Kleiner Perkins

Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

by Jacob Silverman  · 9 Oct 2025  · 312pp  · 103,645 words

. Andreessen would hardly be the first billionaire to claim he was somehow powerless or even persecuted. In 2014, Tom Perkins, a billionaire co-founder of Kleiner Perkins, a major VC firm, compared San Francisco’s treatment of the rich to an early episode in Nazi Germany’s genocide of the Jewish people

eBoys

by Randall E. Stross  · 30 Oct 2008  · 381pp  · 112,674 words

, artuframe/Art.com Burt McMurtry general partner, Technology Venture Investors Pete Mountanos CEO, Charitableway Pierre Omidyar founder and chairman, eBay Tom Perkins retired general partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Danny Shader Benchmark entrepreneur in residence; founder and CEO, Accept.com Rob Shaw founder, Newwatch/Ashford.com Jeff Skoll cofounder and vice president

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wish) to raise up his partners to the same prominence he enjoyed. (And after hearing so much about Doerr, what entrepreneur who approached his firm, Kleiner Perkins, wanted to be deflected to one of the other partners, an unknown not-Doerr?) Benchmark partners had selected one another on the basis of perceived

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was a self-acknowledged experiment, but they were hopeful that the merits of their alternative model—a partnership of equals—would, in the end, outshine Kleiner Perkins’s heliocentric system that revolved around Doerr. The industry held that it took five years before anyone could tell whether a new venture capitalist was

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company that provided e-mail services for large corporations and Internet-service providers. In the fall of 1997 Critical Path’s entrepreneur had first invited Kleiner Perkins to invest in his company, which had just launched its service. The deal bounced to partner Will Hearst, a scion of the publishing family—and

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one of Kleiner Perkins’s numerous not-Doerrs. Hearst professed an immediate liking, but he could not impel Doerr and the other partners to move; one month, two months

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not for the consoling thought that the leading venture capital firm in the galaxy was saying it might invest in his company. By the time Kleiner Perkins finally got around to tendering an offer, the entrepreneur had been wooed by another venerable Sand Hill Road firm, Mohr Davidow Ventures, founded in 1983

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. Seeing the entrepreneur hesitate in accepting Kleiner Perkins’s offer, Mohr Davidow, in turn, contacted two other venture firms to see if either would be willing to be a co-investor. One was

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previously and chosen because Mohr Davidow viewed the Benchmark partners as a hardworking, aggressive group that would love nothing more than the opportunity to beat Kleiner Perkins in winning over the entrepreneur. While the other prospective co-investor failed to respond, the Benchmark partner who got the first call, on a Monday

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shared board seats and traded notes, and Ramsey Beirne began to get the choice assignments that had eluded the firm until then. John Doerr, of Kleiner Perkins, took a particular liking to Dave Beirne’s work. It was Doerr who chose Beirne to work on the highest-profile assignments, to find the

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not even finished investing its first fund, Benchmark was the unproven upstart in a feudal, hierarchical guild. Looming over it was Doerr’s firm, venerable Kleiner Perkins, in its twenty-fifth year, snugly—and not a little smugly—ensconced on a throne at the summit. When Beirne told Doerr of his plans

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to join Benchmark, Doerr tried to persuade him to join Kleiner Perkins instead. Doerr said he would personally champion Beirne’s candidacy. If you were willing to abide complacency for security, Kleiner Perkins was the place to go. But if you liked the climb, if you liked the

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Sand Hill Road commanded the highest commercial rents in the country. The first venture capital firm to take up residency in that stretch had been Kleiner Perkins, in 1972, when Interstate 280 was newly opened and the nearby land behind Stanford University was still undeveloped. Since then it had become exceedingly valuable

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the previous occupant, Merrill Pickard, and had passed from posh to once posh—lacking the ostentation of the Architectural Digest showplace up the road at Kleiner Perkins but more showy than the ostentatiously Spartan quarters of another neighbor on Sand Hill Road, Sequoia Capital. The gradations that placed its décor in a

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to join Benchmark instead of Kleiner, saying at the time he would like to work jointly on a project with Beirne. Borders’s presentation at Kleiner Perkins did not go well, however. He spent most of his time talking about the bricks and mortar and the trucks. And he backpedaled; the neighborhood

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scenario that this deal, with its outsized ambitions, seemed well-suited to bring about. Kleiner was out. Beirne next turned to Sequoia Capital, which, like Kleiner Perkins, was founded in 1972, and whose partner Mike Moritz had backed Yahoo, a connection that Beirne thought would be valuable in sending online customers to

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a deadpan expression. “You mean, compared to gambling?” Kagle asked, laughing. Benchmark Capital’s very first investment in 1995 was as a co-investor, with Kleiner Perkins, in Silicon Gaming, a manufacturer of electronic slot machines. “Cover all the vices,” someone said. Discussions with Pink Dot progressed a bit further, and the

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menace, without overprotecting them? It was unanswerable and led only to more questions, offered up without hope of resolution. The two returned to practical matters—Kleiner Perkins. “Going to the KP Christmas party?” Harvey asked. The haughtiness of aristocrats versus the scrappiness of up-from-the-bottom plebeians; that was how Beirne

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felt Kleiner Perkins’s and Benchmark’s cultural values diverged. He remembered how one of Doerr’s colleagues “always asked what school you went to. Checking your pedigree

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for digitizing snapshots, could have sunk out of sight were it not rescued by Kodak. Benchmark’s very first investment, Silicon Gaming, was done with Kleiner Perkins and initially did the best of the first ten. It was the first to go public—but then the stock sank. It appeared that the

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Economist estimated that there were more than 150 online auction sites on the Web. One of those was far ahead of the rest, backed by Kleiner Perkins, and was already a public company with a market capitalization of about $175 million. Onsale’s founder, Jerry Kaplan, was at forty-three a well

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in 1995 just as his memoir, Startup, hit bookstores. The book spun an engrossing story of how Kaplan had, in essence, flushed $75 million of Kleiner Perkins’s money down the toilet in a vain attempt to make a go of Go Corporation, which produced an operating system for pen computers. He

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“part Las Vegas, part P. T. Barnum, and part Price Club.” He had to start out with just his and his partner’s money because Kleiner Perkins and every other venture firm he shopped the business plan to had turned him down. When he launched the company, John Doerr publicly derided Kaplan

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as being far out of his element, noting that he “doesn’t have any merchandising or mass-marketing success.” Amazingly, Kleiner Perkins later decided to let bygones be bygones and signed up to back Kaplan once again. Kaplan likened his ongoing ability to raise capital to the

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one without any track record; they were extremely wary of unproven first-time funds. When Benchmark formed in 1995 the prevailing carry was 20 percent; Kleiner Perkins alone had created an aura that permitted it to charge 30 percent. Plotting their entry, the Benchmark boys contemplated the same problem of differentiation in

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them some perspective on the giddy times of the present. Was Tom Perkins exaggerating—he did not appear to be—when he said that when Kleiner Perkins opened its office in 1972 the telephone never rang; he and Gene Kleiner only made outbound calls; and the pace was so slow that they

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had only a single secretary, who worked half days? Peter Crisp, of Venrock Associates, a firm decades older than even Kleiner Perkins, reminded the audience that investments used to be made with the expectation that it would take eight or ten years before an exit could be

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been there. In the future, let’s make sure when another one of us is in this situation that we be supportive about that. The Kleiner Perkins guys do what Doerr did on this one all the time—they always stock their panels. I’m a cynic, I look at it that

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way. Whenever he’s on Louis Rukeyser, all he mentions are Kleiner Perkins companies. It’s a total promote.” Harvey had just as strong a visceral distaste for the National Venture Capital Association as did Dunlevie, but he

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this case included the founder, John Atalla, the father of PINs, which had made bank ATM networks secure two decades earlier, and Tom Perkins, of Kleiner Perkins fame (and one of the “Living Legends” at the NVCA conference), who had already invested his own money in TriStrata. And it seemed to be

