Came across this old post by US-based venture capitalist Mark Suster on the topic via a recent guest post by Amit Sharma in NextBigWhat. Uses comparative examples to help understand Gross Margin / Net Revenues, Price/Revenue Growth, Cash Flow vs P&L Profitability, etc.
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While I knew the one line description "Vinod Khosla was the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems and was earlier part of the founding team at Daisy Systems", I hadn't come across a more detailed version of Khosla's pre-KPCB exploits before Joe Kraus talked about it on his blog .
Here are some extracts from the Harvard Business School case study (by Dr. Amir Bhide) that I found interesting:
How a Stanford secretary "linked up" SUN's co-founders:
I'm probably more of a conceptual engineer, and I can draw block diagrams for almost anything I can think of, but I can almost never implement them. So I started looking for someone who had done this kind of stuff before. I heard of a project at Stanford called the Stanford University Network, or Sun.workstation project. I called the computer science department, and some secretary who did not want to bother a professor gave me the uame of a graduate student from Germany, Andy Bechtolsheim.
Apparently,...