Sun's Returning Co-Founder Talks About New Role: Page 2 of 5

InformationWeek: How many people worked at Kealia, and what were you working on?

Bechtolsheim: I founded that company in 2001, even before Opteron came out. We spent a year-plus evaluating potential designs. It's a design company; we never shipped a product but had prototypes of Opteron systems.

The Sun thing happened fairly quickly, but the work at Kealia had been going on for several years. We were going to focus on universities and research institutions. But it's really hard for startups to get to major market share. Once Sun came into the market, it became clear that I didn't want to compete with my own former company.

Kealia had 59 employees, including me, all engineers. The only investor was myself. It was a stealth company--the company never made any press releases or announcements. My philosophy is not to talk about products until they're shipped. Sun's a little different.

We'd been working on horizontally scalable systems. On day one, the company worked on media servers, which is a scalable kind of architecture. Everybody will come to Sun; that's the engineering team. So the deal was a function of Sun announcing they'd go in the Opteron direction.