Vinod Khosla

Sun Microsystems, Co-founder
India

Vinod Khosla (born 28 January 1955) is an Indian-American billionaire businessman and venture capitalist. He is a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the founder of Khosla Ventures. Khosla made his wealth from early venture capital investments in areas such as networking, software, and alternative energy technologies.He is considered one of the most successful and influential venture capitalists.[3]

In 2014, Forbes counted him among the 400 richest people in the United States. In 2021, he was ranked 92nd on the Forbes 400 list. As of March 2024, Forbes estimated his net worth at US$6.8 billion.


Khosla was born on 28 January 1955, to a Punjabi family in Pune, India. Khosla's father was an officer in the Indian Army and was posted at New Delhi, India. His father wanted him to also join the army. He attended Mount St Mary's School for elementary school. Khosla became interested in entrepreneurship after reading about the founding of Intel in Electronic Engineering Times as a teenager, and this inspired him to pursue technology as a career.[10] According to Khosla, he was inspired by Intel co-founder Andrew Grove, a Hungarian immigrant that got funding for Intel in Silicon Valley, when it was a startup.

From 1971 to 1976, Khosla attended IIT Delhi where he earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. He started the first computer club in any IIT to do computer programming and operated the school's computer center while the operations staff were on strike. He also wrote a paper on parallel processing as a teenager before the concept was adopted by the IT industry, and helped to start the first biomedical engineering program in India. In 1975, Khosla attempted to start a soy milk company intended to provide a milk alternative to Indian consumers that do not have refrigerators to preserve cow milk.

Khosla received a master's in biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University on a full scholarship.[12] He applied to Stanford University's MBA program but was rejected for lack of work experience. He had two full-time jobs while finishing his master's for the two years of work experience, but was rejected a second time. Three weeks into starting at Carnegie Mellon for his MBA, Khosla convinced the admissions staff to accept him into Stanford Graduate School of Business and received an MBA in 1980.