Thomas Perkins, billionaire founder of famed Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has died at the age of 84.
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Silicon Valley venture capitalist Thomas J. Perkins died Tuesday night at his home in Tiburon, Calif. of natural causes after a prolonged illness, his long-time assistant Kathleen Daly confirmed.
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers was founded in 1972 at the early days of Silicon Valley. 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. Perkins also recruited partners like John Doerr, now the chairman of Kleiner Perkins, who started a new era of investing in Internet companies like Netscape, AOL, Amazon, and Google. There were semiconductor companies such as Intel in the area, attracting computer makers who used these components, developers and the service industry.
In 2014, the Sand Hill institution with his name on the door distanced itself from its famous founder after he penned an ill-advised letter to the Wall Street Journal comparing the rise in popular resentment of the wealthy “1 percent” to the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. In 1996, he was convicted in France of involuntary manslaughter from a yacht collision.
At our Disrupt SF conference in 2013, Perkins appeared with Sequoia Capital founder Don Valentine, where he paid tribute to his mentor David Packard and talked about his career’s highs (like investing in Genentech) and lows (like passing on Apple). Waters adds that the letter “was widely condemned in Silicon Valley”, including by Kleiner Perkins. “His accusations cost chairwoman Patricia Dunn her job and led to criminal charges against her, which were later dropped”, reports Marisa Kendall for the San Jose Mercury News.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Mass., in 1953, and an MBA at Harvard Business School four years later. During the 2016 election cycle, Perkins backed former HP CEO Carly Fiorina’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination.
While working his way up the ranks at Hewlett-Packard in San Francisco, Mr. Perkins spent nights and weekends in nearby Berkeley to develop a laser company, University Laboratories, during the 1960s.
One of Perkins’ biggest personal investments was a 289-foot sailing yacht, the Maltese Falcon.
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Perkins served on the board of News Corp. In 2006, Perkins published the romance novel * a href=”https://www.amazon.com/Sex-Single-Zillionaire-Tom-Perkins/dp/0060859776?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0″ target=”_blank” *”Sex and the Single Zillionaire”. He is survived by two children from that marriage, a son, Tor, and a daughter, Elizabeth.
