3Com Corporation was a digital electronics manufacturer best known for its computer network infrastructure products. The company was co-founded in 1979 by Robert Metcalfe, Howard Charney, Bruce Borden, and Greg Shaw and recruited Bill Krause from Hewlett-Packard to be its president in February 1981 when it raised its first round of venture capital. Metcalfe has explained that he came up with the name 3Com as a contraction of "Computer Communication Compatibility", with its focus on deploying the Ethernet technology that he had co-invented, which enabled the networking of computers.