Regents Lecture: Bill Joy

Bill Joy joined KPCB in 2005 as a partner in KPCB's Greentech Practice. He helped develop KPCB's strategy of funding game-changing technologies broadly addressing the twin problems of climate change and sustainability. He is working broadly on ventures in areas such as wind, solar and thermoelectric power generation; low-cost electrical energy storage; renewable fuels and green chemicals from non-fuel sources; low-embodied-energy materials; energy-efficient electronics; and other areas.

Bill was previously a founder and Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, a KPCB III/IV portfolio company. While at Sun, Bill was a key designer involved with a number of Sun technologies, including the Solaris operating system, SPARC microprocessor architecture and several of its implementations, and the Java programming language. In 1995 he installed the first city-wide WiFi network at his satellite research laboratory in Colorado. As an inventor, Bill is named on more than 40 patents. Before co-founding Sun, Bill designed and wrote Berkeley UNIX, the first open source operating system with built-in TCP/IP, making it the backbone of the Internet. Bill's many contributions were recognized in a Fortune cover story which called him the "Edison of the Internet."