Andreas von Bechtolsheim

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Andreas von Bechtolsheim 2012

Andreas von Bechtolsheim (born September 30, 1955 in Hängeberg am Ammersee , internationally mostly Andy Bechtolsheim, born Andreas Maria Maximilian Freiherr von Mauchenheim called Bechtolsheim ) is a German computer scientist and entrepreneur who lives in the American Silicon Valley . He was one of the four founders of Sun Microsystems in 1982 and one of the first investors in Google in 1998 . With an estimated fortune of 6.6 billion US dollars, he was ranked 367th in the Forbes billionaires list in 2018, placing him 30th among Germans.

Life

Family and childhood

Andreas von Bechtolsheim is the second of four children of an elementary school teacher and initially lived on a lonely farm near the Ammersee in Bavaria . From 1961 to 1963 he attended the village school , after which the family moved to Rome , where he attended the private German school and was taught by his father, among others. In 1968 the family moved to Nonnenhorn on Lake Constance , where he in 1973 with 17 years at the Bodensee-Gymnasium Lindau his high school took off.

At the age of 17 he developed a microcomputer based on the Intel 8008 processor for an entrepreneur friend of his family , which was used to control sheet metal stamping machines. From this he received license fees of 100 DM per device. At the age of 18, he won the national youth research competition in the field of physics in 1974 when he took part for the third time, with a thesis on "precise flow measurement using ultrasound ".

education

After graduating from high school, Bechtolsheim began studying electrical engineering with a focus on data processing at the Technical University of Munich with the support of the German National Academic Foundation . He was annoyed that the students had no computers available, and in retrospect stated: "The Germans have bury their heads in the sand." At the same time, he was bored and annoyed from studying because of the level Fulbright Scholarship to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh , USA, where he obtained his master's degree in computer science in 1976 .

In 1977 he moved to Silicon Valley and took a summer student job at Stanford University as a programmer on a CAD project. He was later accepted there as a PhD student and gained access to Xerox PARC .

In 1980 or 1981, at the suggestion of Forest Basket, he began developing a computer that was to serve as a workstation computer in the university computer network . As a basis, he used the powerful Motorola 68000 processor, which as a 32-bit processor had a large linear address space and therefore supported a large working 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 supported by the US military research agency , among others .

The entrepreneur

Bechtolsheim was convinced that the new concept of a powerful and networked workstation computer was very promising and could also be implemented inexpensively with the emerging 32-bit processors. The users became independent of the computing time of the central computer without losing the advantage of networking, which was given by using Unix as the operating system .

However, several attempts by the university to have the design built under license failed. As a result, Bechtolsheim gave up his doctoral position in 1982 and founded their own company together with his fellow students Scott McNealy and Vinod Khosla and Bill Joy from the University of Berkeley . Investors were quickly found. They called their company SUN as an acronym for "Stanford University Network". The workstation called Sun-1 was offered at a price of less than 10,000 US dollars, was superior to many mainframes and formed the cornerstone of the company's continued success.

Bechtolsheim acted as Vice President Technology at Sun from 1985 . Sun went public in 1986 and business did very well. In 1988 the sales threshold of 1 billion US dollars was exceeded; ten years later it was nearly $ 10 billion. In 2003, Sun's stock was valued at $ 11.5 billion.

In 1995 Bechtolsheim was looking for new challenges. He left SUN and founded a new company called Granite Systems to develop high-speed components for Internet applications ( network switches ). In 1996, Granite was acquired by Cisco Systems for $ 220 million . At that time, Bechtolsheim owned 65% of the company shares. He became Vice President of Engineering at Cisco and worked in various positions on the development of new network technologies, most recently as General Manager of the Gigabit Switching department. In December 2003, he left Cisco to devote himself to Kealia , a company he founded in 2001 with David Cheriton , his Granite business partner.

In February 2004, Kealia was acquired by Sun Microsystems via a stock swap . With Bechtolsheim, the "No. 1 employee" returned to Sun, where he was henceforth Senior Vice President and Chief Architect . In September 2005 Sun presented the so-called “Bechtolsheim machine”: the new Galaxy series is based on Opteron processors with two central, parallel computing units from AMD . Ten operating systems are supported, in addition to various Unix derivatives and Linux variants, also Microsoft Windows. In 2010 he left Sun Microsystems again and moved to Arista Networks , a company he funded, as Chief Development Officer and Chairman .

The investor

In addition to the founding of its own companies, Bechtolsheim is also very successful as an investor and has already given start-up support to more than 20 start-ups through start-up financing and the brokerage of risk capital . He is primarily dedicated to the area of Electronic Design Automation (EDA), the software for the design of microprocessors , as such applications were already of interest to him during his time at Stanford.

Probably the only major investment in Germany was his stake in the Hamburg software house Star Division in 1992 , which was completely taken over by Sun in 1999. Its StarOffice office package was one of the main alternatives to Microsoft's office applications and provided the basis for the open-source programs OpenOffice.org and later LibreOffice .

Bechtolsheim made his best investment in 1998. Through his business partner David Cheriton, he met Stanford students Larry Page and Sergei Brin , who introduced the concept of a new Internet search technology. He was one of Google's first investors with $ 100,000 and also put him in touch with venture capitalist John Doerr . In an interview with WirtschaftsWoche in September 2005, he described Google as the greatest idea he had ever come across. After Google went public, the value of his stake was estimated at $ 500 million in early 2005.

Awards and memberships

Web links

Commons : Andreas von Bechtolsheim  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Other sources

  • Radio interview (60 min.) By Norddeutscher Rundfunk with Andreas von Bechtolsheim, July 1987

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Forbes. The World's Billionaires - Andreas von Bechtolsheim , accessed on February 24, 2018
  2. ↑ Portrait on stern.de, May 2008 , accessed on September 26, 2014
  3. ↑ Leonhard Wolfgang Bible: Reflections before reflexes - memoirs of a researcher . 1st edition. Cuvillier Verlag, Göttingen 2017, ISBN 978-3-7369-9524-6 .
  4. ↑ Helmut Werb: "I'm only interested in my work." karriere.de, October 2, 2009, accessed September 26, 2014
personal data
SURNAME Bechtolsheim, Andreas von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bechtolsheim, Andreas Maria Maximilian von; Bechtolsheim, Andy
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German computer scientist and entrepreneur, co-founder of Sun Microsystems
DATE OF BIRTH September 30, 1955
PLACE OF BIRTH Hängeberg am Ammersee