Vinod Khosla is one of the best known success stories of Silicon Valley. An army officer’s son, he faced multiple failures before hitting it big. His first venture failed to see the light of day. Second business shut down in less than a year. But the Army officer’s son, inspired by the story of Intel’s migrant founder, did not give up.
Today, his worth is a whopping Rs 49,206 crore ($6 billion). He lives in a palatial house with a private beach in a 53-acre estate, an entire village, that he bought for $37 million. The rise of Vinod Khosla as one of the richest Indians in America began after he migrated on the back of a failed venture in India.
Born in Pune to an Army officer father, Khosla was expected to follow the legacy and join the forces. However, he set his mind on becoming an entrepreneur at an earlier age. Khosla is an alumnus of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi. As an engineering student, Khosla wrote a paper on a concept that later became an IT industry norm.
Around the same time, he attempted to start a soy milk business in India but the idea never took off. The young entrepreneur then migrated to the US where he earned a degree in biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA from Stanford. Khosla then began as founder at Daisy Systems but left it soon to create a startup called Data Dump in 1981. However, that idea failed within a year, but that eventually led Khosla to success.
First came Sun Microsystems that he co-founded the very next year. The company eventually sold to Oracle in 2009 for a huge $7.4 billion. After exiting Sun, Khosla had a long-term stint at VC giant Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers before founding his own company Khosla Ventures. Most of his wealth comes from his investment firm.
