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Vinod Khosla, named by Fortune magazine as “the greatest Venture Capitalist of all time,” founded one of the most famous brands on Earth, Sun Microsystems, at the age of 27 and went on to fund more start-ups in optical networking, router manufacture and transmission companies than any other financier on Earth. A modest middle-class Delhiite who graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Khosla’s fame and reputation are pithily set forth in an entrepreneurial motto he adopted very early in life: “Success comes to those who dare to dream dreams and are foolish enough to try and make them come true.” His uncanny ability to pick winners (the Sparc microprocessor, the K-6 chip, NexGen, Juniper, Corvis, Excite et al.) and challenge established paradigms to carve out landmark changes in the technology world led to Upside magazine naming him in the company of Alan Greenspan and Bill Gates as one of the most influential tech leaders of the coming era. The Wall Street Journal paid tribute to the Khosla Midas touch by calling him “the hottest hand in Silicon Valley”. Vinod Khosla was born in New Delhi in a family full of army officers, but chose to chart his own path in life instead of following the family tradition of soldiering. He got himself into IIT Delhi to earn his B. Tech, and then went on to the united States to do an MS in Biomedical Sciences from Carnegie Mellon and acquire an MBA from Stanford. Khosla’s childhood in India had instilled within him a set of priorities and morals that enabled his innate entrepreneurial spirit to bloom and reach its full potential in America. Khosla, one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems, served as its first CEO and Chairman during the early 1980s. In 1986, he became a general partner of the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, where he stayed put through the early 2000s. Apropos, by then Sun’s US$ 150 Billion market capitalisation had made it by far the largest Indian-founded corporation of the world at that time. In 2004, hosla formed his own firm Khosla Ventures, which focused on venture investments in various technology sectors, most notably into clean technologies. Today Khosla and his wife Neeru are among the latest billionaires to have pledged half of their vast fortunes to charity. Khosla is Silicon Valley’s most prominent ‘green’ venture capitalist and a dominant personality in the ‘clean tech’ community. Clean energy is a passion for Khosla, who received the support of former British Premier Tony Blair in pushing technologies focussed on the environment.

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