Hardware founder and early backer of Google
Andy Bechtolsheim's fortune comes from a career of designing computer and networking hardware and from a handful of well timed investments. His first success was Sun Microsystems, which he co-founded in 1982 with Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy and, soon after, Bill Joy. Sun was built around a workstation design Bechtolsheim had created as a graduate student at Stanford, and it became one of the leading makers of workstations and servers during the growth of networked computing.
In 1995 he left Sun to found Granite Systems, which developed Gigabit Ethernet switching, and sold it to Cisco Systems in 1996. He then worked at Cisco for several years. In 1998 he met Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were trying to raise money for their search engine, and wrote them a check for 100,000 dollars made out to Google Inc. before the company had even been incorporated. That early stake grew enormously as Google went public in 2004 and became one of the most valuable companies in the world.
His largest source of wealth today is Arista Networks, a maker of high speed switches for data centers that he co-founded in 2004. Arista listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2014, and demand for its products from cloud companies and AI data centers has driven strong growth. Bechtolsheim holds a large stake in the company.
Companies he founded and backed
Bechtolsheim's career has involved a series of ventures:
- Sun Microsystems: workstation and server maker co-founded in 1982, acquired by Oracle in 2010
- Granite Systems: networking startup founded in 1995 and sold to Cisco in 1996
- Kealia: a server company he co-founded in 2001, bought by Sun in 2004, after which he returned to Sun as a chief architect
- Arista Networks: founded in 2004 with David Cheriton and Ken Duda, originally under the name Arastra
- Google: one of the earliest outside investors, before the company's incorporation
He has also made angel investments in many other technology startups, often in infrastructure, chips and networking, and he is known for his deep technical involvement in the products of companies he backs.
At Arista he served for many years as chairman and chief development officer, working on the design of its switching platforms. In 2024 he settled charges brought by the US Securities and Exchange Commission over trading in options of Acacia Communications ahead of its acquisition by Cisco, without admitting or denying the allegations. The settlement drew attention because of his long record as one of the most respected figures in networking.
A Bavarian engineer in California
Andreas von Bechtolsheim was born in 1955 in Bavaria, Germany, and grew up in a rural area near the Ammersee lake. As a teenager he showed unusual talent in electronics and won a German national science competition with a project in physics and engineering.
He studied electrical engineering at the Technical University of Munich and then went to the United States on a Fulbright scholarship, earning a master's degree in computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in 1976. He moved on to Stanford University for doctoral studies.
At Stanford he designed the SUN workstation, short for Stanford University Network, a powerful computer for engineers that could be built from standard parts. He licensed the design to several companies before deciding with fellow founders to build the machines themselves, which led to Sun Microsystems. He left the doctoral program to work on the company and became its first chief technology officer, staying in Silicon Valley for the rest of his career.
Low profile and outside interests
Bechtolsheim has kept a low public profile for most of his career. He seldom gives interviews about money or personal matters and is known mainly in engineering circles, where he is regarded as one of the most influential hardware designers of his generation. He is often described as preferring technical discussions about chips, networks and system architecture to business presentations.
His philanthropy has not been widely publicized, and little detail about his personal giving is on the public record. His public contributions have come mostly through technology: Sun's work on networked computing, the open standards it promoted and the data center hardware developed at Arista.
He lives in the Palo Alto area. His early check to Google became one of the best known stories in Silicon Valley about angel investing, often told as an example of an engineer recognizing technical quality before the business case was clear. Throughout his career he has returned repeatedly to founding hardware companies rather than retiring on earlier gains, and he remains active in the networking industry he helped shape.