Vinod Khosla Biography

Despite growing up in an Indian Army home with no commercial or technological contacts, Vinod grew up dreaming of being an entrepreneur. He had aspired to build his own technological business from the age of 16, when he first heard of Intel's formation. Vinod failed, at the age of 20, to start a soy milk firm to service the many people in India who did not have freezers after graduating with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Instead, he moved to the United States to get a master's degree in biomedical engineering at Carnegie-Mellon University. His entrepreneurial ambitions drew him to Silicon Valley, where he earned an MBA from Stanford University in 1980. He was one of the three founders of Daisy Systems after graduation, which was the first substantial computer-aided design system for electrical engineers. The firm went on to earn large sales, profitability, and an IPO, but Khosla founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 to produce workstations for software developers, motivated by the irritation of having to design the computer hardware on which the Daisy program needed to be built. He pioneered open systems and RISC CPUs at Sun. Sun was supported by John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a long-time friend and board member. Vinod swapped sides in 1986 and joined Kleiner Perkins, where he was and still is a general partner of KPCB funds through KP X. During his time at Excite, he and other partners challenged Intel's monopoly with Nexgen/AMD (the only microprocessor to have significant success against Intel, sold to AMD for 28 percent of AMD), incubated the idea and business plan for Juniper to challenge Cisco's dominance of the router market, formulated Excite's very early advertising-based search strategy, and transformed the moribund telecommunications business and its archaic SONET implementations with Cerent (sol). He assisted in the creation of value, having fun, succeeding, failing (remember Dynabook?) and driving impact in collaboration with entrepreneurs and KPCB partners. Vinod founded khoslaventures in 2004, spurred by the need for flexibility to accommodate four teenager children and a desire to be more experimental, to support sometimes risky research studies, and to take on both for-profit and social impact enterprises. His objectives remain the same: to engage with and learn from interesting and knowledgeable entrepreneurs, to establish significant firms via the use of innovation, and to invest time in a relationship that makes a difference. Vinod is passionate in emerging technologies that can have a positive and economic impact on society. His primary interest is mentoring entrepreneurs and assisting them in the development of technology-based enterprises. Vinod participates on the boards of a few firms, although he usually meets with most of the portfolio companies directly when they are going through changes or making crucial decisions. Two instances of his thought may be seen on the site: a personal reflection he delivered at the 2010 CEO Conference and a discussion about entrepreneurship he gave at MIT in 2011. Khosla is a founding member of TiE, a non-profit worldwide network of entrepreneurs and professionals that was created in 1992 and today has over forty chapters in nine countries. He also serves on the board of directors of the Indian School of Business. His current passion is social entrepreneurship, with a focus on microfinance as a tool for poverty reduction. He supports several microfinance groups in India and Africa. He has been dabbling with education and global housing. Vinod is also interested in alternative energy, petroleum independence, and environmental issues. This well-known businessman resides in Woodside, California, with his wife and four kids. Khosla believes in familial connectedness. Breakfast and supper with his family are among his life guidelines. In Forbes magazine's list of America's richest 400 individuals, he is one of three billionaires of Indian descent.

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