Bill Joy

Bill Joy, currently a member of KPCB, helps entrepreneurs advance the Internet, develop wireless innovations, and find new ways of using large scale computing to solve the most difficult problems. He also looks to help entrepreneurs who have discoveries and inventions that can solve energy and resource problems, and helps them apply 21^st century advances in physics, chemistry and the natural sciences to help create abundance.

Bill Joy was Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems. He led Sun's technical strategy from the founding of the company in 1982 until September 2003. While at Sun, Bill was a key designer of Sun technologies, including Solaris, SPARC, chip architectures and pipelines, and Java. In 1995 he installed the first city-wide WiFi network. Bill has more than 40 patents issued or in progress.

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."

Bill has a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan, a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in Engineering, honoris causa, from the University of Michigan. Bill is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a trustee of the Aspen Institute.