But there is at least one skill Khosla seems to lack. As his official biography has it, while still in his twenties, Khosla helped found two extraordinarily successful startups, Sun Microsystems and an early design-automation company called Daisy Systems.
He wrote the business plan for Daisy while still a student at Stanford, but others ran the company and he soon left. At Sun, he was replaced early on as chief executive by his former roommate in business school, Scott McNealy. Khosla "had no people sense," recalls a Sun director of that era.
"He would go through the factory floor and terrorize people and shut down the line. There was Vinod's way and no other way. It drove his cofounders crazy." (Khosla says that his disagreements with the board were frequent and significant but his involvement with production wasn't among them.)
To keep him with the company, the board promoted him to chairman, but after he boycotted four board meetings in a row, sitting resentfully alone in his office, he was fired. He retained a large stake in Sun, however, as well as in Daisy, and their public offerings made him rich.
His brief, troubled tenure in the executive suite rarely stops him from telling startup CEOs what they ought to be doing. At board meetings, he's insistent -- "analytical, unemotional, and often blunt," says one fellow director. Another describes him as "massively intrusive."
A third, more charitably, says, "He has so much more energy than other people that he can overwhelm entrepreneurs...If Vinod's on the board, the CEO needs a senior vice president in charge of managing him."
Image: Car designer Konrad Ciaramella in his World Solar Challenge vehicle. | Photograph: Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images
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