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smile. “You’ll do just fine.” Everyone but Beirne laughed at the memory of what at the time had seemed like an utter disaster for Kleiner Perkins, and yet hadn’t John Doerr marched out of the smoking crater unscathed and funded Netscape? “I take this very seriously,” Beirne said, without relaxing

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be because he had an open position that he thought would be of interest. Beirne was then searching for the CEO position of Healtheon, a Kleiner Perkins–funded company. When Beirne brought Wahl and John Doerr together, Doerr did not sell Wahl hard, and Wahl passed. But the experience gave him an

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this tiny company. The problem was that Tom Perkins was bobbing on a yacht somewhere in the Mediterranean, the pastime that after his retirement from Kleiner Perkins seemed to occupy most of his time and attention. He lived the life one would expect of a very wealthy character in a Danielle Steel

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-commerce companies that were aiming for a broad consumer market. That spring Benchmark backed PlanetRx, an online pharmacy that would compete head-to-head with Kleiner Perkins–backed Drugstore.com; Dave Beirne went on the company’s board. One that came close to getting funded but ultimately did not was GreenTree, which

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discount gets you to six. That’s the logic I go through to get there. Accel would do it at ten or twelve. Benchmark or Kleiner Perkins would do it at eight.” “Well, I’m going to ask for the broad hunting license,” Harvey said. Kagle tore up strips of paper for

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more money in. I can’t get my partners to do that.” Tom Perkins, who had invested as an individual, not as a partner of Kleiner Perkins, had begun to respond, but Beirne held him off. “Tom, don’t go there, if you can’t get Kleiner to invest in this company

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would do exactly, he had not figured out. But Benchmark was eager to host him while he sorted out potential ideas, and so too was Kleiner Perkins. So when he left Netscape he became an entrepreneur in residence at two venture firms simultaneously. There is no single form of charisma, that ineffable

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from everybody.” Deals never received such uniformly high votes. “That’s scary.” That afternoon, Shader went up the street to present to the partners at Kleiner Perkins. The next day he was back in the Benchmark office, reporting that he had expected the Kleiner partners to bare their fangs and “dog pile

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.” Swiftly, in October, Accept received $5.2 million in equity financing, at $5.1 million pre-. Danny Shader was the CEO and had Benchmark and Kleiner Perkins as his venture backers, each receiving 20 percent stakes. And his company was poised to make eBay, which had its IPO while Accept was being

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it attention until after the IPO and the distractions that followed had abated, and eBay did not turn out to be a coinvestor—Benchmark and Kleiner Perkins had balked at eBay’s wish to invest at a 50 percent discount to what they themselves were paying. A week after the IPO, when

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noticeably different from life within its venture backer, situated toward the rear. In Menlo Park, Benchmark’s primary rival, “our friends up the street,” was Kleiner Perkins, which was a competitor on some deals (like Critical Path, the e-mail-services-for-corporations deal that Benchmark had won; or Chemdex, a specialty

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venture funds as well as in Benchmark’s, whispered a most astounding fact: Only five years after its founding, Benchmark’s returns beat those of Kleiner Perkins. The eBoys almost never mentioned the growth of their personal wealth. One of the rare occasions in which it surfaced was the day Bob Kagle

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were no longer interested in Mayfield; the partner that they had met with there, an older gentleman, did not appreciate the potential of the Web. Kleiner Perkins was not on the shortlist because every characterization of the firm that Omidyar had heard related to the shark family, and KP had already invested

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Secret Passion (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1989), pp. 71–72. 6: Room at the Top first to go public: Benchmark did not want to follow Kleiner Perkins in one way that a 1998 Fortune profile of KP pointed out: Between 1990 and 1997, the stock of KP-backed companies tended to drop

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of Venture Capital Organizations in the United States,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1989. permitted it to charge 30 percent: Tom Perkins explains Kleiner Perkins’s shift in 1980 from a carry of 20 percent to 30 percent as the suggestion of KP’s primary limited partner, who urged the

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future

by Sebastian Mallaby  · 1 Feb 2022  · 935pp  · 197,338 words

s Andy Grove, addressing John Doerr Contents Introduction Unreasonable People Chapter 1 Arthur Rock and Liberation Capital Chapter 2 Finance Without Finance Chapter 3 Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, and Activist Capital Chapter 4 The Whispering of Apple Chapter 5 Cisco, 3Com, and the Valley Ascendant Chapter 6 Planners and Improvisers Chapter 7 Benchmark

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their mark on the evolution of computing. Cocky and obnoxious, Khosla was soon fired. He became a venture capitalist. Joining the storied venture partnership of Kleiner Perkins, Khosla discovered his true métier. His unreasonable impatience—his determination that anything might be possible and everything should work his way—made him one part

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pioneers of the new venture style were Don Valentine and Tom Perkins, the prime movers, respectively, of the great Silicon Valley rivals Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. They were equally forceful and equally suited by temperament to combative activism. Valentine is said to have remarked that underperforming company founders should

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the portfolio, there was no sign of this happy ending at the time. Kleiner and Perkins felt sufficiently glum to rethink their strategy. The new Kleiner Perkins formula doubled down on activism. Rather than funding outside entrepreneurs, the partners would incubate startups in-house, kicking ideas around with junior associates. They had

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wrote up six pages outlining an investment pitch. Then they prepared to meet Tom Perkins. On April 1, 1976, Swanson appeared with Boyer in the Kleiner Perkins conference room.[83] Swanson sketched out the business plan. Their company, now named Genentech, needed six months to negotiate licenses governing the gene-splicing techniques

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By force of character and intellect, they stamped their will on their portfolio companies. Chapter Four The Whispering of Apple By the late 1970s, when Kleiner Perkins backed Genentech, the West Coast venture-capital industry had developed much of its modern tool kit. The equity-only, time-limited fund had displaced the

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-Bass duly broke off the partnership and assumed that this was the end of the matter. Then things got messy—for the companies and for Kleiner Perkins. Spurned, Silicon Compilers struck up a new relationship with Ungermann’s rival, 3Com. Thanks to the fruitless collaboration initiated by Doerr, Ungermann’s intellectual

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property now seemed likely to fall into the hands of its fiercest competitor. The Ungermann-Bass leaders called Kleiner Perkins. “You can’t do that!” they protested. “We gave you everything we know!”[42] What happened next illustrates the secret magic of the Valley.

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when you invest in a company facing a technical challenge, the first thing you do is take the white-hot risks off the table. If Kleiner Perkins embodied the swashbuckling spirit of the Valley, the upstart challenger Accel was deliberately different. The two founders, Arthur Patterson and Jim Swartz, were already veterans

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in small-town Pennsylvania, the son of a man who worked as a bus driver and farmhand, he believed in character and discipline.[11] The Kleiner Perkins improvisers might traffic in messianic visions, but Swartz backed solid founders, enforced financial controls, and radiated sobriety, integrity, and realism. Once, when an entrepreneur

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managed the balance between competition and cooperation in the Valley since the 1980s, when Tom Perkins had presided, Solomon-like, over the dispute between two Kleiner Perkins portfolio companies, Ungermann-Bass and Silicon Compilers. In this instance, twenty years later, Moritz was determined that cooperation should prevail. Sequoia would be better

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in 2007 the London team formalized its de facto independence, stopped sharing profits with the California gang, and left Benchmark without a European presence. Meanwhile, Kleiner Perkins suffered a similar setback in China. In 2007, John Doerr helped to recruit four Chinese investors, but he made the fatal error of delegating most

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prestige—raises a delicate question. Is there really skill in venture capital, or are the top performers merely coasting on their reputations? The story of Kleiner Perkins illustrates what academic study has confirmed.[35] Reputation matters, but it cannot guarantee outcomes. Success has to be earned afresh by each successive generation. Kleiner

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been completed. For a venture team to work productively, the culture of the partnership has to be right. This is what Kleiner Perkins mismanaged spectacularly.[43] In the early years of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the partnership had appeared lopsided. Tom Perkins was the flamboyant and domineering rainmaker, the creative genius behind Tandem

