InfoWorld: First of all, was Bill Joy actually the fourth employee at Sun? Or wasn't he more like the 15th or 16th employee?
Bechtolsheim: I think his official badge number was 6 because there were two people we hired on day one, and he came [onboard approximately] the next week. But he was considered a founder.
InfoWorld:And you wore badge number 1, right?
Bechtolsheim: Well, that's because I worked on the workstation for three years before the company started, although I think Bill worked on Berkeley Unix longer than that. So maybe he should have been number 1. The way the company started was I had a previous business that was actually licensing the design [of] the Sun workstation to other companies in exchange for royalties. And I had a whole bunch of people set up making these boards. It dazzles me that none of these companies had any clue about the workstation business. They had all the pieces, but they didn't see the market opportunity, and I was kind of getting frustrated because I was really more the engineer, the hardware guy, than the businessman. So Khosla called me saying, "Let's just start a company. This was the obvious solution to the problem of how to bring this product to market.
InfoWorld: I know you've left Sun, you've come back, and I think there's been a couple exits and returns.'