VC firm finds Joy

Bill Joy has joined tech venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the company said Tuesday.

Joy co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 and was its long-time chief scientist. At Sun, he helped design the Solaris operating system, Sparc processor, chip architectures and Java software.

Bill Joy
co-founder,
Sun Microsystems

He is credited with inventing several Internet technologies and also set up the first citywide Wi-Fi network. He left Sun in fall 2003.

"The pace of innovation is accelerating--making this the best of times for entrepreneurs, and for me to become a KPCB partner," Joy said in a statement. "I will continue to help entrepreneurs advance the Internet, develop wireless innovations, and find new ways of using large piles of computers to solve difficult problems. I'm also particularly interested in discoveries and inventions that solve energy and resource problems."

Menlo Park, Calif.-based Kleiner Perkins has backed some of the biggest names in technology, including America Online, Amazon.com, Compaq Computer, Google, Juniper Networks, Netscape Communications, Symantec and VeriSign.

Oh Joy!

I think this guy got as far as he did just based on the Pun-factor of his name.


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More talk at http://loudboard.com

[jimstormy]

Perhaps not

I've meet Mr. Joy on two occasions. Once back in the days of the Sun 1, based on the 68xxx. He was giving my group a talk on the latest thing he came up with: NFS. I noted that the suit he was wearing was pink searsucker; I dubbed it a techno-powersuit.

The second occasion was when he gave a talk to the geeks at AOL (a scary looking group). He talked about innovation and new techonologies; describing his previous assignment, network storage, as being "too rooted in reality" and he basically needed to get his head higher in the clouds of innovation. I particularly like his concepts of making technologies work together, even if some of those are outdated.

I believe his success is from his vision and his ability to make things happen. Compare to Microsoft that came up with crude file sharing decades after NFS was reality and Windows is nowhere near being a true operating system.