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him that a $10 billion valuation was reasonable. At the end of May 2009, while Neil Shen was cementing his leadership over Sequoia China and Kleiner Perkins was grappling with its struggling cleantech bets, Milner and Zuckerberg concluded their negotiations. Milner’s investment company, DST, bought $200 million worth of company-

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entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs,’” he declared confidently.[41] Of course, Andreessen’s pitch was less original than he pretended. Many venture capitalists—nearly all the early Kleiner Perkins partners, not to mention Thiel, Graham, Milner, and others—had entrepreneurial experience. The idea of coaching founders was not original, either. When Michael Moritz

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to demonstrate early success, the partners went on to raise large follow-on funds, recruit additional investing partners, and expand their internal consulting operation. As Kleiner Perkins vacated its slot among the Valley’s top investment firms, a16z filled it. At first, a16z’s accomplishment was greeted as a vindication for its

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the triumph of the network.” Chapter Thirteen Sequoia’s Strength in Numbers In the summer of 2010, a year after Andreessen Horowitz got started, a Kleiner Perkins partner named Joe Lacob made an unconventional investment. Over the course of twenty-three years at Kleiner, he had backed some seventy ventures—life-science

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short period, as is normal practice. On this measure, Khosla came out on top. The second most prodigious profit maker was John Doerr, also of Kleiner Perkins. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 29 Laura M. Holson, “A Capitalist Venturing in the Worlds of Computers and Religion,” New York Times, Jan. 3, 2000.

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he has never suggested the opposite. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 67 Berlin, Man Behind the Microchip, 165. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 68 CHAPTER THREE: SEQUOIA, KLEINER PERKINS, AND ACTIVIST CAPITAL Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster,

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to go get your head examined.’” Goeddel, author interview. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 94 The scientist was Richard Scheller. See Felda Hardymon and Tom Nicholas, “Kleiner-Perkins and Genentech: When Venture Capital Met Science” (Harvard Business School, Oct. 27, 2012), 6. See also Judith Michaelson, “Genentech Soars: $300 in Stock Turns

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Crossroads (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1992), 149. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 46 Wilson, New Venturers, 60. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 47 Thomas K. Perkins, “Kleiner Perkins, Venture Capital, and the Chairmanship of Genentech, 1976–1995,” interview by Glenn E. Bugos, 2001, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

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and that this is not the same as hubris. Doerr, author interview. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7 G. Pascal Zachary, “Computer Glitch: Venture-Capital Star, Kleiner Perkins, Flops as a Maker of Laptops,” Wall Street Journal, July 26, 1990. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8 Doerr touted these technologies at a speech to

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63 Sequoia’s Yahoo bet would ultimately earn more than this, because the partnership held on to some of the stock into 1999. Meanwhile, another Kleiner Perkins bet, on Juniper Networks, would eclipse Benchmark’s eBay return after Juniper soared following its April 1999 flotation. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 64 Stross, eBoys

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the one that hit the jackpot with Google. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 64 The VC partnerships that returned capital to limited partners included Accel and Kleiner Perkins, as well as Benchmark’s European operation. In all, nearly $4 billion was returned to limited partners in the first half of 2002. Lisa

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, exceeding the gain on Sequoia’s $12.5 million investment in Google. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 77 CHAPTER ELEVEN: ACCEL, FACEBOOK, AND THE DECLINE OF KLEINER PERKINS Efrusy, interviews by the author, June 7, 2018, and Aug. 18, 2020. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1 Efrusy, author interviews. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE

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of Fairchild Semiconductor, establishes Sequoia Capital. 1972 Eugene Kleiner, a member of the Traitorous Eight, teams up with Hewlett-Packard executive Tom Perkins to found Kleiner Perkins. 1973 Sutter Hill pairs the inventor of the electronic printing wheel with a strong outside CEO, establishing the “Qume model.” 1974 Valentine backs Atari, showing

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successful government program to promote venture capital. 1993 Accel, NEA, and Menlo Ventures back UUNET, turning the government-run internet into a mass medium. 1994 Kleiner Perkins backs Netscape, transforming the online experience. 1995 Michael Moritz of Sequoia backs Yahoo, emerging as the leader of his firm and later of the venture

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1998 Sergey Brin and Larry Page raise $1 million without talking to VCs, heralding the rise of angel investing. 1999 Google dictates funding terms to Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia, demonstrating the leverage of software founders. 1999 Shirley Lin of Goldman Sachs finances Alibaba, equipping it with stock options that enable its take

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investments. 2004 Google goes public using a dual-class share structure, preserving founder control and setting a precedent for later IPOs that disempower shareholders. 2004 Kleiner Perkins embarks on a troubled experiment with cleantech. 2005 Peter Thiel launches Founders Fund, differentiating himself from traditional VCs by deferring to founders. 2005 Paul Graham

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bet in Sequoia’s history. 2010 Vinod Khosla finances Impossible Foods, heralding a new and more successful wave of cleantech investments. 2012 Ellen Pao sues Kleiner Perkins for discrimination. 2013 As big tech firms increasingly remain private, Aileen Lee coins the term “unicorn.” 2017 Masayoshi Son launches his $99 billion Vision

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-com bust, 184–85 Facebook, 195, 253–61, 264, 271, 272, 306, 380, 382 founding of, 128–29 gender issues, 272 Google, 182 Hailo, 357 Kleiner Perkins compared with, 210, 265, 270, 272 Myspace, 252–53 Portal Software, 174, 436n, 440n “prepared mind” approach of, 122, 128, 210, 250–51, 252, 

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City of Hope Hospital, 75, 77–78 Claremont McKenna College, 110 Clarium Capital, 208 Clark, Jim, 144–48, 237 cleantech, 2–5, 276, 381, 460n Kleiner Perkins investments, 2–3, 262–66, 271–72, 276, 450n Clifford, Matt, 221, 300 climate change, 381 Clinton, Bill, 133 Clubhouse, 14, 388 CNBC, 177 Coase

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173–76, 178–79, 198–99, 215 Bechtolsheim’s investment, 173–76, 183, 213 CEO search, 183–87 Facebook and, 198 IPO, 188–91, 442n Kleiner Perkins’s investment, 179–88, 190, 263, 328, 382 market cap, 180–81 Project Maven, 394–95 Sequoia Capital’s investment, 179, 181–83, 190, 382

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5, 12 cleantech investments, 2–5, 263 contrarianism of, 9, 11 Forbes Midas List, 263, 449n GO Corp. investment, 122, 124 Google investment, 182 at Kleiner Perkins, 5–6, 9–11, 265, 303 Mosaic investment, 148 power law and, 9–11 Khosla Ventures, 2, 415n Khosrowshahi, Dara, 316, 370–71, 372, 459n

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Nazre, Ajit, 270–71 Nest Labs, 269–70 NetEase, 226, 233, 235, 279–82 Netscape founding of, 144–46, 237 IPO, 146, 148, 277–78 Kleiner Perkins investment, 146–48, 167, 179 Mayfield Fund investment, 145, 146, 148 Yahoo and, 150, 152, 154, 157 “network centrality,” 433n network effects, 36, 164, 167

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led investing, 48, 51 Perella, Joseph, 178 Perelman, Ronald, 287 Perkins, Tom, 60, 67–72, 74–80, 264, 378 Apple investment, 82, 83 founding of Kleiner Perkins, 67–70 Genentech investment, 74–79, 80 GO Corp. investment, 122–23 investing strategy of, 60, 69–70, 72, 75, 128, 266 Silicon Compilers and

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, 394 Google, 179, 181–83, 190, 382 growth funds, 324–30, 347 hedge funds, 331–33 Heritage funds, 321, 333–36 India business, 321–24 Kleiner Perkins compared with, 303–4 Plaxo, 197 scouts program, 311, 316, 455n Seeq-3Com alliance, 106, 107 Stripe, 317–20 success formula of, 304–6, 307

