Eugene Kleiner

Eugene Kleiner (12 May 1923 – 20 November 2003) was an Austrian-American engineer and venture capitalist. He is considered a pioneer of Silicon Valley. He was one of the original founders of Fairchild Semiconductor, part of the Traitorous Eight, and 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, 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 (the "Fairchild eight", whom Shockley dubbed the "traitorous eight") 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.