Seahawks sale: Get to know family buying team

SEATTLE — For months, the question was who would be the next owner of the Seattle Seahawks.

After Saturday's news that the Paul G. Allen Estate entered an agreement to sell to a group, there's a new question.

Who are the new owners of the Seahawks?

The group is headed by the Khosla family, specifically billionaire Vinod Khosla, his wife Neeru and son Neal. The family, which has built their lives and businesses in Silicon Valley over the past decades, purchased a small stake in the San Francisco 49ers last year.

The Seahawks are set to be sold for $9.612 billion, according to multiple reports that were confirmed to The Seattle Times by a league source. There's still financial review and an ownership vote that needs to take place, but the Khosla family is poised to become the fourth owners in the 51-year history of the Seahawks.

Neeru Khosla will be the team's controlling owner and Neal Khosla is expected to have a significant leadership role." Here's some of what we know about the family:

Who is Vinod Khosla?

Khosla, 71, was born in Pune, India. He is a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the founder of Khosla Ventures, a venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, Calif.

Khosla earned his bachelor’s in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi. In India, he attempted to start a soy milk company that wouldn't require refrigeration but failed.

He immigrated to the U.S. in 1976 after receiving a full scholarship to pursue a master's in biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He moved to Silicon Valley to get an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and has been rooted in the area since.

After graduating from Stanford, Khosla founded Daisy Systems, a computer-aided design platform for electrical engineers. He grew frustrated with Daisy's hardware limitations, and in 1982 he co-founded Sun Microsystems, which developed and sold computers and software.

Khosla joined venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins in 1986. He worked for the company just shy of two decades before launching his own fund.

Khosla Ventures was founded in 2004, “with a deliberate focus on technologies [Khosla] believed could meaningfully reshape society,” per the fund’s website. Today, his firm manages approximately $15 billion and has backed companies including OpenAI, DoorDash and Instacart.

Khosla’s net worth is an estimated $13.6 billion, according to Forbes.

Who is Neeru Khosla?

Khosla's wife, Neeru Khosla, will serve as the controlling owner of the team.

Neeru and Vinod were childhood sweethearts, according to a New York Times feature on Vinod from 2000. She moved to the U.S. with him in 1976. At the time she was his girlfriend.

The couple married and had four children together. After moving to the U.S., Neeru earned a master's degree in molecular biology from San Jose State University. She joined a Stanford lab working on gene expression research, but stepped away because of radioactivity concerns when she became pregnant with her first child.

She decided to return to Stanford to earn a master’s degree from the School of Education. She said during that time she had firsthand experience with the inequities in education, which later led to her launching a nonprofit, CK-12, which provides free learning resources for California students, in 2007.

Neeru remains the executive director of the nonprofit she founded and has served on the board of various educational institutions and organizations.

Who is Neal Khosla?

Not much is known about the other three Khosla children. But Neal is “expected to have a significant leadership role in the ownership group,” according to a Saturday memo released by the NFL to all teams.

Like his parents, he is a Stanford graduate and the co-founder and CEO of Curai, a Palo Alto-based virtual primary and urgent care platform.

Neal and his parents bought a 3.1% share of the San Francisco 49ers last year. Per NFL rules, they'll have to sell that share.

At the time, he shared in a statement that he had been attending games with his father as season ticket holders for 30 years. "For us, becoming members of the 49ers family is a dream come true and we’re honored to be a part of the team’s future success and continued impact on the Bay Area community," Neal said in a statement through the 49ers on behalf of the Khosla family last year.

Neal has a bachelor's and master's in computer science from Stanford, according to his LinkedIn.

His interest in sports seems to date back. In 2014, as an undergraduate at Stanford, Khosla appeared as a secondary author on an academic research paper titled "Determinants of regional sport network television ratings in MLB, NBA, and NHL" that was published in the Journal of Sports Management.

He briefly interned with the 49ers in 2011, where he said he "worked with the 49ers front office doing analysis on their NFL draft process and decision."

What else do we know about the family?

The Khosla family hasn't said much since Saturday's announcement. On X, Vinod reposted the Seahawks' statement and wrote, "Excited to be part of this great franchise. Also excited to see the money all go to a nonprofit. No other comments till sale is final but more about us at …" with a link to his Wikipedia page.

In 2011, Vinod and Neeru Khosla committed to giving away half of their wealth to charity by signing Bill Gates' and Warren Buffett's Giving Pledge. At the time, his net worth was an estimated $1.4 billion.

He has been at the center of a decade-plus-long controversy and legal battle over public access to Martins Beach, a popular area south of Half Moon Bay in San Mateo, Calif., after he purchased 89 acres of land in two beachfront properties that included the only road providing overland access to the beach and closed it off.

In a 2016 Blomberg interview, Khosla was asked about his willing to give to charity being at odds with his unwillingness to allow public access to the beach.

"I'm religious about my belief systems, so when I have a battle on the beach … it's about property rights and about a set of people who want to use coercion … if you have a belief system, even though its unpopular, even though the press knocks you for it, you want to live by your principles, he said in the Bloomberg interview.

The Surfrider Foundation won a lawsuit against Khosla in 2018, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Khosla's appeal. There have been additional legal filings since, including another brought against Khosla from the California Coastal Commission that remains ongoing.

____