Silicon Valley pioneer Eugene Kleiner, whose ideas and money spawned a brood of high-tech giants, has died. He was 80.
Kleiner died of heart failure last Thursday (November 20) at his Los Altos Hills, California, home, according to a family statement issued yesterday announcing his death.
Although he shunned the limelight most of his life, Kleiner played a pivotal role in building Silicon Valley, first as a scientist, then as an entrepreneur and venture capitalist. In the 1950s, Kleiner helped lay the groundwork for one of Silicon Valley’s seminal companies, Fairchild Semiconductor which became the entrepreneurial breeding ground that hatched several other groundbreaking companies, including Intel, National Semiconductor and Advanced Micro Devices.
During the early 1970s, he founded one of nation’s most powerful venture capital firms, Menlo Park’s Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers, which has financed a long line of high-tech powerhouses, including Sun Microsystems, Tandem Computers, Compaq Computer and Amazon.com.
A native Austrian who fled Europe before World War II, Kleiner eventually settled in California during the mid-1950s when he and seven other East Coast scientists were recruited by Nobel Prize winner William Shockley to help build computer transistors.
Shockley’s recruits eventually rebelled and left their startup to form their own company. The defection tagged the men with an unflattering nickname – “the Traitorous Eight”.
With their subsequent achievements, the men would be hailed among as Silicon Valley’s founding fathers. Besides Kleiner, the eight men included Intel Corp co-founders Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, as well as Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Jay Last and Sheldon Roberts.
“Helping entrepreneurs find their way was a source of great pride for him,” Kleiner’s son, Robert, said yesterday.
