Andy Bechtolsheim

Andy (Andreas) Bechtolsheim (born in Germany in 1956) co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 with Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy, and Scott McNealy.

Bechtolsheim received an undergraduate degree from a university in Germany, and received his master's degree in electrical engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University.

At Stanford University, Bechtolsheim had devised a powerful computer (which he called a workstation) with built in networking running a non-proprietary operating system called Unix. He developed the workstation because he was sick of waiting for computer time at the central University system.

Khosla approached him, wanting to build a business around selling the workstation. He also approached McNealy who was then pursuing an MBA at Stanford Business School.

They named the company Sun as a gesture to their alma mater, "Stanford University Network." Bechtolsheim left Stanford, where he was enrolled in a PhD program, to found the company.

Sun Microsystems quickly became a success, with $1 billion in sales by 1988. By 2003, the market capitalization of Sun Microsystems was $11.5 billion.

After leaving Sun, he founded Granite Systems in 1995 to develop network switches. In 1996, Cisco acquired the firm for $220 million, with Bechtolsheim owning 65%. As Vice President and general manager of Cisco's Gigabit Systems Business Unit, he left the company in December 2003 in order to lead Kealia Inc, which was founded 3 months before.

With one of his former partners in Granite Systems, Bechtolsheim was one of the first investors in Google, investing $100,000 in 1998, writing the check to "Google" prior to the company even being founded.

As a result of shrewd investments like these, Bechtolsheim is increasingly being seen as a savvy investor, particularly in areas such as electronic design automaton (EDA), 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.

One such EDA company, Magma Design Automation Inc., has been tremendously profitable for Bechtolsheim, with his stake in the company being valued around $60 million.

Bechtolsheim is a founding member of Carnegie-Mellon University's West Coast Campus in California.