Andy Bechtolsheim

Last updated
Andy Bechtolsheim
Andreas bechtolsheim.jpg
Born (1955-09-30) 30 September 1955 (age 68)
Hängeberg am Ammersee
Finning, Landsberg, Bavaria, West Germany
Education Technical University of Munich
Carnegie Mellon University
Stanford University
Known forCo-founder Sun Microsystems
Google investor
Board member of Arista Networks

Andreas Maria Maximilian Freiherr von Mauchenheim genannt Bechtolsheim (born 30 September 1955 [1] ) is a German electrical engineer, entrepreneur and investor. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 and was its chief hardware designer. As of September 2023, his net worth is $11.2 billion. [2]

Contents

Early life and education

Bechtolsheim was born at Hängeberg am Ammersee, located in Finning, Landsberg, Bavaria, [3] the second of four children. The isolated house had no television or close neighbors, so he experimented with electronics as a child. His family moved to Rome in 1963. Five years later, in 1968, the family relocated again, to Nonnenhorn on Lake Constance in Germany. At age 16, he designed an industrial controller for a nearby company based on the Intel 8008, which he then programmed in binary code as he had no access to assemblers. Royalties from the product supported much of his education. [4]

As an engineering student at Technical University of Munich Bechtolsheim entered the Jugend forscht contest for young researchers, and after entering for three years, won the physics prize in 1974. [5] He went to Carnegie Mellon University in 1975 with the help of a Fulbright scholarship, and obtained his Master's degree in Computer Science in 1976. In 1977, Bechtolsheim went to Stanford University and became a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering. [4] [6]

Career

Early Sun workstation hardware Sun100U Cardcage.jpg
Early Sun workstation hardware

At Stanford, Bechtolsheim designed a powerful computer (called a workstation) 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 remunerated directly but had free access to the research being done there. At the time, Lynn Conway was using workstations to design very-large-scale integration (VLSI) circuits. [4]

Bechtolsheim's advisor was Forest Baskett. 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. [4]

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 of years earlier from the Stanford Graduate School of Business with Scott McNealy, who managed manufacturing at Onyx Systems. Khosla, McNealy and Bechtolsheim wrote a short business plan [7] and quickly received funding from venture capitalists in 1982. [4] Bechtolsheim left Stanford to co-found the company, Sun Microsystems, as employee number one, with McNealy and Khosla, and with Bill Joy, who had been part of the team developing the BSD series of Unix operating systems at UC Berkeley; Bill is usually counted as the fourth member of the founding team. For a while Bechtolsheim and Joy shared an apartment in Palo Alto, California. [4]

SPARCstation 1, designed circa 1988 SPARCstation 1.jpg
SPARCstation 1, designed circa 1988

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. [8]

Sun Microsystems had its initial public offering in 1986 and reached $1 billion in sales by 1988. Bechtolsheim formed a project code-named UniSun around this time to design a small, inexpensive desktop computer for the educational market. The result was the SPARCstation 1 (known as "campus"), the start of another line of Sun products. [9]

Other companies

In 1995, Bechtolsheim left Sun to found Granite Systems, a Gigabit Ethernet startup focused on developing high-speed network switches. In 1996, Cisco Systems acquired the firm for $220 million, with Bechtolsheim owning 60%. [10] 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. [11]

Bechtolsheim founded Kealia in early 2001 with Stanford Professor David Cheriton, 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. [12] [13] Kealia hardware technology was used in the Sun Fire X4500 storage product. [14]

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. [14]

Investments

Bechtolsheim and Cheriton were two of the first investors in Google, investing US$100,000 each in September 1998. When he gave the check to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google's founders, the company had not yet been legally incorporated. Claims that Bechtolsheim coined the name "Google" are untrue. However, he did motivate the founders to officially organize the company under that name. [15] [16]

As a result of investments like these, Bechtolsheim was seen as one of the most successful "angel investors", [17] particularly in areas such as electronic design automation (EDA), which refers to the software used by people designing computer chips. He has made a number of successful investments in EDA. In one such EDA company, Magma Design Automation, his stake was valued around $60 million.[ citation needed ] He was an early investor in another EDA start-up company, Co-Design Automation, which developed SystemVerilog which is used to design almost all digital hardware.

