THE CO-FOUNDER OF SUN MICRO SYSTEMS – Vinod Khosla

INTRODUCTION:

The years since 1970 have produced some great inventors and entrepreneurs especially in the field of computers and networking. They have not only invented something, but they revolutionized the usage of the computers and related peripherals. One of those legends who contributed to the age of computer revolution by co-founding the renowned Sun Microsystems, known for creating Java programming language, is Vinod Khosla, an Indian-American businessman and venture capitalist. He is also well-known as a strong supporter of clean technology. Let us know some interesting facts about Vinod Khosla and his career.

CHILDHOOD – INTEREST IN TECHNOLOGY:

Vinod Khosla was born on January 28, 1955 in Delhi, India. His father was an Indian Army officer who was posted at New Delhi, India.

Since his childhood, he had shown immense interest in technology. The roots for his passion for technology were planted when he read about the founding of Intel in Electronic Engineering Times at the age of fourteen. This was an inspiration for him to pursue a career in technology. He had graduated with multiple degrees from various universities.

•    Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering – IIT Delhi

•    Masters in Biomedical Engineering – Carnegie Mellon University

•    MBA – Stanford Graduate School of Business

SUN MICROSYSTEMS:

Vinod Khosla worked for a company known as Daisy Systems which was an electronic design automation company after graduating from Stanford in the year 1980. He worked there for two years before co-founding the Sun Microsystems.

SUN in the Sun Microsystems is the acronym for Stanford University Network and it was co-founded in the year 1982 by Vinod Khosla with Scott McNealy, Andy Bechtolsheim, his Stanford University classmates and UC Berkeley computer science graduate Bill Joy. Khosla was the first chairman and CEO for the company and he had served in those positions for 2 years i.e. from 1982 to 1984.

CAREER AS A VENTURE CAPITALIST:

Vinod Khosla had a highly successful career as a venture capitalist. He had joined the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in the year 1987 and within a very short time was recognized as a successful one with his profitable early investments.

SKS Microfinance in India was another firm which Khosla invested in. This is a finance company which lends small loans to the poor and women in rural India.Apart from the investments, he had also founded companies like TiE and The Indus Entrepreneurs. Khosla believed that ethanol can be used as a gasoline substitute and hence invested a lot in the companies that produced ethanol.

CONTRIBUTION TO FOUNDATIONS:

CK-12 foundation was co-founded by Khosla’s wife Neeru in the year 2006. This foundation is aimed at developing the open source textbooks to lower the cost of education. The couple also donated $500,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation.

ESTABLISHING KHOSLA VENTURES:

In the year 2004, Vinod Khosla established Khosla Ventures which is a venture capital firm in Menlo Park, California. The capital is estimated to be 1 billion dollars along with the funds invested by Vinod Khosla. Clean tech and information technology start-ups have been invested with the funds from Khosla in September 2009. An announcement in May 2010 have been made that Tony Blair, Prime Minister of Britain would be joining Khosla Ventures to advising on the investments in environment focused technologies.

WORKS AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS:

Vinod Khosla was involved in the foundation and development of many other organization, businesses and foundations apart from his own Khosla Ventures. They are

•    Daisy Systems which was established in 1981 had the contribution of Vinod Khosla in its foundation.

•    He is one of the founders of The Indus Entrepreneurs, shortly known as TiE.

•    He also guest edited a special issue of Economic Times newspaper.

•    He was the finalist for World Technology Award in the year 1999.

•    He served as the Honorary Chair of the Donors Choose San Francisco Bay Area Advisory Board.

•    He is a Member of the Board of Trustees of the Blum Center for Developing Economies at the University of California, Berkeley.

SUPPORTER OF CLEAN TECHNOLOGY:

Vinod Khosla has always been a great supporter of clean technology and he has invested a lot of the capitals in the ventures for the safer inventions. He once said “If it doesn’t scale, it doesn’t matter. Most of what we talk about today – hybrid, biodiesel, ethanol, solar photovoltaics, geothermal – I believe are irrelevant to the scale of the problem.” There are a very few people in the world of technology who has a vision of clean technology and Vinod Khosla is one of them.