Vinod Khosla (born 28 January 1955) is an Indian-American businessman and venture capitalist. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 and was its first chief executive, then spent nearly two decades at the venture firm Kleiner Perkins before starting Khosla Ventures in 2004. He is known for early bets on risky technology, including networking in the 1990s and OpenAI in 2019.
Quick Facts
| Full name | Vinod Khosla |
| Born | 28 January 1955, Pune, Maharashtra, India |
| Age | 71 |
| Nationality | American (born Indian) |
| Occupation | Venture capitalist, entrepreneur |
| Known for | Co-founder of Sun Microsystems; founder of Khosla Ventures |
| Education | Mount St. Mary’s School, Delhi; IIT Delhi (B.Tech.); Carnegie Mellon University (M.S.); Stanford Graduate School of Business (MBA) |
| Spouse | Neeru Khosla |
| Children | 4 |
Early Life
Khosla was the son of an Indian Army officer and grew up in Delhi. As a teenager he read about the founding of Intel in an electronics magazine and decided he wanted to start a technology company. After studying electrical engineering at IIT Delhi he tried to start a soy milk business, then left for the United States, where he studied biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon and, after being rejected twice, entered Stanford’s business school.
Career
After Stanford he helped start Daisy Systems, a maker of computer-aided design tools. In 1982 he founded Sun Microsystems with his Stanford classmate Scott McNealy, the hardware designer Andy Bechtolsheim and the software engineer Bill Joy. Sun’s workstations and servers, and later its Java language, became pillars of the internet era. Khosla was chief executive until 1984.
He joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 1986. His investments included the chip maker NexGen, the search company Excite and the networking firms Juniper Networks and Cerent; the last was sold to Cisco in 1999 for about seven billion dollars.
His own firm, based in Menlo Park, backs companies in software, health, energy and food. It has invested in Square, DoorDash, Instacart, Affirm and Impossible Foods, and it put 50 million dollars into OpenAI in 2019. Many of its clean-energy bets of the 2000s failed, which he has discussed openly, arguing that large successes require a willingness to fail.
Personal Life
He married Neeru, his childhood friend, in 1980; she founded the free-textbook non-profit CK-12. They have four children. A long legal dispute over public access to a beach on his California property drew wide attention. He has supported microfinance and education projects in India and has signed the Giving Pledge.
Frequently Asked Questions
When and where was Vinod Khosla born?
Vinod Khosla was born on 28 January 1955 in Pune, Maharashtra, India and is 71 years old.
What is Vinod Khosla known for?
Known for: Co-founder of Sun Microsystems; founder of Khosla Ventures.
Featured image: Vinod Khosla speaks at South by Southwest, Austin, Texas, March 2024. Photo by Jay Dixit, licensed under CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
