Andy Bechtolsheim: Hero talks innovation, success and engineering

Innovation and Silicon Valley have always gone hand-in-hand, but the relationship has evolved since the early 1980s when Andreas “Andy” von Bechtolsheim first made his mark.

“Innovation is obviously the essence of high technology and business. In many ways it’s even more important than ever,” said the inventor of the SUN workstation and co-founder of Sun Microsystems at a recent interview at the Stanford University School of Engineering.

It is more important, but different, too, he added. There was a time when big companies innovated, albeit slowly, leaving a wide-open gap for a nimble start-up to dash through and steal market share, if not put them out of business altogether. The phenomenon became known as getting “Amazon-ed.”

“Today, it's not uncommon for the competitors in a given market to all be start-ups. They all move fast, and the pace of innovation has accelerated,” said Bechtolsheim.

Andy Bechtolsheim (far right) with Dean Jim Plummer (third from right) and engineering students at the Stanford Engineering Hero event for Bechtolsheim on May 22, 2012. Photo: Steve Stanghellini, Stanford University School of Engineering.

Hero

The School of Engineering feted Bechtolsheim recently as one of its second class of “Engineering Heroes,” the revered alumni and faculty who have reshaped the world through their transformative work. Just 16 engineers have been recognized as Stanford Engineering Heroes.

As a graduate student at Stanford, Bechtolsheim invented the workstation, an affordable, high-end computer that was to engineers what the PC would become to the average American. The workstation filled a crucial gap in the market. Perhaps more than the PC itself, it spelled the end for the massive, expensive IBM, DEC and Wang mini-computers and mainframes that then dominated the industry.

Andy Bechtolsheim talks about innovation and Stanford's role in his life.

The SUN workstation was no PC or Mac, however. It was a true 32-bit machine. “It was a gigantic leap in cost and performance,” said Bechtolsheim. “You could run the same kind of programs as on a larger mini-computer like the [DEC] on this little box that cost $10,000 instead of hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Bechtolsheim was fortunate to split time between Stanford and Xerox PARC, the legendary research facility that birthed the graphical user interface, the mouse and many other now-ubiquitous computing technologies. 

“At the time they had the ‘ultra computer’ and I was just thrilled with that kind of machine and I was a little befuddled why they didn’t sell this thing on the market,” he recalled. So Bechtolsheim did what innovators do: He created his own ultra computer.

In the next few years, Bechtolsheim and Stanford partnered to build and sell 15 or so workstations before Stanford stepped aside. “The University decided they weren’t a computer manufacturer and walked away,” he said.

Thus, Sun Microsystems was born. It was 1982. His co-founders Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy and Bill Joy—all Stanford alumni—have become, like Bechtolsheim, Silicon Valley legends. 

Deep connections

“My entire life I wanted to be an engineer … I was trying to figure out: What is the most fun thing to do in life? And I decided that it would be to build better products, to innovate, to build beautiful products,” said Bechtolsheim.

Stanford played a crucial role in his development. SUN, in fact, stood for Stanford University Network, a holdover from the earliest days of the workstation and a nod to the place that has inspired so many young people and companies to change the world. 

“I wouldn’t have done what I’ve done in my life, if I hadn’t been here,” he said. “Little did I know that I would come exactly to the right place where you couldn’t just learn about how to do this but you could actually then go off an start a company. I was very fortunate.”

Watch Bechtolsheim's full lecture, "The Process of Innovation."

Bechtolsheim’s connection to Stanford—and his good fortune—would come full circle in 1998 when he was invited to Stanford Professor David Cheriton’s house to meet two students who had an interesting product to demonstrate. The students were Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The product was Google.

The premise of Google search, of assessing relevance based on how many times one site is linked from others, was something Bechtolsheim grasped immediately from his experience in scientific publishing, where the number of papers one writes matters less than how many people cite those papers in their work.

“They explained their business model of sponsored links for relevant ads and five cents a click. I did the math … a million clicks a day, they can’t go broke … and I said, okay, let’s get going.”

Bechtolsheim went to his car and returned with check for $100,000 made out to “Google, Inc.”—a company that did not even exist because the owners had yet to incorporate. In scribbling those two words, Bechtolsheim takes at least partial credit for naming the search giant.  Estimates today put the value of Bechtolsheim’s initial $100,000 stake at upwards of $1.5 billion. 

Measure of success

When it comes to success in business, there is no single formula, said Bechtolsheim, but one central theme bears out.

“What one can learn from the Apples of the world, the Googles of the world, the Amazons and the Facebooks, is that innovation is the essence of high technology and business,” Bechtolsheim asserted. “Over the years, the content changes but the underlying processes of how to focus on innovation, how to do the right things, don’t really change.”

The lessons are perhaps best demonstrated in reverse, in trying to understand not why start-ups succeed, but in why they fail. Failure, Bechtolsheim said, comes in five flavors: The idea is too early, too late, not relevant, too expensive or without clear value.

“It comes down to solving the right problem,” said Bechtolsheim, “but if you’re lucky, and not too early or too late with just the right value proposition, start-ups will usually succeed.”

Andrew Myers is associate director of communications for the Stanford University School of Engineering.