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venture-capital playbook. He backed entrepreneurs who were brilliant but wayward: the early video-game impresario Nolan Bushnell held board meetings in his hot tub. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers was founded the same year as its archrival, Sequoia. Tom Perkins, the flamboyant force behind Kleiner’s early triumphs, is pictured second

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called Doerr “a little Mozart.” Mitch Kapor (left) a former teacher of transcendental meditation, founded the software pioneer Lotus Development, generating a big win for Kleiner Perkins and John Doerr (right) when Lotus went public. Later, Doerr and Kapor collaborated on a disastrous tablet-computer project called GO, proving that being early

The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

by Michael Lewis  · 29 Sep 1999  · 146pp  · 43,446 words

might help him talk some reason into Clark. Instead, Doerr invited Clark to his office and gave him exactly what he asked for. His firm, Kleiner Perkins, purchased a 15 percent stake in Netscape that valued the company at $18 million, and left Clark still holding 25 percent of the company. "That

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venture capitalists had learned a hard lesson from Netscape. Before Netscape went public, a lot of venture capitalists had thought John Doerr and his firm, Kleiner Perkins, had been mad to agree to Clark's terms. Clark had charged Doerr three times the going rate for start-up capital. Doerr had cleared

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for @Home had been at least as much his as Doerr's. And yet Doerr's firm, Kleiner Perkins, had denied Clark the chance to buy a piece of @Home, at least at first. Kleiner Perkins hewed to the old venture capital model, which relegated entrepreneurs like Clark to the sidelines of any business

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. I intend to recruit heavily from SGI. Then he gave up being sweet: Anyway, I think you'll probably have to co-invest with KP [Kleiner Perkins], and if I detect any problems with these guys hearing about my recruiting, I will move away from NEA pronto. Breaking up was never all

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Clark had called a meeting with NEA that included John Doerr. Within weeks he had agreed to split the equity into eleven parts, he and Kleiner Perkins each taking four parts and NEA getting only two. In mid-November 1995 the Kleiner employer David Schnell, writing "on behalf of NEA and

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Kleiner Perkins," sent Clark an e-mail, "reviewing our discussion on your business model." Thanks for getting the NEA and KPCB groups together to share ideas. Like

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out Page 109 with Jim Clark's imprimatur and came back with a few hundred million dollars in profits, he could be a partner at Kleiner Perkins. Schnell, who knew perfectly well what it meant to be a captain of Jim Clark's ship, politely declined. In the end, he was given

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question: Why did the world's most important ven- Page 110 ture capitalists put up with Clark? Surely, it would have been easy enough for Kleiner Perkins or NEA to announce that they were backing someone else to do the same thing as Clark. Valley venture capitalists stole each other's ideas

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, he decided that one more than the others "had the passion to change the world." On Christmas Eve 1995, Clark's final choice arrived at Kleiner Perkins for his interview with David Schnellwhich even Schnell knew was a formality. On Christmas Day, David Schnell wrote to Clark, "I spent several hours yesterday

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care industry, with a bit of guidance from a doctor who had agreed to be their CEO only because he wanted to make partner at Kleiner Perkins, and an older man who was interested mainly in writing the code to computerize a yacht. And most of the engineers were not even citizens

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and I made the decision to quit SGI and join Healthscape based on my belief that P, J, and KP [Pavan Nigam, Jim Clark, and Kleiner Perkins] were going to do something great and I was just going to be a part of it. She asked me how much I could make

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just quit SGI, "'Never in my life will I find all of these stars lined up at the same time: P [Pavan], J [Clark], KP [Kleiner Perkins], the diamond with the H in the middle." Stuart Liroff was the eleventh person, and the tenth engineer, and the second native-born American, to

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. For most of 1996 the engineers did what they were told by their sales force. The sales force was in turn put together by a Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist, David Schnell, who, against his better judgment, had Page 153 agreed to captain Clark's new ship. The sales force told them that

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was the only one in the place who stuck up for them. Instead, they blamed David Schnell, the venture capitalist who had been installed by Kleiner Perkins as temporary CEO. They told Clark, as Clark later said, that "David occasionally left customers with the impression that the train was leaving the station

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board and to help him recruit a CEO. Doerr, who had told a lot of people that Healtheon might one day be the biggest company Kleiner Perkins ever backed, then set out to find the Serious American Executive who could make the Magic Diamond plausible to the wider world. He found him

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boom had turned venture capitalism into a license to print money; half of the investment bankers on Wall Street longed to work for NEA or Kleiner Perkins, because working as a VC put you closer to the source of wealth. To the recipes. It was as if everyone on Wall Street at

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-founder of Silicon Graphics Inc. and Netscape Communications Corp., whose Web browsers have helped Internet mania sweep the world. Healtheon's main venture capitalist is Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which has shown a Midas touch on its Internet investments.... But Healtheon has struggled to live up to its pedigree.... For much of

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like this: The CEOs: Mike Long (Healtheon): $400,000,000 Jim Barksdale (Netscape): $1,000,000,000 Tom Jermoluk (@Home): $550,000,000 The VCs: Kleiner Perkins (John Doerr): $1,800,000,000 New Enterprise Associates (Dick Kramlich): $700,000,000 Mayfield Fund (Glenn Mueller): $400,000,000 The cofounding engineers: Pavan

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deals like that, and Benchmark could offer the same sort of imprimatur as Kleiner Perkinswhich was perhaps the biggest reason that people like Clark sought Kleiner Perkins' money. The Kleiner halo, as it was called. The trouble with the Kleiner halo is that it was as up for grabs as everything else

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in the Valley. Out of fear of losing yet another very public success to Benchmark, Kleiner Perkins had just paid $25 million for a 33 percent stake in a new company called Google.com. Google.com consisted of a pair of Stanford

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graduate students who had a piece of software that might or might not make it easier to search the Internet. In short, Kleiner Perkins was already feeling a bit of the pressure on capitalists that Clark, with myCFO, wanted to create a lot more of. He did not seriously

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new company. He hoped only that word of his trip to Benchmark would reach John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins. A week or so after he visited Benchmark Capital, Clark drove back up Sand Hill Road to Kleiner Perkins. John Doerr had gathered his partners in the conference room. Outside of Jim Clark's soul

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he dismissed the hundreds of companies modeled on Netscape. He then went on to explain what Page 258 did not need explaining to partners at Kleiner Perkins: the power of a trillion or so dollars pooled into a kind of cartel. There was no end to what might be done with it

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keep Clark sweetJim Clark was a national treasure. He understood exactly how deep and mysterious was this force seated on the other side of the Kleiner Perkins conference room table. Normally, Kleiner partners deliberated for a few days before deciding whether to invest in a new company. They didn't do that

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age

by Leslie Berlin  · 7 Nov 2017  · 615pp  · 168,775 words

years, innovators developed the microprocessor, the personal computer, and recombinant DNA. Entrepreneurs founded Apple, Atari, Genentech, and the pioneering venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Five major industries were born: personal computing, video games, advanced semiconductor logic, modern venture capital, and biotechnology. In this same remarkable period, a

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high-risk, high-reward investments. Valentine rented an office on Sand Hill Road, near the venture firm Kleiner & Perkins, started by Fairchild cofounder Eugene Kleiner and Hewlett-Packard alumnus Tom Perkins. Sequoia Capital and Kleiner & Perkins were pioneers in a trend that would later prove an essential element of Silicon Valley’s longevity: an

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older generation of successful tech entrepreneurs and executives mentoring and funding later generations. Between them, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner & Perkins would go on to fund, among others, Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Dropbox, Electronic Arts, Facebook, Genentech, Google, Instagram, Intuit, and LinkedIn–and that is just the

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’s desk displayed a photo of Jimmy Treybig, who had left HP to launch Tandem Computers with backing from the young venture capital firm called Kleiner & Perkins, which had an office near Don Valentine’s Sequoia Capital. The security guards feared that Treybig might return to try to steal secrets.III Browne

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entrepreneur and venture capitalist, even though he had never started a company and had just been fired from a four-year-old venture capital firm, Kleiner & Perkins (today Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers). Swanson was a young man who was always busy with friends and always in a hurry. His father, an airplane maintenance crew

