Bechtolsheim is the co-founder of Arista Networks, a Santa Clara, California-based company that provides cloud networking services for clients, including Microsoft. The publicly traded company had revenue of $4.4 billion in 2022. The Silicon Valley veteran was an early Google investor and co-founded Sun Microsystems.
Bechtolsheim owns a 15% stake in Arista Networks, according to the company's 2023 proxy statement. The billionaire, who was one of Google's first investors, holds most of his Arista shares through the Bechtolsheim Family Trust, according to the filing.
He was an early investor in Google. Proceeds from his Google investment are based on the stake disclosed in the prospectus for the internet search company's 2004 initial public offering. The number of shares he holds hasn't been disclosed since that date and it's calculated that he'd completely sold down his stake by the start of 2019, in line with the selling rate during the IPO.
Proceeds from these calculated Google share sales and from Bechtolsheim's other ventures, including Sun Microsystems, Granite, Kealia and venture capital firm HighBar, have been derived from reported sale prices and share sales. The value of his cash investments is based on an analysis of dividends, insider transactions, asset sales, taxes and market performance.
Amanda Jaramillo, a spokeswoman for Arista, said the billionaire declined to comment on his net worth.
Andreas von Bechtolsheim was born in Bavaria on Sept. 30, 1955. He moved with his family to Rome in 1963, returning to Germany five years later to study engineering at Munich's University of Technology where he won a Fulbright Prize. He moved to the U.S. and completed a master's degree in computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in 1976.
After a brief stint at chipmaker Intel, he took a summer job at Stanford University and became an electrical engineer PhD student in 1977. He left Stanford five years later to set-up Sun Microsystems with Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy and Bill Joy. The company sold shares in an initial public offering in 1986.
Bechtolsheim left the company nine years later to set up network-switch maker Granite, which he sold to Cisco for $220 million the following year. Granite co-founder and Stanford professor David Cheriton introduced Bechtolsheim to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998. He invested before the company had been incorporated.
The billionaire returned to Sun in 2004, after the company bought server maker Kealia, a company he'd established with Cheriton in 2001. He left again in 2008, to focus on Arista Networks, a network-switch maker that held an IPO in June 2014.