Vinod Khosla, venture capitalist
Position: 34 Last year: Not ranked
Why? Commitment to green technologies
Agree with panel rating?
Indian-born Khosla is another big figure in the venture capital world and has been picked out by the Agenda Setters panel for his significant influence on the direction of technology investment.
Khosla co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982, where he pioneered open systems. He then moved to venture capital group Kleiner Perkins in 1986 where, among other things, he helped get AMD off the ground.
He recently set up a green technology investment fund at Kleiner Perkins for environmentally friendly start-ups. With green very much on the tech agenda, this is likely to be a fund to watch.
He set up his own venture assistance organisation in 2004. The principal aim of Khosla Ventures is to give Khosla scope to indulge his interest in finding and supporting nascent technologies that can have a positive impact on society.
Khosla is also now passing on his years of wisdom to tech entrepreneurs and so looks set to remain an influential presence in years to come.
Take a walk down memory lane - and find out who made the agenda setters poll in years past
"Blogging's definitely got to the point where there're enough mainstream consumers watching it for the top bloggers to be regarded as agenda setters."
Michael Smith,
Agenda Setters panellist
"Open source gets more important rather than being something that will get squeezed out of the enterprise."
Simon Briskman,
Agenda Setters panellist
The world's 50 most innovative companies BusinessWeek
The world's 100 most powerful women Forbes.com
Chron 500 - The San Francisco Bay Area's top public companies San Francisco Chronicle
100 fastest growing tech companies Business 2.0
Content featuring Vinod Khosla
They might not top any single panellist's voting but the names to look out for are: Michael Moritz at 24, Daniel Rimer at 32 and Vinod Khosla at 34. The Agenda Setters rankings always throw a few curve balls.
The other co-founder is Vinod Khosla, who left the company years earlier. Sun Microsystems has agreed to acquire Kealia, a start-up that designs servers with Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron processor and that employs Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim.
The suit also cites a 60 Minutes interview with sun co-founder Vinod Khosla, now a partner at venture capital firm at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, in which he said East Indians are "favoured over almost anybody else".
Asera was founded by high-profile technology VC Vinod Khosla and during the boom was considered to be one of the hottest technology properties around. On a rare visit to the UK, ex-Oracle chief Ray Lane took the opportunity to launch another attack...
Copyright © 2008 CBS Interactive Limited. All rights reserved. Top of page
RSS Feeds