Eugene Kleiner


Eugene Kleiner was an Austrian-born American engineer and venture capitalist. He is considered a pioneer of Silicon Valley. He was one of the original founders of Kleiner Perkins, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm which later became Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The company was an early investor in more than 300 information technology and biotech firms, including Amazon.com, AOL, Brio Technology, Electronic Arts, Flextronics, Genentech, Google, Hybritech, Intuit, Lotus Development, LSI Logic, Macromedia, Netscape, Quantum, Segway, Sun Microsystems and Tandem Computers.

Early life and education

Kleiner was born on May 12, 1923 in Vienna, Austria. In 1938, he fled Nazi persecution of Jews with his family from Vienna, Austria, arriving in New York two years later. He served in the U.S. Army, then earned a Bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the Polytechnic University of New York in 1948 and a Master's degree in industrial engineering from New York University.

Career

After briefly teaching engineering, he joined Western Electric, the manufacturing arm of AT&T Corporation.
In 1956, he was among the first to accept an offer from William Shockley to come to California to help form what became Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. In 1957, he and seven colleagues left the laboratory to found Fairchild Semiconductor, which most historians mark as the first major spin-off of what later was called Silicon Valley. According to fellow venture capitalist Arthur Rock, Kleiner led the eight, obtaining a $1.5 million investment from Sherman Fairchild and taking over the new firm's administrative duties.
Kleiner later invested his own money in Intel, a semiconductor firm founded in 1968 by fellow Fairchild founders Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore.
In 1972, he joined Hewlett-Packard veteran Tom Perkins to found Kleiner Perkins, the venture capital firm now headquartered on Sand Hill Road. In 1977, the company added Brook Byers and Frank J. Caufield as named partners. He retired from day-to-day responsibilities in the early 1980s.

Personal life

In 1947, he married the former Rose Wassertheil, a Polish Jewish émigrée. They had two children, Robert and Lisa. He died on November 20, 2003 in Los Altos Hills, California.

Kleiner's laws