Vinod Khosla Biography 
Vinod Khosla is an American venture capitalist who was born in India. He is a very influential person in Silicon Valley. He is one of the founders of Sun Microsystems. He served as the CEO and Chairman of the company in the early 1980s. He became a partner of the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 1986 and remained there till 2000. Then in 2004 he started his own firm Khosla Ventures and focused on venture investments in technology sectors especially in clean technology.
He was born on 28th January 1955 in Delhi. His father was in the army and worked in New Delhi. He read the article about the founding of Intel in Electronic Engineering Times when he was fourteen years old. This inspired him to take technology as his career. He received Bachelor of Technology degree in Electrical Engineering in IIT Delhi and continued his Masters’ degree in Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He finished his MBA in Stanford Graduate School of Business. He married Neeru and has four children Nina, Anu, Vani and Neal.
He co-founded electronic design automation company, Daisy System after graduating from Stanford University in 1980. In 1982, he co-founded Sun Microsystems together with his classmates Scott McNealy, Andy Bechtolsheim and UC Berkeley and Bill Joy. SUN is the acronym for the Stanford University Network. In 1984 he left the company to become a venture capitalist. He joined as the general partner of the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 1986. He became a recognized venture capitalist.
He also made his investments in Indian Microfinance NGO, SKS Microfinance and is also one of the founders of TiE, The Indus Entrepreneurs, guest-edited the special issue of the leading business newspaper of India, The Economic Times. In 2006 his wife Neeru co-founded CK-12 Foundation which aims at open source textbooks which lower the cost of education in America and rest of the world. Khosla and his wife donated $500,000 to Wikimedia Foundation.
He started his own venture capital firm Khosla Ventures in Menlo Park, California in the year 2004 and invested $1 billion. In September 2009, he raised funds for his cleantech and information technology start ups. In May 2010 it was announced that the former Prime Minister of Britain, Tony Blair was to join Khosla Ventures to provide strategic advice concerning investments in technologies.
Published: N/A
Updated: August 15, 2011
