VinodKhosla: Scaling green tech

Next to outsize personalities such as Scott McNealy, Andy Bechtelsheim, and Bill Joy, Vinod Khosla might seem like the silent partner from Sun's early days. But he's anything but, and the years since he left Sun have thrust him ever more into the spotlight.

Khosla's stint with Sun was the shortest of the original founders. After helping establish the company with fellow grad students McNealy and Bechtolsheim in 1982, Khosla served briefly as CEO and then left the company in 1985 to join venture firm Kleiner Perkins. As a general partner at Kleiner Perkins and through his own Khosla Ventures, Khosla has thrown his chips into more than one Silicon Valley pot. He's scored big with companies such as Cerent and Juniper Networks, and fallen short with the likes of Excite@home.

In an e-mail exchange with InfoWorld, Khosla recalled the heart-stopping excitement of the early years at Sun as it struggled with financing obstacles, technical problems, and the threat of losing marquis customers likes such as CAD/CAM giant Computervision.

These days, Khosla tries to spend half his time on "traditional venture" and the other half on his new passion: green technology. Khosla was a strong backer of California's recent Proposition 87, which would have funded clean energy initiatives in the state. He's also a backer of research on ethanol to replace the United States' dependence on foreign oil. "My goal is to make green technologies cheaper than their fossil alternatives so they can scale beyond toys to actually making a big dent in fossil energy," Khosla wrote.