Bechtolsheim invested in Tapulous, the maker of music games for the Apple iPhone. [18] Tapulous was acquired by the Walt Disney Company in 2010. [19] He joined George T. Haber, a former colleague at Sun, to invest in wireless chip company CrestaTech in 2006 and 2008. [20]

Bechtolsheim invested in all of Haber's previous startups:[ citation needed ] CompCore purchased by Zoran, GigaPixel purchased by 3Dfx and Mobilygen purchased by Maxim Integrated Products in 2008, as well as Moovweb, a cloud-based interface for mobile and computer websites in 2009. [21]

He was reportedly an early investor in Claria Corporation, which ceased operating in 2008. [22] From 2015 to 2017, Bechtolsheim invested in PerimeterX, an automated attack mitigation SaaS. [23]

Awards

Bechtolsheim received a Smithsonian Leadership Award for Innovation in 1999 [24] and a Stanford Entrepreneur Company of the year award. He was also elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2000 for contributions to the design of computer workstations and high-performance network switching.

Bechtolsheim gave the opening keynote speech at the International Supercomputing Conference in 2009. [25]

In 2012, he was voted by IT Pros as the person who contributed most to server innovation in the last 20 years. [26]

Personal life

Despite living most of his life in the US, Bechtolsheim never attempted to acquire US citizenship. He remains a German national. [27] [28]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bill Joy</span> American computer engineer (born 1954)

William Nelson Joy is an American computer engineer and venture capitalist. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla, and Andy Bechtolsheim, and served as Chief Scientist and CTO at the company until 2003.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sun Microsystems</span> American computer company, 1982–2010

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the Network File System (NFS), and SPARC microprocessors. Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing. Notable Sun acquisitions include Cray Business Systems Division, Storagetek, and Innotek GmbH, creators of VirtualBox. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982. At its height, the Sun headquarters were in Santa Clara, California, on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Workstation</span> High-end single-user computer

A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term workstation has been used loosely to refer to everything from a mainframe computer terminal to a PC connected to a network, but the most common form refers to the class of hardware offered by several current and defunct companies such as Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Apollo Computer, DEC, HP, NeXT, and IBM which powered the 3D computer graphics revolution of the late 1990s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SBus</span>

SBus is a computer bus system that was used in most SPARC-based computers from Sun Microsystems and others during the 1990s. It was introduced by Sun in 1989 to be a high-speed bus counterpart to their high-speed SPARC processors, replacing the earlier VMEbus used in their Motorola 68020- and 68030-based systems and early SPARC boxes. When Sun moved to open the SPARC definition in the early 1990s, SBus was likewise standardized and became IEEE-1496. In 1997 Sun started to migrate away from SBus to the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus, and today SBus is no longer used.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vinod Khosla</span> American businessman (born 1955)

Vinod Khosla is an Indian-American businessman and venture capitalist. He is a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the founder of Khosla Ventures. Khosla made his wealth from early venture capital investments in areas such as networking, software, and alternative energy technologies. He is considered one of the most successful and influential venture capitalists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scott McNealy</span> American businessman and tech entrepreneur

Scott McNealy is an American businessman. He is most famous for co-founding the computer technology company Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy, and Andy Bechtolsheim. In 2004, while still at Sun, McNealy founded Curriki, a free online education service. In 2011, he co-founded Wayin, a social intelligence and visualization company based in Denver. McNealy stepped down from his position as CEO of Wayin in 2016.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daisy Systems</span> American engineering company

Daisy Systems Corporation, incorporated in 1981 in Mountain View, California, was a computer-aided engineering company, a pioneer in the electronic design automation (EDA) industry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Multibus</span> Computer bus standard

Multibus is a computer bus standard used in industrial systems. It was developed by Intel Corporation and was adopted as the IEEE 796 bus.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jonathan I. Schwartz</span> American businessman

Jonathan Ian Schwartz is an American businessman. He is president and CEO of CareZone, a firm intending to lower the price of prescription drugs for people with chronic illness.

