. CNET News.com caught up with Li shortly before Cisco announced it would buy Procket. During the hour-long phone interview, Li, speaking from his home in California, dished the dirt on his previous employers, explained his rock-star persona and gave some insight into new trends he sees in the IP routing market and the Internet in general.

Juniper is the only core routing vendor to successfully take on Cisco, How did they do it?Cisco had annoyed its customers because they had not presented them with a reliable and useful core router, Cisco's corporate bureaucracy was structured so that people were awarded for playing very safely, At the same time, the Internet was growing by leaps and bounds, We were basically a roadblock in the sunflower mandala iphone case growth, because we could not get a reasonable system to market, It is not that Juniper succeeded so much as Cisco failed..

You left Cisco and went to Juniper, which was then a start-up. Then you left Juniper in 1999, just before the IPO. Why?It was time for me to move on. I had run into some issues there, and it was simply time for me to find other opportunities. Didn't you leave a lot of money on the table in terms of stock options?I left some things on the table, but it was hardly enough that I would care. I am one of these strange people who doesn't think this is all about the money. Procket has raised something like $300 million, and now there's talk that the company is trying to sell itself. Could it really be out of money? Unless they have raised more funding that is not publicly known, then I'd say they need to do something quickly. They should be close to running out of money by now.

People have been saying that Cisco is interested in buying Procket, Does this make sense to you?I'm not sure what Cisco's rationale is, If it's a matter of improving hardware density and getting some software talent, then that makes sense, But I don't see how this wouldn't really (anger) the team that just built Cisco's new sunflower mandala iphone case CRS-1 router, People say that Procket could be going for between $80 million and $100 million, What's your take on that? Well, I'm a bit biased, but I think that's a real steal for the technology..

Procket was one of the most highly valued start-ups in Silicon Valley at one point. What happened? I am a perfectionist, and I certainly have a temper.There was a lot of mismanagement, especially in the early days. Things were delayed, and the sales didn't happen. The product ended up being much more expensive to develop than we had planned, simply because we were not able to execute as we had hoped. Were there partnership opportunities that came about and were they missed? A number. But I can't go into them specifically.