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graduation three years earlier, tapped him to open an office in San Francisco. He stayed less than a year before leaving to join Kleiner & Perkins. Swanson’s early days at Kleiner & Perkins had been promising. The firm had been launched in 1972, at nearly the same time as Don Valentine’s Sequoia Capital, which

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individuals in portfolio companies backed by the partnership, and one of the two men had to serve on the board of any company funded by Kleiner & Perkins. Investments would be concentrated in the West, ideally in the San Francisco Bay Area, so the partners could assist and monitor the entrepreneurs. Eugene Kleiner

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had handpicked Swanson as an associate after serving with him on the board of a failing company in which both Citicorp and Kleiner & Perkins had invested.21 Kleiner might well have recognized some version of himself in the younger man; Kleiner, too, had talked his way into an excellent

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on him, even without a high school diploma. As an associate, Swanson worked alongside the senior partners to assess new investments and monitor existing ones. Kleiner & Perkins had invested in a shoe-resoling business (Tred 2, whose founder, Rory Fuerst, would found Keen shoes three decades later), a motorcycle-cum-snowmobile (Snow

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Job), a medical device company (Andros Analyzers), and a nearly fail-safe minicomputer firm (Tandem Computers).VII Shortly before Swanson joined Kleiner & Perkins, the firm moved from 3000 Sand Hill Road, where Kleiner had had a private office before the partnership began, to the twenty-ninth floor of

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roommate, had splurged on a third-floor Pacific Heights apartment with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge.VI Swanson’s promising new job at Kleiner & Perkins came to an abrupt end fewer than two years after it began, for reasons that he never quite understood. The triggering event seemed to be

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the meeting was interested—not the two other company founders and not Tom Perkins, who had decided to join the lunch to signal how concerned Kleiner & Perkins was. Swanson, however, was intrigued by the laureate’s suggestion. After leaving the meeting, Swanson began reading as much as he could about recombinant DNA

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they were not interested and certainly not with Swanson.”27 The rejection disappointed but did not worry Swanson, who assumed that he could stay at Kleiner & Perkins until another opportunity came along. He was wrong. Perkins told him that he and Kleiner “would like to have just the two of us working

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. With fifty-one amino acids, insulin’s structure was well understood—a critical starting point. With a partner and a product to target, Swanson asked Kleiner & Perkins to pay him a salary while he tried to start a recombinant DNA company. The founders of Tandem Computers had been granted that sort of

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, Swanson—now three months without a paycheck—had a few investors interested in backing him, but not enough. He began making plans to pitch to Kleiner & Perkins. It is unclear whether the firm invited him in or whether Swanson asked for the chance, but he was nervous. He feared that Perkins had

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would be assets. On April Fool’s Day 1976, Swanson, accompanied by Boyer, sat at the Kleiner & Perkins conference table, no longer a junior associate of the firm but an entrepreneur in search of capital. Kleiner & Perkins had already invested in roughly a dozen small firms, and the one that looked most promising—Tandem

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.56 If the engineering effort did not succeed, the company would fail relatively cheaply and relatively fast.III Perkins had one more stipulation: he wanted Kleiner & Perkins to be the sole first-round investor. Swanson would need to go back to Crocker and the other interested investors and tell them that they

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could not be in on the first round. If Swanson did that, Kleiner & Perkins would invest $100,000—among the smallest investments in the venture capitalists’ first fund. (Only two of the twelve companies invested in before Genentech had

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all my tricks,” Perkins later said of Swanson, but the venture capitalist invested nonetheless.58 Nine years later, Genentech would be a key reason why Kleiner & Perkins’s $8 million fund, which had struggled so much at its launch, would be worth $165 million.II Six days after pitching to

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Kleiner & Perkins, on April 7, 1976, Swanson and Boyer incorporated Genentech.59 In June, the check from Kleiner & Perkins arrived. Swanson rented a tiny office in an annex of the Wells Fargo building at the corner of

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Cohen-Boyer process to make insulin and other hormones. II. The other big winner was Tandem. Although eight of the eighteen deals in the first Kleiner & Perkins fund were written off or marked below cost, the internal rate of return on that fund was 40 percent per annum for the first 9

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called the poster “the best-selling poster of all time.” VII. This was the same day, coincidentally, that Bob Swanson and Herb Boyer first pitched Kleiner & Perkins. VIII. Markkula was not impressed with the Apple I, but Apple already had its fans. The earliest fan letter, dated April 14, 1976, is a

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similarly radical. “It was science, it was hardly profitable, and it had essentially no revenue,” says Brook Byers, Swanson’s former apartment mate who joined Kleiner & Perkins (now Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers) in 1972. Genentech, attempting to be the first new pharmaceutical business launched in many years, would compete against established giants. Without Coyle

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2015 dollars). Swanson and Boyer’s original $500 investments were each worth about $65 million ($199 million in 2015 dollars), as was the stake that Kleiner & Perkins bought for $100,000 in the first round and an additional $100,000 later.IV At least one scientist, seeing Boyer as a turncoat, not

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, thanking him for giving Stanford “the chance at obtaining what could be the most significant patent property Stanford (and UC—sigh) will ever have.” IV. Kleiner & Perkins owned roughly 15 percent of Genentech at the IPO, about the same as Swanson and Boyer. V. The SEC, worried about a possible violation of

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billion in revenue. IV. Valentine gave Hawkins an office at Sequoia Capital and helped him secure a $2 million round of funding from, among others, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sevin Rosen, a fund started by Ben Rosen. The original name of Electronic Arts was Amazin’ Software. V. Many people point to

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Sun’s success. The computer workstation’s technical design was based on technology from Xerox PARC, where Bechtolsheim had worked while in graduate school.4 Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venture capital firm that had launched Genentech and whose cofounders had worked at Fairchild and Hewlett-Packard, was an early and significant

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Sun’s cofounders went on to fund new generations of technology companies. Vinod Khosla has backed dozens of startups as a venture capitalist, first at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and later at Khosla Ventures. In 1998, Andy Bechtolsheim met two young Stanford computer science graduate students who were thinking of starting a

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Systems, Netscape, NVIDIA, Silicon Graphics, Snapchat, Sun Microsystems, Varian Associates, VMware, and Yahoo!—and those companies, many funded by Don Valentine’s Sequoia Capital or Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, have begotten others. (Stanford has been a limited partner in both venture firms’ funds, as well.) Ampex begat Memorex and Oracle, as well

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Good Morning America—before returning to entrepreneurship in 2010, when she launched a cloud-based enterprise software company called Kenandy with backing from Salesforce.com, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and the venture arm of Larry Sonsini’s firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. She currently serves as executive chairman of Kenandy. Mike Markkula

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to its employees. He retired from his eponymous firm in 2000 but continued to consult and served for several years as a consulting partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. An accomplished author (five books and dozens of articles), McKenna today serves as a director for several not-for-profit organizations and as

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verify, given the deaths of all three men. 29. Swanson, ROHO interview. 30. Ibid. 31. Brook Byers, interview by author, Oct. 8, 2015. Byers joined Kleiner & Perkins after Swanson left and remains a partner at the firm. Byers is one of the world’s premier investors in biotechnology, a passion he says

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a cruel trick” (in footnote): Sally Smith Hughes, Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011): 62. 49. “Genentech Outline for Discussion Kleiner & Perkins, 1 April 1976,” SSH. 50. See Cohen, ROHO interview, and Boyer, ROHO interview. 51. Swanson pitched Crocker Capital in March 1976. 52. Fred Middleton says

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, 2015. 53. Eugene Kleiner to Nathaniel Weiner [Corporations Counsel], May 7, 1976, SSH. 54. Tom Perkins, ROHO interview. 55. Ibid. 56. “Genentech Outline for Discussion, Kleiner & Perkins,” April 1, 1976, SSH. Genentech called itself “a development stage company” until the hormone was cloned. 57. Swanson talks about Perkins’s insistence on exclusivity