David Ross Cheriton is a Canadian computer scientist, businessman, philanthropist, and venture capitalist. He is a computer science professor at Stanford University, where he founded and leads the Distributed Systems Group.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sun-1</span> First generation of Sun Microsystems computers

Sun-1 was the first generation of UNIX computer workstations and servers produced by Sun Microsystems, launched in May 1982. These were based on a CPU board designed by Andy Bechtolsheim while he was a graduate student at Stanford University and funded by DARPA. The Sun-1 systems ran SunOS 0.9, a port of UniSoft's UniPlus V7 port of Seventh Edition UNIX to the Motorola 68000 microprocessor, with no window system. Affixed to the case of early Sun-1 workstations and servers is a red bas relief emblem with the word SUN spelled using only symbols shaped like the letter U. This is the original Sun logo, rather than the more familiar purple diamond shape used later.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">3M computer</span>

The 3M computer industrial goal was first proposed in the early 1980s by Raj Reddy and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as a minimum specification for academic and technical workstations. It requires at least one megabyte of memory, a one megapixel display with 1024×1024 1-bit pixels, and one million instructions per second (MIPS) of processing power. It was also often said that it should cost no more than one "megapenny" or $10,000.

The Sun Fire X4500 data server integrates server and storage technologies. It was announced in July, 2006 and is part of the Sun Fire server line from Sun Microsystems.

The Stanford University Network, also known as SUN, SUNet or SU-Net is the campus computer network for Stanford University.

The SUN workstation was a modular computer system designed at Stanford University in the early 1980s. It became the seed technology for many commercial products, including the original workstations from Sun Microsystems.

David James Brown is an American computer scientist. He was one of a small group that helped to develop the system at Stanford University that later resulted in Sun Microsystems, and later was a co-founder of Silicon Graphics in 1982.

Arista Networks is an American computer networking company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. The company designs and sells multilayer network switches to deliver software-defined networking (SDN) for large datacenter, cloud computing, high-performance computing, and high-frequency trading environments. These products include 10/25/40/50/100 Gigabit Ethernet/200/400/800 low-latency cut-through switches, including the 7124SX, which remained the fastest switch using SFP+ optics through September 2012 with its sub-500 nanosecond (ns) latency, and the 7500 series, Arista's modular 10G/40G/100Gbit/s switch. Arista's Linux-based network operating system, Extensible Operating System (EOS), runs on all Arista products.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nebula (company)</span>

Nebula, Inc. was a hardware and software company with offices in Mountain View, California, and Seattle, Washington, USA. Nebula developed Nebula One, a cloud computing hardware appliance that turned racks of standard servers into a private cloud. The Nebula One private cloud system was built on the OpenStack open source cloud framework, as well as many other open source software projects.

Forest Baskett is an American venture capitalist, computer scientist and former professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University.

