Andy Bechtolsheim

Andreas Maria Maximilian Freiherr von Mauchenheim genannt Bechtolsheim (born 30 September 1955[1]) is a German electrical engineer, entrepreneur and investor.

As of January 2025,[update] he was 68th wealthiest according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes with an estimated net worth of US$28.9 billion.

At age 16, he designed an industrial controller for a nearby company based on the Intel 8008, which he then programmed in binary code as he had no access to assemblers.

He began studying electrical engineering with a focus on data processing at the Technical University of Munich with the support of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation.

Khosla, McNealy and Bechtolsheim wrote a short business plan [8] and quickly received funding from venture capitalists in 1982.

[4] Bechtolsheim left Stanford to co-found the company, Sun Microsystems, as employee number one, with McNealy and Khosla, and with Bill Joy, who had been part of the team developing the BSD series of Unix operating systems at UC Berkeley; Bill is usually counted as the fourth member of the founding team.

Bechtolsheim formed a project code-named UniSun around this time to design a small, inexpensive desktop computer for the educational market.

[10] In 1995, Bechtolsheim left Sun to found Granite Systems, a Gigabit Ethernet startup focused on developing high-speed network switches.

[11] He became vice president and general manager of Cisco's Gigabit Systems Business Unit, until leaving the company in December 2003 to head Kealia, Inc.[12] Bechtolsheim founded Kealia in early 2001 with Stanford Professor David Cheriton, a partner in Granite Systems, to work on advanced server technologies using the Opteron processor from Advanced Micro Devices.

[citation needed] He was an early investor in another EDA start-up company, Co-Design Automation, which developed SystemVerilog which is used to design almost all digital hardware.

He was also elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2000 for contributions to the design of computer workstations and high-performance network switching.

[27] In 2024, Bechtolsheim settled insider trading allegations with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), in which he agreed to pay a civil penalty of nearly $1 million, and is prohibited from serving as an officer or director of a public company for five years.

The SEC accused him of misusing confidential knowledge of Cisco's proposed acquisition of Acacia Communications, stating that the illegal option trades netted over $400,000 in profits between his associate and relative, to whom he passed the information.

printed circuit boards
Early Sun workstation hardware
small desktop computer
SPARCstation 1 , designed circa 1988