[IP] Silicon Valley Saga: A Tech Guru (Bill Joy) Flips To the Money Side
------ Forwarded Message
From: "John F. McMullen" <observer@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: <johnmacsgroup@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2005 05:19:45 -0500 (EST)
To: johnmac's living room <johnmacsgroup@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Dave Farber <farber@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [johnmacsgroup] Silicon Valley Saga: A Tech Guru (Bill Joy) Flips
To the Money Side
(johnmac -- Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and
former cochair of the presidential commission on the future of
IT research, is the author of the much-discussed "Why the
Future Doesn't Need Us"
(www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html); his Wikipedia bio
follows the article)
>From the Wall Street Journal --
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110599955521828163,00.html?mod=home_whats
_news_us
Silicon Valley Saga: A Tech Guru Flips To the Money Side
By ANN GRIMES
One of Silicon Valley's best-known technology gurus has teamed
up with one of its best-known venture-capital firms.
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers plans to announce today that
Bill Joy, the programmer who co-founded Sun Microsystems Inc.,
joined the firm this month as a venture partner.
Mr. Joy, 50 years old, resigned in 2003 as Sun's chief
scientist, citing a desire to pursue new challenges -- and
setting off speculation about whether he would join or start
another technology company. Instead, he has become a venture
capitalist at the firm that was one of Sun's original
financial backers.
John Doerr, a Kleiner partner and longtime Sun director, said
the Menlo Park, Calif., venture firm lured Mr. Joy because,
"increasingly, we as a firm want to be able to help
entrepreneurs exploit the accelerating pace of innovation. You
don't want to rely on consultants to do it....Bill is someone
who is very current in all fields and, more important, he's an
entrepreneur."
While a student at the University of California, Mr. Joy
helped develop an influential strain of the Unix operating
system that became a technical foundation of Sun and other
companies and was a precursor of the "open-source" programming
methodology used for Linux and other popular programs. In
1982, he co-founded Sun with three colleagues including Vinod
Khosla, now a top Kleiner partner. While at Sun, Mr. Joy
worked on software that included Java, the computer company's
popular programming technology, as well as its Sparc
microprocessor chips.
He has made his home since 1991 in Aspen, Colo., where he
helped develop a pioneering city-wide network using the
wireless technology called WiFi.
Mr. Joy will be the seventh partner in the firm's current
fund, which also has six managing partners. He has been an
active venture investor since the late 1990s and described his
latest step as a "natural" extension of what he has been
doing.
"I saw more and more opportunities coming my way that were
interesting and of sufficient scale that they needed a larger,
more organized, heavier-hitting VC partnership to get behind
them," Mr. Joy said. He said he had talked with Mr. Doerr, a
Sun director, about "doing something together for a number of
years."
While Sun's shares are about 90% off the peak they hit in
2000, Mr. Joy left the company a wealthy man. He immersed
himself in public-policy projects and a number of investments
in start-up companies, worked on a book (now shelved) and
learned more about new kinds of energy technologies, an area
that he believes is ripe for venture investing. He plans to
help the partnership evaluate start-ups pushing ahead with
innovative chips, open-source software and "getting the
Internet on top of other things than the desktop."
He also is interested in exploring new ways to solve
genetic-decoding and environmental problems using large-scale
supercomputing, including finding ways to profitably use new
materials to solve age-old problems like oil dependency.
Mr. Joy attracted national attention four years ago when he
wrote a manifesto of sorts in Wired magazine spelling out the
unforeseen dangers of technology, especially in biotechnology,
nanotechnology and robotics. Mr. Joy said that work helped
shaped his view on technology investing.
Mr. Joy is a net addition to Kleiner's partnership, which it
recently restructured. While Kleiner was a backer of Internet
search engine Google Inc., the venture-capital firm had its
share of failed investments during the Internet-investing
boom.
The firm began retooling its management team more than a year
ago as it raised its 11th $400 million fund.
Most recently, Kleiner has put money behind XenSource Inc., a
Palo Alto, Calif., start-up that will provide services and
support for a new kind of open-source software. Other recent
investments include Scintera Networks Inc., a San Jose,
Calif., start-up that develops high-speed signal-processing
technology, and Fortify Software Inc., a Palo Alto start-up
that is developing new ways to tackle computer viruses and
other security flaws. Mr. Joy personally invested in that
company last spring.
Write to Ann Grimes at ann.grimes@xxxxxxxx
Copyright 2005 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
------------------------------------------------------------------
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Joy
William N. Joy (born 1954), commonly known as Bill Joy,
co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla,
Scott McNealy and Andy Bechtolsheim, and served as chief
scientist at the company until 2003.
Joy received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the
University of Michigan and his M.S. in Electrical Engineering
and Computer Science from UC Berkeley.
Bill Joy was the person largely responsible for the authorship
of Berkeley UNIX, also known as BSD, from which spring many
modern forms of UNIX, including FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.
Some of his more notable contributions were TCP/IP, the vi
editor and the csh shell.
In the early 1980s, DARPA had contracted BBN to add TCP/IP,
devised by Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn, into Berkeley UNIX. Joy
had been instructed to plug BBN's stack into Berkeley Unix.
But Joy refused to do so. In his opinion, BBN's TCP/IP wasn't
good enough. So he wrote his own high-performance TCP/IP
stack.
As John Gage tells it, "BBN had a big contract to implement
TCP/IP, but their stuff didn't work, and Joy's grad student
stuff worked. So they had this big meeting and this grad
student in a T-shirt shows up, and they said, 'How did you do
this?' And Bill said, 'It's very simple -- you read the
protocol and write the code.'" Others dispute this version of
events.
In 1986, Joy was awarded a Grace Murray Hopper Award by the
ACM for his work on the Berkeley UNIX Operating System.
Joy was also a primary figure in the development of the SPARC
microprocessors, the Java programming language, and JINI.
In 2000 he gained notoriety with the publication of his
article in Wired Magazine, "Why the future doesn't need us",
in which he put forward what some have described as a
"neo-Luddite" position that he was convinced by the growing
advances in genetic engineering and nanotechnology that
intelligent robots would replace humanity, at the very least
in intellectual and societal dominance, in the relatively near
future.
On September 9, 2003 Sun said that Bill Joy was leaving the
company and that he "is taking time to consider his next move
and has no definite plans.".
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