References

  1. List of richest Germans Archived 2018-09-24 at the Wayback Machine diereichsten.de; accessed 30 June 2017.(in German)
  2. Andreas von Bechtolsheim profile, Forbes.com, 3 September 2023.
  3. Beise, Marc; Schäfer, Ulrich (11 August 2016). Deutschland digital: Unsere Antwort auf das Silicon Valley. Campus Verlag. ISBN   9783593505923 . Retrieved 24 January 2018 via Google Books.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Daniel S. Morrow (18 March 1999). "Andreas Bechtolsheim & William Joy Oral History" (PDF). Computerworld International Archives. Archived from the original (PDF) on 22 July 2011. Retrieved 11 April 2011.
  5. "Die Milliarden-Karriere: Andreas von Bechtolsheim - Bundessieger Physik 1974" (in German). 2006. Archived from the original on 19 July 2011. Retrieved 12 April 2011.
  6. Leonhard Wolfgang Bibel (2017), Reflexionen vor Reflexen - Memoiren eines Forschers (in German) (1 ed.), Göttingen: Cuvillier Verlag, ISBN   9783736995246
  7. "Sun Microsystems Business Plan" (PDF). 1982. Retrieved 25 December 2023.
  8. "Sun Workstation product overview" (PDF). 1982. Retrieved 11 April 2011.
  9. Karen Southwick (1999). High noon: the inside story of Scott McNealy and the rise of Sun Microsystems. John Wiley and Sons. p. 88. ISBN   978-0-471-29713-0.
  10. Peter Cohan (November 1997). "Lessons from High-Tech Companies". Journal of Business Strategy.
  11. Thurm, Scott (16 December 2003). "High-Tech Pioneer Leaves Cisco To Return to Start-Up Life". The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Comnpany. Retrieved 16 November 2023.
  12. Stephen Shankland (11 February 2004). "Sun to buy Opteron server maker, reclaim co-founder". ZDNet. Retrieved 11 April 2011.
  13. Peter Galli (10 February 2004). "Sun Acquires Server Technology Startup". eWeek. Retrieved 11 April 2011.
  14. 1 2 Chris Preimesberger (23 October 2008). "Sun Co-founder Bechtolsheim Joins Cloud Computing Startup". eWeek. Retrieved 11 April 2011.
  15. Tony Long (7 September 1998). "If the Check Says 'Google Inc.', We're 'Google Inc.'". Wired. Archived from the original on 1 May 2011. Retrieved 11 April 2011.
  16. "Google history". About Google Company. Archived from the original on 1 April 2011. Retrieved 11 April 2011.
  17. "Andreas von Bechtolsheim". Forbes. 2006. Archived from the original on 22 May 2011. Retrieved 13 April 2011.
  18. Jenna Wortham (21 December 2008). "Music Games for iPhone Give Artists New Spotlight". The New York Times . Retrieved 11 April 2011.
  19. Andy Fixmer and Adam Satariano (1 July 2010). "Disney Buys Tapulous, Maker of Video Games for IPads". Bloomberg Businessweek. Archived from the original on July 5, 2010. Retrieved 11 April 2011.
  20. "The Programmable Broadband Company:About Us". CrestaTech website. Retrieved 11 April 2011.
  21. "Bechtolsheim-Backed Moovweb Develops Mobile Sites And Smartphone Apps". 4 November 2009.
  22. Timothy L. O'Brien and Saul Hansell (20 September 2004). "Barbarians at the Digital Gate". The New York Times. Retrieved 12 April 2011.
  23. Daniel, Robert. "PerimeterX, providing defense against automated attacks, launches anti-bot service". The PE Hub Network. PE Hub. Retrieved 8 August 2017.
  24. "Past Leadership Award Recipients: 1990–2008". Computerworld Information Technology Awards Foundation. 2008. Archived from the original on 22 July 2011. Retrieved 13 April 2011.
  25. "An Interview with ISC'09 Keynote Speaker Andy von Bechtolsheim". HPCwire. 21 June 2009. Archived from the original on 2009-07-27. Retrieved 13 April 2011.
  26. Tracie Barnes. "IT Brand Pulse Networking Innovation Leader Awards". Conferenceconcepts.com. Retrieved 3 September 2017.
  27. "Von Bechtolsheim: I invested in Google to solve my own problem". Deutsche Welle. Retrieved 3 September 2017.
  28. Moss, J. Jennings (28 November 2018). "Arista's Andy Bechtolsheim carves deep-impact tech career". American City Business Journals.

Further reading