Andy Bechtolsheim Biography
Andy Bechtolsheim (birth name: Andreas Maria Maximilian Freiherr von Mauchenheim genannt Bechtolsheim) is a German electrical engineer, entrepreneur, investor, and self-made billionaire. He is among the co-founders of Sun Microsystems and served as the company’s chief hardware designer.
Bechtolsheim became an investor later on and he is notably known for providing Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google, with their first round of funding, a $100,000 investment in 1998 before they had even incorporated their company.
Andy Bechtolsheim Age
Bechtolsheim is 63 years old as of 2018. He was born on 30th September 1955 in Bavaria, Germany.
Andy Bechtolsheim Family
The self-made billionaire was born in a family of four and he was the second child in the family. He experimented with electronics as a child. In 1963, the family moved to Rome and five years later, they moved again. this time to Nonnenhorn on Lake Constance in Germany.
Andy Bechtolsheim Married | Partner | Wife | Daughter
Bechtolsheim has never been married nor been known to be in any romantic relationship. This also drives to the fact that he has no children too.
Andy Bechtolsheim Photo
Andy Bechtolsheim Career and Organizations founded
At the age of 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. Much of his education was supported by royalties from this product.
Andy attended the Technical University of Munich to study engineering. He joined the Jugend forscht content contest for young researchers, and after three years of joining it, he won the physics prize in 1974. He moved to the USA in 1975 to attend Carnegie Mellon University after receiving a Fulbright Award. From this university, Andy earned his master’s degree in computer engineering in 1976. In 1977, he became a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering at Stanford University.
While at Stanford, he created a computer that was called a workstation that was powerful and had built-in networking, the SUN workstation (Stanford University Network). He later teamed up with Vinod Khosla and Scott McNealy and they wrote a short business plan. In 1982, they received funding from venture capitalists. They founded the company, Sun Microsystems and Bill Joy joined the founding team as its fourth member.
In 1986, the company had its Initial Public Offering and by 1988, it had reached $1 billion in sales. However, he left Sun in 1995 and founded Granite Systems, a Gigabit Ethernet startup focused on developing high-speed network switches. Cisco Systems acquired the firm in 1996 for $220 million, with Bechtolsheim owning 60%. He was the Vice President as well as general manager of Cisco’s Gigabit Systems Business Unit, until 2003 when he left to head Kealia, Inc.
Kealia, Inc. was also his own company that he had founded with Stanford Professor David Cheriton, in 2001. Its aim was to work on advanced server technologies using the Opteron processor from Advanced Micro Devices. It was acquired by Sun in early 2004 hence, Bechtolsheim returned to Sun as senior vice president and chief architect.
In 2005, Bechtolsheim along with Cheriton launched another high-speed networking company called Arastra (now known as Arista Networks). In October 2008, Bechtolsheim left Sun Microsystems to become the Chairman and Chief Development Officer of Arista though he was still associated with Sun in an advisory role.
Bechtolsheim is also an investor. He co-founded an early-stage venture capital investment firm called HighBAR Ventures, with two of his Sun colleagues: Bill Joy and Roy Sardiña. The venture’s investments include Tasmania Network Systems, Brocade, Regroup, and Brightmail.
He also invested US$100,000 in Google, with his business partner, Cheriton also investing the same amount into the company in September 1998. He also invested in electronic design automation (EDA) companies such as Magma Design Automation and Co-Design Automation. He had also invested in the maker of music games for the Apple iPhone, Tapulous. It was acquired by the Walt Disney Company in 2010.
Bechtolsheim invested in a Stanford incubated semantic web startup Diffbot in 2012. In the same year, he was voted by IT Pros as the person who contributed most to server innovation in the last 20 years. From 2015 to 2017, Bechtolsheim was an investor in the Seed, Series A, and Series B rounds of PerimeterX, an automated attack mitigation SaaS awarded by Gartner as one of its 2017 Cool Vendors.
Andy Bechtolsheim Net Worth
As of September 2018, the German investor and electrical engineer has a net worth of $7 billion.
Andy Bechtolsheim Awards and Honors
» Smithsonian Leadership Award for Innovation in 1999
» Stanford Entrepreneur Company of the year award
» He gave the opening keynote speech at the International Supercomputing Conference in 2009
» He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering