Andy Bechtolsheim
Andreas von Bechtolsheim (actually: Andreas Maria Maximilian Freiherr von Bechtolsheim Mauchenheim called ) ( born September 30, 1955 in slopes at Lake Ammersee ) is a German, in Silicon Valley (USA) live, computer scientists and entrepreneurs. 1982 he was one of four founders of Sun Microsystems and 1998 one of the first investors in Google. With an estimated fortune of 1.9 billion U.S. dollars, it has been on number 40 of the list of the richest Germans of Manager magazine in 2007; on the Forbes Billionaires List, he finished in March 2012 Course 546
Life
Family and Childhood
Andreas von Bechtolsheim is the second of four children of a primary school teacher and lived first on a lonely farm near the Ammersee in Bavaria. From 1961 to 1963 he attended the village school, after the family moved to Rome, where he attended the private German school and was instructed by his father. 1968 the family moved to nuns Horn Lake Constance, where he age of 17 on Lake High School Lindau took off in 1973 graduated from high school.
At age 17, he developed a microcomputer based on the Intel 8008 processor, which was used for the control of sheet metal stamping machines, for a friend of the family business. From this he received royalties of $ 100 per device. At 18, he won his third participation in the 1974 National Competition Youth Research in Physics with a thesis on the " accurate flow measurement by ultrasound ."
Training
After graduation Bechtolsheim began with support from the Study Foundation of the German people to study electrical engineering with a focus on data processing at the Technical University of Munich. In 1975 he moved with the help of a Fulbright fellowship at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA, in 1976 and earned his degree as master in computer science.
In 1977 he moved to Silicon Valley and took a summer student job at Stanford University as a programmer at a CAD project. Later, he was accepted there as a graduate student and received access to Xerox PARC.
1980 or 1981 he started at the suggestion of Forest Basket with the development of a computer that should serve as a workstation in the university computer network. As the base, he used the powerful Motorola 68000 processor, which had a large linear address space than 32 -bit processor and therefore supported a large memory. With the help of a CAD system he designed the main processor board, the graphics card and the Ethernet card. During this time he was also supported by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The contractor
Bechtolsheim was convinced that the new concept of a powerful and networked workstation was also inexpensive feasible and promising with the emerging 32- bit processors. The users are independent, without losing the advantage of the cross-linking, which was determined by the use of UNIX as the operating system on the computing time of the host computer.
Several attempts by the university to be constructed in the draft license, but failed. Then Bechtolsheim gave his 1982 doctoral position and founded together with his classmates Scott McNealy and Vinod Khosla and Bill Joy of Berkeley University, a private company. Investors were quickly found. Your company they called SUN as an acronym for " Stanford University Network ." The Sun -1 workstation called was offered at a price of less than $ 10,000, was superior to many mainframes and formed the foundation of the company's further success.
Bechtolsheim served at Sun from 1985 as Vice President of Technology. Sun returned in 1986 to the stock market, the business performed very well. In 1988, the turnover threshold of 1 billion U.S. $ has been exceeded; ten years later there were almost ten billion dollars. 2003, the share value of Sun 11.5 billion U.S. $.
1995 sought Bechtolsheim new challenges. SUN He left and founded Granite Systems, a new company to develop high-speed components for Internet Applications ( network switches ). 1996 Granite was acquired for 220 million U.S. $ from Cisco Systems. At this time Bechtolsheim had 65 % of the company shares. He was vice president of engineering at Cisco and has worked in various positions in the development of new network technologies, most recently as General Manager of the Gigabit Switching Department. In December 2003 he left the company to pursue another startup, which together with his business partner at Granite, David Cheriton, founded in 2001, company Kealia.
In February 2004 Kealia was acquired by Sun Microsystems via a share swap. With Bechtolsheim of the "employee # 1 " returned to Sun, where he was henceforth served as Senior Vice President and Chief Architect. In September 2005, Sun introduced the so-called " Bechtolsheim machine" before: the new Galaxy series is based on Opteron processors with two central, parallel processing units from AMD. This ten operating systems are supported, in addition to various Unix derivatives and Linux versions and Microsoft Windows. In 2010 he left Sun Microsystems again and moved as Chief Development Officer and Chairman to the financed company he Arista Networks.
The investor
Besides their own business ventures Bechtolsheim is also very successful as an investor and has already given more than 20 start-up companies through start-up funding and the provision of venture capital start. He devotes itself mainly in the field of electronic design automation (EDA ) software for the design of microprocessors, since such applications has already applied his interest during his time at Stanford.
Probably the only major investment in Germany in 1992 was his participation in the Hamburg software company Star Division, which was fully acquired by Sun in 1999. Its office suite StarOffice represented one of the main alternatives to the office applications from Microsoft dar.
Its probably the best investment -actuated Bechtolsheim 1998. Through his business partner David Cheriton he learned the Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin know who introduced the concept of a new Internet search technology. He was with U.S. $ 100,000 to the first investors from Google and also mediated the contact with the venture capitalist John Doerr. In an interview with Business Week in September 2005, he described Google as "the greatest idea that has ever come to me." After the IPO of Google, the value of its stake in early 2005 to 500 million U.S. $ was estimated.
Awards and Affiliations
- Founding member of the California West Coast campus of Carnegie Mellon University
- Smithsonian Leadership Award for Innovation
- A member of the National Academy of Engineering