NEA nabs former Sun Microsystems CTO as partner

New Enterprise Associates has appointed former Sun Microsystems chief technology officer Greg Papadopoulos as a partner.

The leading venture capital firm continues a trend among VCs of hiring high-profile technology executives in Silicon Valley. The hope is that they can bring their connections and experience to bear in giving advice to entrepreneurs and greasing the wheels for commerce.

Papadopoulos spent the last nine months at NEA as an entrepreneur in residence, evaluating companies and figuring out a permanent role at NEA. He left Sun last year after Oracle bought the company.

NEA raised $2.5 billion with its 13th fund in January, 2010. With billions of dollars under management, the big venture capital firms are a lot like the old corporate research and development labs that did a lot of fundamental work, Papadopoulos said in an interview. The heavy focus on R&D is what made the NEA role attractive to him, he said.

“There is more R&D than I thought,” he said. “It is very efficient R&D. Then you combine it with getting the company to the market.”

Papadopoulos will work closely with seed and early-stage companies in NEA’s portfolio to help them guide their fundamental technology development and define how they will get to market.

At Sun, Papadopoulos directed the company’s $2 billion research and development portfolio. He first joined Sun Microsystems in 1994. Before that, he was a development engineer at Hewlett-Packard and Honeywell. He was an architect at supercomputing firm Thinking Machines, and he helped start several companies, including Exa, Ergo and PictureTel. He was also an associate professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

NEA has more than $11 billion under management, and its portfolio includes startups like 23andMe, Bloom Energy, Causes, Clearspring, EngineYard, Eucalyptus, Fusion-io, and Opower. Papadopoulos said that NEA general partner Forest Baskett recruited him to join NEA and he got excited about working on “transformative” startups like Tabula, which raised $108 million last week in the largest round for a chip company in a decade.

As for the venture capital environment, Papadopoulos said, “It feels like our model is working. But there are some things that are getting very frothy. It reminds me of the dotcom days.” But that doesn’t make Papadopoulos want to sit on the sidelines.

“You want to be pragmatic,” Papadopoulos said. “But it’s a hits business. If you shy away, you won’t find the next Groupon.”

Papadopoulos said he is willing to look at a wide range of investments, including in chip and hardware companies, which are not nearly as fashionable as social shopping firms. He said cool things are happening in networking, grid computing and the cloud. And he can’t wait to see the outcome of the battle between Intel (one of Sun’s “frenemies” over the years) and ARM, the maker of low-power microprocessors.

“That battle hasn’t even begun yet,” he said.

When I interviewed Papadopoulos at Sun in the past, he was very excited about the “internet of things,” where intelligence and internet connectivity is built into everyday objects. He still believes in that and expects that kind of vision to serve as the backdrop for investments. But he noted he didn’t want to do what everyone else does. Otherwise, he said, you’re “skating to where the puck is, not where it will be.” That’s a reference to hockey star Wayne Gretzky’s approach to hockey.