That he made hundreds of millions of dollars on the high-tech companies he founded is just one dimension of this multifaceted entrepreneur. Reet Rana discovers a man of many interests in this San Francisco-based Democrat.

Sunil Paul
A MAN OF IDEAS

Sunil Paul is always filled with ideas. "One time, early in my career, somebody told me everyone should have a verb to describe themselves." He grins and adds, "My verb is 'to create.'"

Paul's most recent creation was a technology company called Brightmail, a leading anti-spam company that he sold last year to Symantec, the Internet security giant, for $320 million. Earlier, in 1997, he had sold Freeloader, an early Internet search technology that was his first company, for $38 million.

Paul's success in the computer world, however, has not limited his ideas to the realm of the Internet. He has recently turned his attention to the challenge of energy consumption.

The entrepreneur's latest business ideas involve the synergy of nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science and semiconductors. His goal is to combine the latest developments in those fields with the "Silicon Valley management style," to reduce greenhouse emissions and work to help ensure energy independence by creating new energy technology.

Paul describes himself as an avid environmentalist. With a broad mind and driven energy, he is a capitalist who wants to save the world through technology and business.

Politically, Paul is an active Democrat. Last year, he ran a fundraising organization - a so-called '527' - to support John Kerry's presidential campaign. His recent green business ideas and his political involvement "are all related to the fact I am an avid environmentalist," he explains to Indian Life & Style.

Paul currently sits on the Board of Directors for City CarShare, a company for urban people who only need cars occasionally - something like a rent-a-car cooperative. He also remains active on the board of Brightmail.

Equally conversant with topics like nanotechnology, political policy, physics and pre-Colombian history, Paul also has a fascinatingly quirky array of personal interests. He has been learning the flying trapeze at the San Francisco School of the Circus Arts. "Trapeze involves coordinating very sensitive movements of the body," says Paul, without elaborating further.

He also has recently taken up sail boarding, hoping one day to fly above the sea. And Paul was one of the first people to sign up for the first Virgin Galactic flight - the passenger rocket flight that will take place in 2007 carrying a cadre of eager and wealthy thrill-seekers out of the atmosphere.

Mostly, though, Paul has been taking it easy. He is incubating his next business plans, and spending a lot of time with his four-year-old twin girls and his wife, Michelle, who is a writer.

He makes his home in the city that he calls his favorite place in the world: San Francisco. "It's such a beautiful city, the weather is great. I am close to so many great things," like the natural beauty of Northern California, the business resources of Silicon Valley, and a vibrant city life.

For a man who has generated so much wealth, Robin Leach (host of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous") probably won't be touring his estate any time soon. Paul is not really interested in the typical trappings of the fabulously wealthy. He could easily afford the grandest of mansions in San Francisco's posh Pacific Heights neighborhood and several vacation properties. Instead, Paul prefers to live a more simple life, focused on family life and travel.

His relatively modest and comfortably elegant home sits atop a hill with a commanding view of downtown and the East Bay. Built in 1904, the three-story, 300-square-foot Edwardian building is Paul's only residence. "Why spend money on a place you never go to," he reasons.

"The cracks in the front sidewalk are from the 1906 earthquake," he explains as we tour his historic and comfortable home. "It survived."

There is no gleaming Rolls Royce in the driveway to show off to his visitors - he doesn't even have a driveway, or a garage. He parks his '97 BMW M3 on the street, usually nearby his home.

Instead of expansive gardens and a sprawling estate, he prefers his 20-foot-wide attached urban dwelling. "I like the fact I know my neighbors. The bigger your house, the less you know about the people around you."

Inside, the house is typically San Francisco, filled with period details, wooden floors and furniture with a casually classic aesthetic. Paul has lived there for over nine years, and has since modernized the kitchen, added bathrooms, and converted the ground floor into an office/movie theater.

The home's boldly colorful walls of burgundy and lime are decorated with items like landscape paintings, photos and fine art prints. There are occasional accents of world crafts like a Moroccan bureau or an African drum. Together, they create a feeling of colorfully exotic warmth.

