Founder, Sun Microsystems and Founder, TiE

Vinod Khosla (born January 28, 1955 in Pune, India) is an Indian-American venture capitalist. He is an influential personality in Silicon Valley. He was one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems and became a general partner of the venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers in 1986.

Khosla read about the founding of Intel in Electronic Engineering Times at the age of fourteen and this inspired him to pursue technology as a career. Khosla went on to receive degrees from the IIT Delhi, India (Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering ), Carnegie Mellon University (Masters in Biomedical Engineering), and Stanford Graduate School of Business (MBA).

After graduating from Stanford University in 1980, Khosla along with his Stanford fellows Scott McNealy, Andy Bechtolsheim (another Carnegie Mellon graduate school alumnus), and a UC Berkeley masters degree holder named Bill Joy founded Sun Microsystems. Khosla left Sun in 1985. He then joined the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 1986 as a general partner. Khosla is also one of the founders of TiE, The Indus Entrepreneurs, and has guest-edited a special issue of Economic Times (ET), a leading business newspaper in India.

In 2004 Khosla formed his own firm, Khosla Ventures. He also invested in an Indian Microfinance NGO, SKS Microfinance, which lends small loans to poor women in rural India.
Khosla was featured on Dateline NBC on Sunday, May 7, 2006. He was discussing the practicality of the use of ethanol as a gasoline substitute. He is known to have invested heavily in ethanol companies, in hopes of widespread adoption. He cites Brazil as an example of a country that has totally ended its dependence on foreign oil.
Khosla was a major funder of Yes on 87’s campaign to pass California’s Proposition 87, The Clean Energy Initiative, which failed to pass in November, 2006.

In 2006, Khosla founded ck12.org that aims to develop open source textbooks and lower the cost of education in America and the rest of the world. Khosla and his wife Neeru are also relatively substantial donors to the Wikimedia Foundation, in the amount of $500,000.