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. (Arscott mentioned this without any prompting.) Typical amounts invested in companies in the first K&P fund ranged from roughly $120,000 to $500,000. Kleiner & Perkins, Summary of Venture Investments (1), EKF. 58. Perkins, quoted on p. 17 of an undated manuscript, “The High Rollers,” with handwritten notes from Kleiner, EKF

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-of-california-and-genentech-s. 3. Bob Swanson, ROHO interview. 4. Fred Middleton, ROHO interview. 5. Brook Byers, interview by author, Oct. 8, 2015. 6. “Kleiner & Perkins, Venture Capital, and the Chairmanship of Genentech, 1976–1995,” oral history of Thomas J. Perkins, ROHO interview. Perkins had started a laser company that was

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Magney, 352 Kindle, 376 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 3 Kirby, Bob, 127–28 Klein, Howard, 183, 323, 326 Kleiner, Eugene, 128, 190–93, 258 Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (formerly Kleiner & Perkins), xii, 128, 178, 190–93, 197, 201, 258, 262, 364–65, 371, 374 Knuth, Donald, 289, 341–42 Kornberg, Arthur, 144 Kottke, Don

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Swanson, Bob, 187–205, 254n, 256–68, 375 and Boyer, 194–204 and Cohen, 194, 199 Genentech and, xvi, 197–98, 256–63, 266 at Kleiner & Perkins, 190–93, 208n and Reimers, 194, 202–3 Swanson, Judy, 262 Sylvania, 3, 42–44, 315 Synoptics, 337 Syntex, 203, 235 system design, 10, 20

Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech

by Sally Smith Hughes

a company rapidly going downhill. Serving on the board of the failing company, he met Eugene Kleiner, who with Thomas Perkins in 1972 had founded Kleiner & Perkins, a venture capital partnership with offices in San Francisco.8 Taking a measure of Swanson, Kleiner was impressed, according to Perkins, with the young man

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. Perkins, a former Hewlett-Packard engineer with a Harvard MBA, respected Kleiner’s ability to assess individual character and motivation. Late in 1974 Swanson joined Kleiner & Perkins as a junior partner in its Menlo Park office on Sand Hill Road. He was twenty-six. One of Swanson’s assignments was to monitor

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presenting a company to the financial community. After a failed pitch to an heir of a California banking family, Swanson approached his former partners at Kleiner & Perkins.36 “He was hot as blazes on genetic engineering,” Perkins remembered. “He was going to make a career out of this either with us or

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, the all-important scientific mind behind the proposed enterprise. Perkins recalled the subsequent meeting: [Swanson’s business plan] was very conventional in that I [representing Kleiner & Perkins] would put up the money, they would hire the people, and it would be a very straightforward venture. I took the view that the technical

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,000—-venture capital’s first stake in recombinant DNA technology. But it was only small fraction of the $8 million total in the first-ever Kleiner & Perkins venture fund. The strategy of the two savvy venture capitalists, as was true in risk investment generally, was to make carefully calculated investments in young

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departure from the invest-and-leave-it approach of most East Coast financiers. Yet despite careful oversight and intent to reduce risk, the business of Kleiner & Perkins was by its inherent nature extraordinarily speculative. As Kleiner wrote to an inquiring California securities regulator apparently concerned about the risky nature of their Genentech

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investment: “Kleiner & Perkins realizes that an investment in Genentech is highly speculative, but we are in the business of making highly speculative investments.”42 Yet the risk represented

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technology are better than 50 percent.” Second thoughts? “Not at all. If it worked, the rewards would be obvious.”43 On the promise of the Kleiner & Perkins seed money, Swanson and Boyer dissolved their partnership and on April 7, 1976, signed incorporation papers creating a legal entity known as Genentech. Boyer had

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institutions that, as the press put it, “gave birth to the biotech industry.”30 MAKING SOMATOSTATIN Early in 1977 Swanson launched a second financing round. Kleiner & Perkins took the lead and invested a second $100,000, an inducement for five other funds to invest. By February Swanson had raised around $850,000

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of his own.7 PROCURING A FACILITY AND STAFF Swanson meanwhile was pressed to find a facility for Genentech. The firm’s operation from the Kleiner & Perkins suite in Menlo Park and then from an office in San Francisco’s financial district had sufficed while the company was essentially Swanson, a part

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the science, techniques, and workforce the company needed. South San Francisco, Swanson noted, was also close to an international airport and a short drive to Kleiner & Perkins and to other venture capital partnerships around Stanford. Silicon Valley—with its high-tech industries, support services, and entrepreneurial culture—lay just to the south

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: “We were able [after insulin] to raise money at much higher prices. So high that Kleiner and I made only token investments after that, because Kleiner & Perkins already had a significant ownership of Genentech.”94 Important as human insulin was for Genentech’s development and reputation, of wider significance was its meaning

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company or, better yet, Genentech would stage a public stock offering. Through one or the other of these “exit strategies,” as venture capitalists called them, Kleiner & Perkins and its co-investors could “cash in,” and in so doing fulfill their primary responsibility: to recoup for their fund investors and for themselves their

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$500 investments in Genentech had vaulted the sons of a railroad man and an airplane mechanic to an inconceivable peak of fame and fortune. For Kleiner & Perkins, Genentech’s first investor, its 938,000 shares purchased at a reported average of $1.85 each were, in the baseball terms Perkins appreciated, a

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oral history, 1996/1997, 2. 5Ibid., 5. 6Ibid. 7For Silicon Valley’s history, culture, and major figures, see Lécuyer 2006. 8In the late 1970s, Kleiner & Perkins became Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, its current name. For the early history of the firm, see Perkins 2007 and his two oral histories, 2001 and 2009. 9Perkins oral

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history, 2001, 3. 10Years later Perkins recalled that Kleiner & Perkins’s investment in Cetus was “probably half a million. Which was a big deal in those days.” Ibid., 4. 11Ibid. Also see Perkins 2007, 119

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. “Outline for Discussion, Crocker Capital, March 12, 1976,” Chief Financial Officer files, Genentech, Inc. 37Quoted in Sylvester and Klotz 1983, 87. 38“Outline for Discussion, Kleiner & Perkins, April 1, 1976,” Chief Financial Officer files, Genentech, Inc. 39One estimate placed the cost in 1975 of moving a candidate drug through the development and

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: Punitive Damages Could Double Jury’s Award to Medical Center,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 11, 2002. 31Swanson oral history, 1996/1997, 27. In addition to Kleiner & Perkins, the Mayfield Fund, International Nickel, Innoven Capital, Sofinnova, and Hambrecht & Quist invested at $2.89 per share. “Genentech, Inc., 1979 Corporate Plan,” Chief Financial Officer

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history, 2002, 89. 92“Invitation and Open House Invitation List,” December 1, 1978, copies courtesy of Roberto Crea. Among those invited were the investment firms Kleiner & Perkins, Innoven Capital, the Hillman Company, the Mayfield Fund, International Industrial Development, Sofinnova, and Hambrecht & Quist; and the pharmaceutical companies Institut Mérieux, Hoffmann–La Roche, KabiGen

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Contributions at Genentech. Oral history conducted by Sally Smith Hughes, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2004. Perkins, Thomas J. 2001. Kleiner Perkins, Venture Capital, and the Chairmanship of Genentech, 1976–1999. Oral history conducted by Glenn E. Bugos, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California

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Corporation, 44, 64, 73, 78, 105, 106, 129, 137–38, 142, 146, 147, 148, 161, 166, 175n17 advisory board, 25–26, 27, 43, 81 and Kleiner & Perkins, 31–32, 33 Chakrabarty, Ananda, 148, 150 Chakrabarty case. See Diamond v. Chakrabarty Chang, Annie, 13–14, 17, 18 Chemical and Engineering News, 67 Chiron

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conference, 98 quoted, 84, 87, 93, 96 Kleiner, Eugene, 105 and Genentech, 40–41, 139–40 quoted, 41 and Swanson, 31, 32, 33. See also Kleiner & Perkins Kleiner & Perkins, 31–33, 38 and Cetus Corporation, 31–32 and Genentech, 40–41, 59, 77, 78, 105, 140, 158, 184n92 Kornberg, Arthur, 7–8, 24, 71

