23 Facts About Andy Bechtolsheim

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

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

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

At Stanford, Andy Bechtolsheim designed a powerful computer with built-in networking called the SUN workstation, a name derived from the initials for the Stanford University Network.

Andy Bechtolsheim was a "no fee consultant" at Xerox, meaning he was not remunerated directly but had free access to the research being done there.

Andy Bechtolsheim tried to interest other companies in manufacturing the workstations, but only got lukewarm responses.

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

Andy 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.

Andy Bechtolsheim formed a project code-named UniSun around this time to design a small, inexpensive desktop computer for the educational market.

In 1995, Andy Bechtolsheim left Sun to found Granite Systems, a Gigabit Ethernet startup focused on developing high-speed network switches.

Andy Bechtolsheim became vice president and general manager of Cisco's Gigabit Systems Business Unit, until leaving the company in December 2003 to head Kealia, Inc.

Andy 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.

Andy Bechtolsheim left Sun Microsystems to become the Chairman and Chief Development Officer of Arista in October, 2008, but stated he still was associated with Sun in an advisory role.

Andy Bechtolsheim has made a number of successful investments in EDA.

Andy Bechtolsheim was an early investor in another EDA start-up company, Co-Design Automation, which developed SystemVerilog which is used to design almost all digital hardware.

Andy Bechtolsheim invested in Tapulous, the maker of music games for the Apple iPhone.

Andy Bechtolsheim joined George T Haber, a former colleague at Sun, to invest in wireless chip company CrestaTech in 2006 and 2008.

Andy Bechtolsheim invested in all of Haber's previous startups: CompCore purchased by Zoran, GigaPixel purchased by 3Dfx and Mobilygen purchased by Maxim Integrated Products in 2008, as well as Moovweb, a cloud-based interface for mobile and computer websites in 2009.

Andy Bechtolsheim was reportedly an early investor in Claria Corporation, which ceased operating in 2008.

From 2015 to 2017, Andy Bechtolsheim invested in PerimeterX, an automated attack mitigation SaaS.

Andy Bechtolsheim received a Smithsonian Leadership Award for Innovation in 1999 and a Stanford Entrepreneur Company of the year award.

Andy Bechtolsheim was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2000 for contributions to the design of computer workstations and high-performance network switching.

Andy Bechtolsheim gave the opening keynote speech at the International Supercomputing Conference in 2009.