A week after announcing a 550-job expansion, the site lead at Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO)’s Research Triangle Park campus, Ed Paradise, hits pause on back-to-back meetings just long enough for an exclusive chat.

Paradise, who worked at IBM (NYSE: IBM) before joining Cisco in 1993, is a passionate guy – and not just about his networking company. His particular passion of late? Mentorship.

So our chat runs the gambit, from those 550 jobs, to the entrepreneurship dollars Cisco is divvying out, to the…