Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins pioneered hands-on venture investing in the 1970s
Sebastian Mallaby · Sebastian Mallaby – The Making of the New Future in Venture, Venture is Eating the Investment World 14 (Capital Allocators, EP.245) · Apr 11, 2022 · at 13:52
Financial historian Sebastian Mallaby explains how early venture capital evolved from Arthur Rock's financial engineering to the operator-led models of Don Valentine and Tom Perkins.
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“And these two companies, Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins, improvised two things in the 19 seventies. The first was this hands-on approach. Arthur Rock had been a financier by background. He had been important in things like devising equity stock options and devising the financial structure of the startups that he backed. He was not an operator. Whereas Don Valentine had been a semiconductor salesman and was very much an operator businessman, not a financier at all, really, just somebody who liked to build companies who understood business. And Tom Perkins, likewise, who turned out to be the driving force in Kleiner Perkins, he had done his own entrepreneurial startup. He had been a senior manager at Hewlett Packard. He was very much hands-on as well.”
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