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quoted, 31–32, 33, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43, 105, 133, 147, 148, 158, 161 recruitment efforts, 82 stock-selling trip, 155–57. See also Kleiner & Perkins Pestka, Sidney, 143, 145 Pettinga, Cornelius, 94, 97 Pfizer, Inc., 175n17 pharmaceutical industry, 32, 33, 38, 39, 47, 57, 71–75 passim, 90, 94, 95

The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley

by Leslie Berlin  · 9 Jun 2005

new neighbors was Eugene Kleiner, who in 1972 partnered with an engineer-turned-Harvard-MBA named Tom Perkins to launch a venture capital company called Kleiner Perkins. Kleiner’s experiences at Fairchild had convinced him that it was best for entrepreneurs to remain independent for as long as they could. And after

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increase in the capital gains tax had scared away many casual investors but not significantly shrunk the pool of entrepreneurs looking for funding. The first Kleiner Perkins fund was $8 million, half of which came from Henry Hillman, a Pittsburgh steel magnate, and half from various limited partners, Noyce most likely among

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’s overall returns.18 In much the same way that Arthur Rock had helped Noyce and Moore incorporate Intel and draw up a business plan, Kleiner Perkins sought to go beyond the traditional investor’s approach that Eugene Kleiner once described as “putting in money and then hoping for the best

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.” Kleiner Perkins and the other Silicon Valley venture capital firms that soon followed its example recruited on behalf of the companies they supported (called “portfolio companies”), helped

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legal work, facilitated introductions to potential customers, and sponsored networking events in which the CEOs of various portfolio companies could discuss common problems and concerns. Kleiner Perkins also developed business ideas in-house with the assistance of “entrepreneurs in residence” or “business incubation” divisions. These ideas were then spun into portfolio companies

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in which the venture capitalists invested.19 Kleiner Perkins’s first $8 million fund returned more than 40 times over. Today, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers is the world’s premier venture capital firm, with assets worth more than $1 billion under

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“seed stage”; it was helping to start something new that he loved best. The Callanish Fund was not a success on the scale of a Kleiner Perkins, but it was profitable, and it satisfied Noyce’s hunger for new ideas and novel approaches. But one investment particularly captivated Noyce: Caere (pronounced “care

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nearly fail-safe minicomputers by linking 16 processors and programming them to back each other up in case of failure. Tandem’s primary backer was Kleiner Perkins, where Treybig had worked before starting the company. The company went public in 1980—Noyce’s broker Bob Harrington arranged for employees to participate in

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.55 Genentech, one of the world’s first biotech companies, was started in 1976 by a San Francisco–based biochemist at the urging of a Kleiner Perkins partner. The company was the first to produce a human protein in a microorganism and among the earliest groups to clone human insulin and human

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likely among them: in his interview with the author, Eugene Kleiner stressed that it had been very difficult to find limited partners for the first Kleiner Perkins fund. Kleiner and Noyce had already invested in each other’s companies once (Kleiner in Intel and Noyce in Kleiner’s peripherals company Cybercom). It

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, of course, proprietary. It should be noted, however, that Ann Bowers says that after their 1975 marriage, Noyce was not a limited partner in any Kleiner Perkins fund. 19. Invest and hope: Eugene Kleiner, interview by author. 20. First fund returned 40 times: Eugene Kleiner, interview by Charlie Sporck. 21. Can only

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, 387; at Fairchild, 85, 94, 106, 114, 119; in group of eight, 82–86, 92, 112, 123–24; at Shockley, 61, 65, 67, 78–79 Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers, 240, 253 Kline, Alex, x Knapic, Dean, 58, 61, 65, 77 Kobrin, Don, 387 Kojima, Yoshio, 184, 187, 195, 199. See also

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, 180–81, 186, 219, 388 Valentine, Don, 250, 388 Varian, 116 venture capital, 86, 89, 123, 157, 168, 179, 240, 262. See also Rock, Arthur; Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield, and Byers video game, 253 Vietnam war, 167, 213–14 Vognar, Linda, 388 Wall Street Journal, 82, 105 war: Cold War, 29, 82, 91

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley

by Emily Chang  · 6 Feb 2018  · 334pp  · 104,382 words

discrimination cases in Silicon Valley; in 2015, she joined the legal team representing investor Ellen Pao in her lawsuit against the storied venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Lawless has represented plaintiffs in a variety of industries but says tech is among the worst offenders. The stress I felt after reading

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fortunes to be made in the emerging field of technology, and an entire subindustry of tech-focused venture capital firms was spawned. Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers set up shop in 1972, just a year after the microprocessor was born. These firms were all-male—with many partners who were

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prioritize and source outstanding candidates that are going to cause the culture of your organization to reflect the world you want to win in.” While Kleiner Perkins is still working to rebuild its reputation post-lawsuit, Pao’s reputation has evolved considerably in the two years since the verdict. After the trial

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, http://www.babson.edu/Academics/centers/blank-center/global-research/diana/Documents/diana-project-executive-summary-2014.pdf “Please, please, really take”: Ellen Pao v. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, 1 (Cal. 2012), http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/358553/pao-complaint.pdf. Pao had a romantic: Heather Somerville, “Timeline: Ellen Pao’s Career

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News, March 27, 2015, http://www.mercurynews.com/2015/03/27/timeline-ellen-paos-career-key-moments-at-kleiner-perkins. Pao’s case piled up: Ellen Pao v. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. her memoir, Reset: Ellen Pao, Reset (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2017). “white girls—Eastern European”: Ibid. “kill the buzz”: Ellen Pao v

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. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Chien denied saying this: Nellie Bowles and Liz Gannes, “All-Male Ski Trip and No Women at Al Gore Dinner: Kleiner’s Chien

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/kleiner-partner-held-all-male-al-gore-dinner-jury-told. “The two people who”: Sam Colt, “Ellen Pao Complained She Had Gotten a ‘Demotion’ When Kleiner Perkins Downsized in 2012,” Business Insider, March 3, 2015, http://www.businessinsider.com/ellen-pao-trial-demotion-2015-3. Pao’s story appeared: David Streitfeld, “Ellen

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Pao Suit Against Kleiner Perkins Heads to Trial, with Big Potential Implications,” New York Times, Feb. 22, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/23/technology/ellen-pao-suit-against

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-kleiner-perkins-heads-to-trial-with-big-potential-implications.html. tech blogs had a field day: David Streitfeld, “Ellen Pao Loses Silicon Valley Bias Case Against Kleiner Perkins,” New York Times, March 27, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/28

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/technology/ellen-pao-kleiner-perkins-case-decision.html. only 5 out of 78: Rolfe Winkler, “Secretive, Sprawling Network of ‘Scouts’ Spreads Money

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America

by Margaret O'Mara  · 8 Jul 2019

even larger than his bosses dared to imagine. By 1980, he had made the jump across Sand Hill Road to join the emerging VC powerhouse Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield, and Byers. There, he’d later shepherd some of the biggest deals in Valley history.13 The microcomputing phenomenon gained velocity from broader political

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its minicomputers. Treybig blazed a spectacularly successful path through HP, eagerly soaking in the wandering-around managerial wisdom of Bill Hewlett. He then decamped to Kleiner Perkins to start sniffing around for ways to start his own company. By 1974, he’d found it: a new and better kind of mini, a

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was the answer to their prayers, and Treybig’s machine became a giant hit. Going public in 1977, Tandem ultimately became a massive win for Kleiner Perkins, and one of the two “early birds” giving Valley VCs hope that the Seventies slump would one day be over. (The second was the Burt

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the 1960s organizing antiwar marches and became Sun’s adult supervision—first as its sales head, and then as its chief scientist. John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins backed the deal in one of his first investments after leaving Intel to become a venture capitalist. It was a very good bet. By 1988

