Career
After graduating from Stanford University in 1980, Khosla worked for electronic design automation company Daisy Systems. Then in 1982, Khosla co-founded Sun Microsystems (SUN is the acronym for the Stanford University Network), along with his Stanford classmates Scott McNealy, Andy Bechtolsheim, and UC Berkeley computer science graduate student Bill Joy. Khosla served as the first Chairman and CEO of Sun Microsystems from 1982 to 1984, when he left the company to become a venture capitalist.
In 1986, Khosla joined the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as a general partner. At Kleiner, Khosla became a recognized venture capitalist, with several successful early stage investments. Khosla also played a key role with several of the tech industry's most spectacular failures, including Asera, Dynabook, BroadBand Office, Excite@Home, and many others.
He also invested in an Indian Microfinance Company, SKS Microfinance, which lends small loans to poor women in rural India. Khosla is also one of the founders of TiE, The Indus Entrepreneurs, and has guest-edited a special issue of The Economic Times (ET), a leading business newspaper in India.
Khosla was featured on Dateline NBC in May 2006 where he discussed the practicality of ethanol as a gasoline substitute. He is known to have invested heavily in ethanol companies, in hopes of widespread adoption. He cites Brazil as an example of a country that has ended its dependence on foreign oil.
Khosla was a major proponent of the "Yes on 87" campaign to pass California's Proposition 87, The Clean Energy Initiative, which failed to pass in November, 2006. In 2006, Khosla's wife Neeru co-founded the CK-12 Foundation that aims to develop open source textbooks and lower the cost of education in America and the rest of the world. Khosla and his wife are also donors to the Wikimedia Foundation, in the amount of $500,000.
Read more about this topic: Vinod Khosla
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)
“I restore myself when I’m alone. A career is born in public—talent in privacy.”
—Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)