KLEINER PERKINS - Klown cutout with insider run on tech out of silicon valley
Kleiner and Schmidt go back
If anyone was gonna be behind a bug on electronic voting systems meet suspects 1 and 2
This from 1998 article
All this is because the partners prefer to be seen not as financiers, a term they disdain, but as company builders who work closely with the entrepreneurs they fund. Even though KP has raised some $650 million in capital in the past four years and clocked annual returns well in excess of anything most Wall Street money managers could sustain, the partners insist that making money is not the essence of what they do. Partner Vinod Khosla sums up: "We're really in the venture-assistance business, helping entrepreneurs and management teams build great companies. If I was driven by money, I wouldn't be doing this." That is, actually, believable. Like many bright lights in Silicon Valley, most KP partners are wealthy enough to retire this instant; if there weren't some higher cause, they probably wouldn't be turning up every day on Sand Hill Road.
Kleiner Perkins is no place for freshly minted MBAs on the make. Not a single partner has a financial background–instead, each is required to have operating experience, either in running a company or in working near the top at a large company. Doerr worked in sales at Intel and co-founded a chip company that he sold for $125 million. Khosla was the first CEO of Sun Microsystems. Siegelman worked for seven years at Microsoft. Ted Schlein ran networking and client-server technology at Symantec. None started with the goal of becoming a VC. "I wake up most mornings thinking I want to run a company," says Kevin Compton, who came to KP as an "entrepreneur in residence" after a KP company acquired his Kansas City computer-store chain. He intended to stay a year or two and then launch another company. That was eight years ago.