Sun Picks Two New Board Members as Another Leaves

Published: November 9, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server and software maker Sun Microsystems said this week that it has brought two new people onto its board of directors.

The first is Tony Ridder, who used to be chief executive of the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain before the paper was sold to McLatchy for $4.5 billion in March, making that Sacramento, California, company the second largest newspaper publisher in the United States. Knight-Ridder owned the key Silicon Valley newspaper during the dot-com boom years--the San Jose Mercury News--along with 31 others, and was a pioneer in Internet publishing. Ridder was president of the merged Knight and Ridder newspaper chains beginning in 1989, and became chairman and CEO of the chain in 1995.

The other new board member for Sun is Peter Currie, who was formerly chief financial officer for Netscape (before it was eaten by AOL, which then ate Time-Warner but then Time-Warner took over) and McCaw Cellular (which was also eaten a number of times, too). Currie is on the board of Internet publisher CNET, as well as auto insurance provider Safeco. Currie joins Sun's audit committee as well.

At the end of August, John Doerr, a serial start-upper from Silicon Valley who serves on the Sun board as well as on the boards of director at Google, Amazon, Intuit, and others, said that he will step down from his position on Sun's board. Doerr is a partner at venture capitalist Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, which he joined in 1980 and which backed the company's he sat on the board of mentioned above. Doerr's term on the Sun board expired last week. Incidentally, one of Sun's founders, Bill Joy, works at KPBC these days, and if Scott McNealy ever retires, he probably will, too. Either that or the National Hockey League.