Vinod Khosla

Vinod Khosla was born in New Delhi, India, in 1955, the son of an army officer. He studied engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, then moved to the United States for graduate study, first at Carnegie Mellon and then Stanford, arriving with limited funds and, as he later described it, having to be careful about every dollar he spent on food and rent while studying.

In 1982, with three co-founders, he helped start Sun Microsystems, a workstation and server company built around the then-unusual idea that computer networks, not standalone machines, were the future; the "the network is the computer" slogan became one of the defining phrases of the period. He served as founding chief executive before stepping back to a less operational role, and Sun grew into a major force in enterprise computing through the 1980s and 1990s before its eventual decline and sale to Oracle in 2010.

He then became a venture capitalist, first at Kleiner Perkins and later running his own firm, Khosla Ventures, funding early-stage bets in clean energy, agricultural technology and software that many established investors considered too risky or too far from proven business models. Some of these investments failed outright; others, including early bets in solar and battery technology, later looked prescient.

He has spoken about the disorientation of arriving in America with little money and no professional network, and has funded fellowships intended to give other first-generation founders the kind of capital access he lacked early on.