Andy Bechtolsheim

Andreas Bechtolsheim is a Founder and Chief Development Officer of Arista Networks, a high-speed datacenter and cloud networking company. Previously, Andy was a Co-Founder and Chief System Architect at Sun Microsystems, responsible for next generation server, storage, and network architectures.

From 1995 to 1996, Andy was CEO and President of Granite Systems, a Gigabit Ethernet Switching startup company he founded that Cisco acquired in September of 1996. From 1996 to 2003 Andy was General Manager for the Gigabit Systems Business Unit at Cisco System that developed the Cat-4K Switch family, which became the highest volume modular switching platform in the industry.

As a private venture investor, Andy has been involved in the funding of numerous companies including Google, VMware, Mellanox, Brocade, and Magma Design. He has served on the Board of Directors of 25 companies, the majority of which went public or were acquired.

Andy earned a M.S. in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1976. He was a doctoral student in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University from 1977 to 1982. He has been honored with a Fulbright scholarship, a German National Merit Foundation scholarship, the Stanford Entrepreneur Company of the year award, the Smithsonian Leadership Award for Innovation, and he is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.