Posted on 06/09/2016 9:21:15 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Tom Perkins, one of Silicon Valley's first venture capitalists, died this week.
The New York Times reported on Thursday that the financier died at 84 at home in Tiburon, Calif., of natural causes. The firm he helped co-found, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, confirmed the news to NPR.
Perkins and Eugene Kleiner co-founded a venture capital firm in 1972 — "at a time when parts of Silicon Valley were still largely fruit orchards," as the Times points out. The firm later grew into a behemoth, propelling a new approach to investment, the Times reports:
"Perkins and his partners popularized a model of investment that involved putting small amounts of money into promising young start-ups in return for a stake in the companies, giving them advice and counsel to spur their growth."
In a statement given to NPR on Thursday, KPCB co-founders Brook Byers and Frank Caufield called Perkins a pioneer in the venture capital industry, who witnessed the "start of the biotech industry and the computer revolution."
"He defined what we know of today as entrepreneurial venture capital by going beyond just funding to helping entrepreneurs realize their visions with operating expertise," they wrote. "Tom was our partner and friend, and we will miss him."
Over the years, KPCB has invested in numerous tech giants, including Google, Twitter, Amazon, Square, Airbnb, Uber, Spotify and various biotech and energy firms.
Perkins served on the board of directors of several companies, such as the biotech firm Genentech, that bloomed into successful corporations.
As a board member, Perkins played the pivotal role in a phone-spying scandal that embroiled Hewlett-Packard in 2006 and resulted in the resignation of chairwoman Patricia Dunn and an overhaul of the board, the Wall Street Journal reported at the time:
"The California attorney general charged [Dunn] on four felony counts of fraud and conspiracy, saying she led the H-P board into criminal violations of privacy when the company pried into personal phone records to investigate boardroom leaks.
"Mr. Perkins set the charges in motion by storming off the board and alerting authorities to the phone snooping. He contacted the Securities and Exchange Commission and California's attorney general, pressing them to take action."
In 2014, Perkins also landed in the headlines for a letter published in the Journal that compared the San Francisco protests against the "one percent" of rich tech entrepreneurs to the 1938 series of coordinated attacks by Nazis against the Jews.
His firm, KPCB, distanced itself at the time, tweeting that it was "shocked by his views" and he "has not been involved" with the firm in years.
He is responsible Tandem Computers, Genentech, and Sun Microsystems, in a way that VCs today weren’t.
“His firm, KPCB, distanced itself at the time, tweeting that it was “shocked by his views” and he “has not been involved” with the firm in years.”
Gutless bastards!
Ah yes the vulture capitalists.... the necessary evil of the start up company
Tom was a terrific guy...
Why is providing necessary capital to startup companies is necessarily vulture and/or evil?
Some are, but it's mostly for those companies that are "in distress" — there are enough VCs and so much money floating around that for many startups there are a lot of opportunities to pick a firm that will provide not just money but also direction and experienced business advice along with potential symbiotic relationships with other companies, usually overseen by some position(s) on the company board of directors.
Quite a few startups have an idea or a product, but very little in the way of the business plan. VCs might be the ones who would see the bigger picture or the market(s) and have the capital and relationships to make it into reality.
VCs often become good partners. Cisco and appointment of John Chambers to CEO is just one such example.
I'd love to know more Vendome.
I have a theory, that the vaulted "Clinton Economy" had nothing to do with Clinton.
I was in CAD at the time and saw the rapid changes, and knew darn well he had nothing to do with it, he was just chit lucky. He was just their when not just software, but high speed microchips ( thank you the Late Andy Grove, and so many other unsung hero's and opine the names of others if you can ) that made these technologies fungible so that it could be bought and used by a small manufacturing firm as they bought a number of seats of CAD/CAM tools that took their little company to the next level.
What I can't rap my head around is who or what was the driver?
I keep coming back to the F-16. It needed negative static stability which needed massive computing power for it's day and an engine that had be be snappy, hence a "FADEC" Full Authority Digital Engine Control, and this came out of the fly off for the A-FX aircraft. Or was something else the driver.
Anyway, so many brilliant individuals and visionaries like Mr Perkins that saw the potential in these pardigm changing technologies helped change the world.
And contrary to popular belief, They did build that....
He had a great sailboat.
Some may...most do not.....
RIP.
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