Profile of Bill Joy

Bill Joy, was a co-founder of Sun Microsystems where he was, Chief Scientist. 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. Joy has more than 40 patents issued or pending.

Before co-founding Sun, Joy designed and wrote Berkeley UNIX, the first open source operating system with built-in TCP/IP, making it the backbone of the Internet. Joy's many contributions were recognized in a Fortune magazine cover story which called him the "Edison of the Internet".

Joy is also well-known as a futurist, especially for his cover story for the April, 2001 issue of Wired Magazine, entitled "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" which warned of the dangers of abuse of the 21st century technologies-Genetic Engineering, Nanotechnology and Robotics. He warned that advances in these fields could pose grave threats to humanity unless we collectively managed these technologies responsibly, even recommending that scientists halt potentially dangerous research, saying "These technologies won't stop themselves, so, since we can't rid the world of evil, we need to do whatever we can to give the good guys a head start". Joy has also called for scientists and technologists to abide by an ethical code of conduct, and for us to rethink our technology-driven quest for immortality, to slow our headlong rush to enable potentially catastrophic technologies.

In January 2005 he joined the fabled venture capital firm of Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield and Byers, where he is focusing on investing in Green Technologies to help create innovative responses to the many environmental and resource problems the world faces, specifically solutions which will be widely adopted because they are both inexpensive and profitable. Joy subsequently co-authored a New York Times Op-Ed piece with Ray Kurzweil pointing out the danger of open publication of the gene sequence for Smallpox on the Internet. KPCB subsequently raised a US $200M fund to advance innovations to deal with the threat of pandemic Avian Flu and other infectious disease and bioterror threats.

Joy 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. Joy is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the Boston-based American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a trustee of the Aspen Institute.