On the day Indian Life & Style interviewed him, he was in between creating business plans and holding meetings in his home-office. He is working on a new company, he says, but he mainly spends a lot of time doing things like visiting the neighborhood playground with his kids and going out to eat.

Paul likes to be well-informed on world events - he subscribes to three newspapers: The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and magazines like The Scientist. When we enter his library, Paul explains, "I'm definitely a non-fiction person," pointing to his wall of books of a dizzying interdisciplinary variety.

Recently, he has been reading up on pre-Columbian cultures. "I'm interested in creation, and learning about society and history, ancient cultures." He has also read books like "Collapse," a novel about the demise of the Aztec Empire, and "What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry," by Jay Stevens.

For fun Paul likes to eat out. "I'm a foodie," Paul laughs. He occasionally dines at high-brow places like Aqua, a seafood restaurant in the Financial District. Mostly, he enjoys dining at Zazi, his local bistro, and visiting Naan & Curry, a dhaba on Haight Street, or Pancho Villa, the celebrated taqueria in the Mission District.

Paul also loves to travel. The day we meet, he is passing through town, in between trips to the ancient Aztec city of Tenóchtitlan, near Mexico City, and the Incan citadel Machu Picchu, in the Peruvian Andes. "I used to travel exclusively for business," he says. "Now I travel mostly for leisure."

Paul likes to give his vacations a connection with his intellectual pursuits, like reading up on the history and culture of where he goes, or experiencing the physical and visual wonders of the Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights in Iceland.

"I always loved astronomy," he says. On his next trip to Peru, he plans on taking a telescope to stargaze in the high-mountain darkness.

Paul is the kind of man who wears sneakers to work. He is proud of the fact that his closet isn't filled with opulent business suits and designer labels. During our interview with him in his dining room, he wore his socks and business casual attire.

Born in the town of Ferozpur, Punjab, Paul came to the U.S. at the age of four with his parents. His father, like many other Indians in America, had come to finish his studies.

His American life began in Oklahoma in 1969, where his father earned his Ph.D. in physics. "At four-years-old, it wasn't much of a shock," he says. "At that age, you're mostly interested in your parents than the culture of society. But for my parents it was quite a change."

Eventually, his family settled in Nashville, Tennessee. Paul went to college at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, obtaining a B.S. in electrical engineering. After school, he moved to Washington, D.C., eager to enter the world of politics and policy wonks. Soon, he landed a government job with the Office of Technology Assessment.

The OTA was an interdisciplinary group, which included engineers, computer scientists, philosophers, lawyers, journalists and others. They worked together to provide congressional committees with analyses of emerging, difficult, and often highly technical issues.

In the early 1990s, Paul championed the emerging Internet as a powerful tool of the future. He also wrote a policy paper on one of the first studies on nanotechnology and miniaturization.

The OTA "was kind of like my graduate school," he says. His time in D.C. was also a formative period in his professional life. "I would go over to my friends' houses and bug them with ideas all the time. A lot of the ideas I had for Freeloader were percolating in my head at that time," he adds.

Moreover, Paul says it was a "mind-expanding time that opened his mind to the world beyond technology and the IT world." It was a time that ultimately drove him towards the technologies and the interdisciplinary thinking that have marked his success and still occupies his mind today.

He soon moved on to work as a product manager at America Online. At the time, the Internet giant was new, and comparatively small. During his time there, he experienced the first technology bubble. "[AOL] went from 300 to over 3,000 employees."

After two years and attaining more than a million dollars in unvested stock options, Paul gave it all up to start his first company, Freeloader.

"My friends thought I was crazy," he mused. But in little over a year, he was written about in Red Herring magazine and Freeloader became an industry leader. By the age of 31, he found that his risk-taking in business had made him fabulously wealthy.

Soon after, he sold his company and began devising Brightmail, which he started about a year later.

These days, Paul seems to keep his eyes on potential, and enjoying the beauty of the world. He likes to watch the buildings reflect the glow of the sunset from his deck.

On a less cerebral level, Paul keeps his mind together by practicing yoga. He visits the Yoga Tree, a local yoga studio, a couple times a week, and practices on his own. "I've practiced yoga on and off since college," he says.

When asked what his favorite pose was, he responds, "I would have to say shivasana," the resting pose.