Andy Bechtolsheim

Andy Bechtolsheim is a successful venture capitalist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems. While attending Stanford University Bechtolsheim grew tired of having to wait for computer time from the central university system. Instead of waiting he set out to create his own powerful computer running the Unix operating system. The term "workstation" was then born and the project caused fellow Sun co-founder Vinod Khosla to approach him. After leaving Sun in December 2003 he went on to invest in and found several new companies. He was an early investor in Google which turned a an initial $100,000 investment that is now worth approximately US$1.5 billion.

Fast Facts

1. Born: 1955 in Germany
2. Co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982
3. Has a master's degree in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University
4. Recently invested wireless chip company CrestaTech
5. Founding member of Carnegie Mellon University's West Coast campus
6. Sun stands for "Stanford University Network"

Quote

"Well, personally, I'm always driven by opportunities. We started Sun around the workstation opportunity (from) the work I did at Stanford--that's where the name came from, the Stanford University Network. Then Sun evolved into a server company, which was another great opportunity with the whole Sparc (processor) direction. In 1995, I saw an opportunity around changing the networking speed from 100 megabits to a gigabit. That got me very excited, so I left Sun to pursue that. I ended up being acquired by Cisco for a lot of money. I stayed there for the next seven years. The Cisco Catalyst 4000 and 4500 series was the product line that my group delivered to the market. It became the world's highest-volume modular chassis switch--I think they shipped over 50 million Ethernet ports" Andy Bechtolsheim during CNET interview

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