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, pushing the company to make and market its own motherboard to hobbyists even before the two Steves had released the Apple I. As a new Kleiner Perkins partner in the early 1980s, as microcomputer mania seized the Valley, he was hanging out at academic conferences learning about the VLSI and 3-D

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Mosaic engineering team. Weeks after that, Clark tendered his resignation at SGI and began pitching his old friend Doerr for help with his new venture. Kleiner Perkins put in $5 million, and Mosaic Communications was born.4 The rapid rise of the company that soon was renamed Netscape showed the tightly knit

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recruited AT&T Wireless CEO Jim Barksdale, formerly of FedEx; his chosen VP, Mike Homer, was a veteran of Apple. Wilson Sonsini provided outside counsel. Kleiner Perkins itself was bursting at the seams in those days with high-tech venture partners: Sun’s Vinod Khosla, Fairchild and Apple’s Floyd Kvamme, and

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year into its existence, Netscape had six million customers.6 Netscape was just one star in the growing Internet constellation financed by John Doerr and Kleiner Perkins during those heady days of the mid-1990s. The firm put money in scrappy Northern Virginia–based America Online (AOL), the successor company to The

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$7.2 billion; two years later, the stock had lost 90 percent of its value and the company was bankrupt.) And an earlier generation of Kleiner Perkins hits helped the online world build out and scale up. In March 1995, making good on its promises that “the network is the computer,” Sun

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and specialized expertise and tacit knowledge that made Silicon Valley soar. Other Valley VCs, both veteran and new, had giant Internet wins, of course. But Kleiner Perkins came to symbolize the dot-com generation more than any other. The firm was the MITI of the Internet era, and John Doerr was the

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into one. Thanks to Doerr, the fight against 211 became Silicon Valley’s obsession for most of 1996. He bent ears, raised money, and turned Kleiner Perkins into a campaign headquarters, with a giant banner reading “NO on 211” draped over its facade. Doerr’s forces eventually raised $38 million to fight

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stunning deal: Brin and Page scored a cool $25 million in venture funding, split evenly between two of the Valley’s heaviest dot-com hitters, Kleiner Perkins’s John Doerr and Sequoia’s Michael Moritz. Bezos had advised them where to go for the money, and with confidence that bordered on arrogance

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Google to become its CFO. Meeker already had moved to California by then, too, departing Morgan Stanley in late 2010 to become a partner at Kleiner Perkins, bringing along her now-legendary annual slideshow on Internet trends. Meeker was bullish once more, and it wasn’t empty hype: the new generation of

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later, the iPhone was a smash, the former veep was worth $100 million, and he accepted John Doerr’s invitation to become a partner at Kleiner Perkins. The politician mocked for his earnest and robotic mien, who had longed for and very nearly achieved the presidency, had at last found his niche

…

start a new venture firm under her own leadership. Theodore Schleifer, “Mary Meeker, the Legendary Internet Analyst, Is Leaving Kleiner Perkins,” Recode, September 14, 2018, https://www.recode.net/2018/9/14/17858582/kleiner-perkins-mary-meeker-split, archived at https://perma.cc/FJ8S-DVUM. 11. Jesse Drucker, “Kremlin Cash Behind Billionaire’s Twitter

…

cleantech tarnished Kleiner and VC star John Doerr,” Reuters Business News, January 15, 2013. 20. David Streitfeld, “Kleiner Perkins Denies Sex Bias in Response to a Lawsuit,” The New York Times, June 14, 2012; Ellen Huet, “Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr and Ellen Pao: A Mentorship Sours,” Forbes, March 4, 2015. 21. Gené Teare and

…

Killian, James R., Jr., 45 King, Edward, 193 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 127 Kirkpatrick, David, 394 Klein, Joel, 345 Kleiner, Eugene, 40, 41, 180, 202 Kleiner Perkins (KP), 142, 202, 275, 304–7, 335, 337, 355, 385, 393, 395–98 Koogle, Tim, 309 Koppel, Ted, 217 Korean War, 15, 23, 30, 69

Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get From Start-Up to IPO on Your Terms

by Jeffrey Bussgang  · 31 Mar 2010  · 253pp  · 65,834 words

it is an indicator that the VC’s goals are aligned with the entrepreneur’s. A bit of history illuminates this point. Silicon Valley-based Kleiner Perkins, one of the most successful VC firms in history, had a consistency to their fund sizes in the 1980s and early 1990s. In 1982, they

…

fees. So, the natural incentive for many is to keep fund sizes large, and therefore fees large, even if the fundamentals do not support it. Kleiner Perkins cut their post-bubble fund, raised in 2004, to $400 million—smaller than their 2000 fund, but still nearly three times what they raised in

…

be fair, the pattern I’ve just described has played out throughout the industry, not just at Kleiner Perkins. And, of course, anyone would have been thrilled to have been an investor in the Kleiner Perkins fund that invested in Google, no matter how large it was. The point is that many funds have

…

the job at Upromise. My partner, Michael Bronner, and I flew out to California to meet with John Doerr and his partners at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, generally known as Kleiner Perkins. John Doerr is one of the most famous VCs in history and considered the “center of gravity in the Internet,” according to

…

staff made us feel at home offering cold drinks, fresh fruit, magazines, and newspapers—all with warm smiles and welcoming words. I later learned that Kleiner Perkins, like many of the best VC firms, instructs their support staff to treat entrepreneurs like superstars rather than peons begging for money (which we were

…

“fishbowl,” the glass-enclosed conference room where the partner meetings are held. Although we were a bit intimidated to be in front of the entire Kleiner Perkins partnership (which, in addition to Doerr, included other VC legends, like Sun co-founder Vinod Khosla), the pitch started off well. We articulated our vision

…

company (Michael) and a leading Internet commerce company (me) and the fact that this new start-up would be a blend of the two. The Kleiner Perkins partners listened politely and patiently. I thought things were going reasonably well. Then, on slide 17, John Doerr went to work on us. “What are

…

asked a dozen more killer questions. We stumbled ahead and answered as best we could. Finally, it was over. Later that day, one of the Kleiner Perkins partners called me to inform us of their decision. “We decided we’re going to invest in you and join in this financing,” he said

…

pitch meeting—preferably through a warm introduction—how you conduct the pitch is crucial. As I demonstrated in the account of my Upromise pitch to Kleiner Perkins, a lack of preparation can be painful, if not fatal. At the initial meeting, you may not get much time to state your case. At

…

IPO and world domination strategy? If a less well-known VC gave Google founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin money rather than John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, would they have been able to convince Silicon Valley veteran Schmidt to join these two Stanford PhDs and take the CEO gig at Google—never

…

. VCs can often act as valuable salespeople, rainmakers who can help bring in the “make the company” deal alongside the management team. John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins was a great role model for me at Upromise. We wanted to connect with the CEOs of major consumer companies to convince them of the

…

contracts we had promised Bill Bradley. Fortunately, we closed them all and launched the service successfully a few months later. One of the partners at Kleiner Perkins remarked to me a few months later, “I’ve never seen a team so precisely execute on its business development plans so fast.” That’s

…

entrepreneurs at VC-backed companies. And an increasingly large number of these firms abroad are sponsored or partially owned by American VCs. Accel, Benchmark, DFJ, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, and many other top-tier venture capital firms have established subsidiaries or joint ventures in Asia and Europe to export their brands in

…

Corporation (DEC) Digitas Dintersmith, Ted Dispatch Management Services Corporation (DMSC) Dispatch Network (dNET) Dixon, Chris Dodge, Don Doerr, John as business developer firms, analysis of Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers VC activities of Domain expert, board member as Doriot, General Dorsey, Jack on amount to raise background information business motivation of on choosing

…

Kaiser, Bill Karlen, Jon blog of at Flybridge and Zing Systems deal See also Flybridge Capital Partners Kawasaki, Guy Khosla, Vinod Kidd, Greg Kirsner, Scott Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers firms, analysis of and Upromise Kopelman, Josh blog of First Round, management of Langer, Robert background information Langer Lab patents held and Terry

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