If you think Midas was the figment of someone’s imagination, you should look at the career of this man—that’s how many describe the phenomenon that is Vinod Khosla. Some even call him Brand Vinod. No matter which companies he backs, the market is willing to bet big on it. And then, technology, management team, product, all become secondary, incidental. What matters is Vinod Khosla.

Many credit him with identifying the optical networking opportunity. Yet, his most significant contribution to the world of telecom remains successfully building Juniper Networks. At a time when no one took the idea of challenging Cisco seriously, Khosla not only backed fellow Indian Pradeep Sindhu in his ambition to make better routers, but prevailed upon him to build routers for carriers, something that quickly made Juniper what it is today—world’s first new generation carrier equipment company, that has come up independently. His other success stories have been Redback and Cerenet, incidentally founded by Indian entrepreneurs. His other success story, albeit not in communication, is NexGen, that challenged another giant’s monopoly—Intel’s in chips.

This IIT Delhi graduate in electrical engineering was one of the first few entrepreneurs who started out in the 1980s. After doing his business management from Stanford, he jumped to the world of entrepreneurship. The first venture was an unsuccessful computer aided engineering company called Daisy Systems. Not disheartened, Khosla co-found Sun Microsystems. The rest is Silicon Valley folklore.

Continuing with Kleiner, Perkins, Caufiled and Buyers, which he joined in 1986, Khosla continues to nurture start-ups. He is probably the only VC who has funded competing (well, almost competing) companies, going against the first principle of VC funding, and has made both the companies successful. Examples include ONI and Zaffire. But as long as it is Vinod Khosla, nothing matters, other than that magical name. n