Andy Bechtolsheim

Andreas Maria Maximilian Freiherr von Mauchenheim genannt Bechtolsheim (born 30 September 1955 ) is a German electrical engineer, entrepreneur and investor.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 and was its chief hardware designer.

As of September 2023, his net worth is $11.2 billion.

Bechtolsheim was born at Hängeberg am Ammersee, located in Finning, Landsberg, Bavaria, the second of four children.

The isolated house had no television or close neighbors, so he experimented with electronics as a child.

Khosla, McNealy and Bechtolsheim wrote a short business plan and quickly received funding from venture capitalists in 1982.

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.

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.

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.

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%.

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.

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.

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.