About Kleiner Perkins first fund (episode 3)
February 9th, 2009Eureka!
A few days ago, I received an “old” book, The New Venturers: Inside the high stakes word of venture capital by John G. Wilson (Addison-Wesley, 1985). This is a great book about the early history of venture capital and Wilson had many interesting data. Chapter 5 “The New Entrepreneurs” is about Kleiner Perkins and Wilson publishes there KP’s first fund portfolio and performance. The data are consistent with Golis’ data in my previous post but still different…
Unfortunately Wilson does not mention his sources and when I asked Perkins again about these, he answered: “Each name rings true in my memory, but I have no idea if the numbers are accurate. I think John Wilson got his hands on one or our reports to the Limited Partners—not directly from us. It’s probably all correct.”
If anyone can help me knowing more, i.e. access to KP’s LPs (Wilmington Securities for example) or to John Wilson… there might be an episode 4!
Tags: Kleiner Perkins, Venture Capital
February 26th, 2010 at 11:57 am
[...] The legend says that Bob Swason, a 29-year old venture capitalist, met Herbert Boyer, a professor at the University of California in San Francisco (UCSF). The money of Bob and the ideas of Herbert made possible the creation of Genentech in 1976, followed by its IPO in 1980. The story deserves however a little more attention. Bob Swanson was not really an investor. He is an entrepreneur. he has been hired by Kleiner and Perkins (KP) who had understood that the real value of a venture capital firm is to create company and not only to fund them. They understood this after the success of Tandem and Jimmy Treybig whom they financed from day 1 in 1974. (See KP first fund). [...]