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Vinod Khosla tops Forbes' Midas list

India-born billionaire venture capitalist and founder of Sun Microsystems Vinod Khosla has topped the Midas list of investors, compiled by the prestigious US financial magazine Forbes International.

Forty-six year old Khosla had raked in $15 billion by investing in about half a dozen makers of breakthrough telecom gear.

Khosla, Forbes says, has made a career of determining which companies will thrive and that none is shrewder than him in the field.

Indeed, many venture capitalists have lost where Khosla has succeeded, it said.

Despite the crash of dot-coms and hints of recession in the US economy, Khosla continues to invest in selected companies.

"This is a reckoning, but this is no time to retreat," says Khosla, described by Forbes as superstar partner in VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers in Menlo Park in California.

"The TechWreck is a stock-market phenomenon caused by fear and greed. It doesn't change the underlying cycle of technology innovation. That's the Tech Trend."

Lower-profile and less loquacious than John Doerr, his headline-happy partner, Khosla has rivaled Doerr's impressive record in 15 years in the business.

Mining the extreme fringe, Khosla has funded some futuristic flopsypen-based computers, interactive games and such. But he also has backed some of the richest payoffs in high-tech.

Khosla's investment success, both for himself and his partners, Forbes says, is a key component of his appearance at the top of the Midas list of venture capital power brokers.

Midas members include entrepreneurs and the investors who nurture their ideas, the venture capitalists who fund them, the technical advisers who pass judgment on their technology and the lawyers who patent it, and the investment bankers who gift-wrap the whole package and sell it to the public.

Khosla was born in 1955 into a military family in New Delhi and earned degrees from some of the world's best tech-savvy institutions including the Indian Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh and the Stanford Business School in northern California.

After Stanford he and a PhD candidate, Andy Bechtolsheim, divined the idea that led them to find Sun Microsystems.

Khosla ran Sun until 1984, when he was replaced by his MBA classmate and pal, Scott McNealy. Just 30 at the time, Khosla could have retired, but Doerr persuaded him to work "part time" for Kleiner Perkins.

"Staying at Kleiner was never in the plans," says Khosla, who had hoped to return to far-out research.

Then he decided a "stable" career in venture capital was a safer bet. He spent a decade at Kleiner as the firm prospered, and by 1995 Khosla, Doerr and other partners set off the race to the Internet bubble by backing Netscape. It went public 16 months after its founding.

SEE ALSO:

Seven Indians in Forbes' 400 richest Americans' list

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