What is Andy Bechtolsheim's Net Worth?
Andy Bechtolsheim is a German billionaire tech entrepreneur, electrical engineer, and investor with a net worth of $20 billion. He made his first significant fortune as a founder of Sun Microsystems, but the majority of his wealth comes from his early investment in Google. Andy and his former Stanford professor David Cheriton were the two first investors in Google. In 1998, Andy and David gave Larry Page and Sergey Brin a $100,000 check each to start their search engine company. Additionally, Bechtolsheim founded companies such as Granite Systems, Kealia, and various electronic design automation companies.
Early Life and Education
Andy Bechtolsheim was born on September 30, 1955, in Finning, Landsberg, Bavaria, West Germany, as the second of four children. Growing up without a television, he often experimented with electronics. In 1963, the family moved to Rome, Italy, but returned to Germany five years later.
At age 16, Andy designed an industrial control system on the Intel 8008 for a local company and used the royalties to fund his college education. He enrolled at the Technical University of Munich to study engineering and participated in the Jugend forscht contest, winning the physics prize in 1974. After graduating, he received a Fulbright scholarship to pursue a Master's degree at Carnegie Mellon University, which he completed in 1976. The following year, he enrolled in the Ph.D. program in electrical engineering at Stanford University.
While at Stanford, Andy designed a powerful modular computer system with built-in networking, inspired by the Xerox Alto computer. He called this the 'SUN' workstation, an acronym for 'Stanford University Network.' He received guidance from Forest Baskett and assistance from Vaughan Pratt on the project.
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Sun Microsystems
In 1982, with funding from venture capitalists, Bechtolsheim left Stanford to co-found Sun Microsystems with Scott McNealy, Bill Joy, and Vinod Khosla. The company's first product was the Sun-1, a Unix computer workstation and server using the Stanford CPU board design. Sun Microsystems went public in 1986 and by 1988, had reached $1 billion in sales. The company developed storage systems, software suites, developer tools, and identity management applications, significantly contributing to critical computing technologies like Unix, thin client computing, SPARC microprocessors, and open-source software.
At its peak, Sun Microsystems was headquartered in Santa Clara, California, with manufacturing facilities worldwide, including Newark, California, and Linlithgow, Scotland. In April 2009, Oracle Corporation announced it would acquire Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion, completing the acquisition in early 2010.
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Granite Systems
In 1995, Andy left Sun and co-founded an Ethernet networking company with Stanford professor David Cheriton. Granite Systems was acquired by Cisco a year later for $220 million, earning Andy $132 million as the 60% owner. He then became Vice President and General Manager of Cisco's Gigabit Systems Business Unit.
Google and Investments
In September 1998, Andy made a landmark investment by giving Larry Page and Sergey Brin $100,000 to create Google. David Cheriton followed suit with his own $100,000 investment. Bechtolsheim's far-sighted investments made him one of the world's most successful angel investors, particularly in electronic design automation. He invested in Magma Design Automation, Co-Design Automation, Tapulous, CrestaTech, and Moovweb, among others. From 2015 to 2017, he invested in PerimeterX, a company specializing in automated attack mitigation on-demand software.
Other Companies
In early 2001, Bechtolsheim founded Kealia with David Cheriton to develop advanced server technologies. Sun Microsystems acquired Kealia in a 2004 stock swap, bringing Bechtolsheim back to Sun as Senior Vice President and Chief Architect. In 2005, he co-founded Arastra, later renamed Arista Networks, a high-speed networking company. Bechtolsheim serves as the Chairman and Chief Development Officer. Arista Networks went public in 2014 and today has a market cap of approximately $30 billion.
Personal Life and Honors
Andy Bechtolsheim has never been married and remains a German citizen. Over his career, he has received numerous honors, including the 1999 Smithsonian Leadership Award for Innovation and the Stanford Entrepreneur Company of the Year Award. In 2000, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for his contributions to computer workstation and high-performance network switching design.
