Andreas "Andy" von Bechtolsheim is an electrical engineer who co-founded Sun
Microsystems in 1982 and was its chief hardware designer. He later became an
investor, providing the first major funding for Google, and starting several
computer networking companies. Early life
Bechtolsheim was born near Ammersee, in the German state of Bavaria. He grew up
on a farm with the Alps in the distance, the second of four children. Since the
isolated house had no television and distant neighbors, he experimented with
electronics as a child. In 1963 the family moved to Rome, and then in 1968
to Nonnenhorn on Lake Constance in Germany. When he was only 16, he
designed an industrial controller based on the Intel 8008 for a nearby company.
Royalties from the product supported much of his education.
As an engineering student at University of Technology Munich Bechtolsheim
entered the jugend forscht contest for young researchers, and after entering
for three years, won the physics prize in 1974. Bechtolsheim received a
Fulbright Award and moved to the US in 1975 to attend Carnegie Mellon
University, where he received his master's degree in computer engineering
in 1976. In 1977 Bechtolsheim moved to Silicon Valley to work for Intel, but
quit when they transferred him to Oregon the first week. He took a summer job at
Stanford University and became a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering.
Career At Stanford, Bechtolsheim designed a
powerful computer with built-in networking called the SUN workstation, a
name derived from the initials for the Stanford University Network. It was
inspired by the Xerox Alto computer developed at the Xerox Palo Alto
Research Center. Bechtolsheim was a "no fee consultant" at Xerox, meaning he was
not paid but had free access to the research being done there. In
particular, Lynn Conway was using workstations to design very-large-scale
integration circuits. Bechtolsheim's advisor was Forest
Baskett and in 1980 Vaughan Pratt also provided leadership to the SUN project.
Support was provided by the Computer Science Department and DARPA. The
modular computer was used for research projects such as developing the
V-System, and for early Internet routers. Bechtolsheim tried to interest
other companies in manufacturing the workstations, but only got lukewarm
responses. = Founding Sun=
One of the companies building computers for VLSI design was Daisy Systems, where
Vinod Khosla worked at the time. Khosla had graduated a couple years earlier
from the Stanford Graduate School of Business with Scott McNealy, who managed
manufacturing at Onyx Systems. The three wrote a short business plan and quickly
received funding from venture capitalists in 1982.
Bechtolsheim left Stanford to found the company, Sun Microsystems, as employee
number one. Bill Joy, who was part of the team developing the BSD series of
Unix operating systems, was the fourth member of the founding team. For a while
Bechtolsheim and Joy shared an apartment in Palo Alto, California. The first
product, the Sun-1, included the Stanford CPU board design with improved
memory expansion, and a sheet-metal case. By the end of the year, the
experimental Ethernet interface designed by Bechtolsheim was replaced by a
commercial board from 3Com. Sun Microsystems had its Initial Public
Offering in 1986 and reached $1 billion in sales by 1988. But Bechtolsheim
wanted something new and around this time formed a project code-named UniSun,
to design a small, inexpensive desktop computer for the educational market. The
result was the SPARCstation 1, the start of another line of Sun products.
= Other companies= In 1995, Bechtolsheim left Sun to found
Granite Systems, a company that focused on developing high-speed network
switches. In 1996, Cisco Systems acquired the firm for $220 million, with
Bechtolsheim owning 60%. He became Vice President and general manager of Cisco's
Gigabit Systems Business Unit, until leaving the company in December 2003 to
head Kealia, Inc. Bechtolsheim founded Kealia in early
2001 with Stanford Professor David Cheriton, who was also a partner in
Granite Systems, to work on advanced server technologies using the Opteron
processor from Advanced Micro Devices. In February 2004, Sun Microsystems
announced it was acquiring Kealia in a stock swap. Due to the acquisition,
Bechtolsheim returned to Sun again as senior vice president and chief
architect. Kealia hardware technology was used in the Sun Fire X4500 storage
product. Along with Cheriton, in 2005
Bechtolsheim launched another high-speed networking company, Arastra. Arastra
later changed its name to Arista Networks. Bechtolsheim left Sun
Microsystems to become the Chairman and Chief Development Officer of Arista in
October, 2008, but stated he still was associated with Sun in an advisory role.
Bechtolsheim is a founding member of Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley CMU's
West Coast campus in Mountain View, California.
= Investments= Bechtolsheim co-founded HighBAR
Ventures, an early-stage venture capital investment firm, along with two Sun
colleagues: Bill Joy and Roy Sardiña. HighBAR's investments include Mirapoint,
Brocade, Tasmania Network Systems, Brightmail, and Regroup.
Bechtolsheim and Cheriton were two of the first investors in Google, investing
US$100,000 each in September 1998. Bechtolsheim wrote the check to "Google
Inc" prior to the company even being founded. The story that says
Bechtolsheim coined the name "Google" is untrue. However, he did motivate the
founders to officially organize the company under that name. When he gave
the check to Lawrence E. Page and Sergey Brin, Google's founders, they had not
actually yet been legally incorporated. As a result of investments like these,
Bechtolsheim was seen as one of the most successful "angel investors",
particularly in areas such as electronic design automation, which refers to the
software used by people designing computer chips. He has made a number of
successful investments in EDA. He argues that changes in the chips themselves are
outpacing the development of EDA tools, creating what he sees as an opportunity.
It was his interest in these design tools while at Stanford which prompted
his frustration when waiting for access to mainframes which led to his
development of the first workstation. In one such EDA company, Magma Design
Automation, his stake was valued around $60 million.
Bechtolsheim invested in Tapulous, the maker of music games for the Apple
iPhone. Tapulous was acquired by the Walt Disney Company in 2010.
Bechtolsheim joined George T. Haber, a former colleague at Sun, to invest in
wireless chip company CrestaTech in 2006 and 2008.
Bechtolsheim was an investor in all of Haber's previous startups: CompCore
purchased by Zoran, GigaPixel purchased by 3Dfx and Mobilygen purchased by Maxim
Integrated Products in 2008. He was an investor in Moovweb, a cloud-based
interface for mobile and computer websites in 2009. He was reported to be
an early investor in Claria Corporation, which ceased operation in 2008.
In 2012, Bechtolsheim invested in a Stanford incubated semantic web startup
Diffbot. The most profitable for Bechtolsheim was
his initial $100,000 investment in Google, which, in March 2010, was worth
approximately $1.7 billion. His net worth was estimated at $2 billion.
= Awards= Bechtolsheim received a Smithsonian
Leadership Award for Innovation in 1999, a Stanford Entrepreneur Company of the
year award, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Bechtolsheim gave the opening keynote speech at the International
Supercomputing Conference in 2009. References
Further reading Carolyn Tajnai. From the Valley of
Heart's Delight to the Silicon Valley: A Study of Stanford University's Role in
the Transformation. Stanford University, Department of Computer Science.
Mark Hall; John Barry. Sunburst: the ascent of Sun Microsystems. Contemporary
Books. ISBN 978-0-8092-4368-6. External links
"Odysseys in Technology: Sun Founders Panel". Computer History Museum. January
11, 2006. Archived from the original on 20 April 2011. Retrieved April 13, 2011.
"SUN display". Stanford University. January 2001. Archived from the original
on 20 April 2011. Retrieved April 13, 2011.
Andreas von Bechtolsheim: Vom Bodensee nach Silicon Valley - Stern.de