Kleiner Perkins, formerly Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), is an American venture capital firm which specializes in investing in incubation, early stage and growth companies. Since its founding in 1972, the firm has backed entrepreneurs in over 900 ventures, including America Online, Amazon.com, Tandem Computers, Compaq, Electronic Arts, JD.com, Square, Genentech, Google, Netscape, Sun Microsystems, Nest, Palo Alto Networks, Synack, Snap, AppDynamics, and Twitter. By 2019 it had raised around $9 billion in 19 venture capital funds and four growth funds.
Eugene Kleiner 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.
Brian Reynolds is an American videogame designer. Reynolds has designed at SecretNewCo, Zynga, Big Huge Games, and MicroProse and has been chairman of the International Game Developers Association. He has played a major part in designing a number of multi-million selling games including Civilization II, Rise of Nations, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, and FrontierVille. He has also founded or co-founded three game companies, SecretNewCo, Big Huge Games, and Firaxis Games.
L. John Doerr is an American investor and venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins in Menlo Park, California. In February 2009, Doerr was appointed a member of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board to provide the President and his administration with advice and counsel in trying to fix America's economic downturn. Forbes ranked Doerr as the 40th richest person in tech in 2017, and as of August 1, 2023, as the 146th richest person in the world, with a net worth of US$11.9 billion. Doerr is the author of Measure What Matters, a book about goal-setting, and Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now.
Louis Castle is an American video games designer. He is known for co-founding Westwood Studios, designing the PC game Blade Runner, and collaborating with Steven Spielberg on the Boom Blox and Boom Blox Bash Party video games for the Wii console based on Spielberg's design ideas.
Bruce Campbell Shelley is an American board and video game designer. He is primarily associated as the co-designer of the video games Railroad Tycoon and Civilization with Sid Meier, and later the Age of Empires series.
Total Entertainment Network (TEN) was an online gaming service that existed from September 1996 until October 1999. T E Network, Inc., which created and operated the TEN service, was formed from the merger of Optigon Interactive and Outland in June 1995 when they received their first round of venture capital funding from Vinod Khosla, a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Donald Allan Mattrick is a Canadian businessman who co-founded Distinctive Software (DSI) in 1982 in Vancouver at age 17, while graduating from high school and attending Simon Fraser University where he studied business and managerial economics. DSI became the largest independent game developer in North America and was then acquired by Electronic Arts in 1991 who renamed it to EA Vancouver and later EA Canada. Mattrick worked at EA Canada for 15 years as the president of Worldwide Studios. In 2007, he joined Microsoft as the president of the Interactive Entertainment Business, famous for developing Kinect for Xbox 360. From 2013 to 2015, he then became the CEO of publicly trading social gaming company Zynga.
John Maeda is a Vice President of Design and Artificial Intelligence at Microsoft. He is an American technologist and designer whose work explores where business, design, and technology merge to make space for the "humanist technologist."
Zynga Inc. is an American developer and publisher running social video game services. It was founded in April 2007, with headquarters in San Mateo, California. The company primarily focuses on mobile and social networking platforms. Zynga states its mission as "connecting the world through games".
Ngmoco, LLC was an American-based publisher of video games for the iOS and Android platforms, and a subsidiary of DeNA Co., Ltd. The company was founded by former Electronic Arts executive Neil Young in July 2008. Since its founding, ngmoco has had more than seven million combined game installs. Venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Norwest Venture Partners, among others, have financed the company with a combined total of US$40.6 million. The company is most well known for their publishing of the Rolando game series and Eliminate Pro.
Lockerz.com was an international social commerce website based in Seattle, Washington. In July 2011, the site claimed to have 19 million members in 195 different countries.
The Ville is a defunct game by Zynga released on June 30, 2012 in which the object was to earn experience points by building a house and talking with neighbors.
Raymond J. Lane is an American business executive and strategist specializing in technology and finance. Lane is best known for assisting corporations with technology strategy, organizational development, team building, and sales and growth management.
Ryan Panchadsaram was the Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the United States. He assumed this role under the second Chief Technology Officer of the United States, Todd Park. Panchadsaram was formerly a senior advisor to Park, starting in 2013, and is credited as an early member of the Healthcare.gov rescue team. Panchadsaram is currently a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers and co-founder of the United States Digital Response in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ellen Pao v. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers LLC and DOES 1-20 is a lawsuit filed in 2012 in San Francisco County Superior Court under the law of California by executive Ellen Pao for gender discrimination against her employer, the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. Overlapping with a number of studies condemning the representation of women in venture capital, the case was followed closely by reporters, advocacy groups and Silicon Valley executives. Given the tendency for similar cases to reach settlements out of court, coverage of Pao v. Kleiner Perkins described it as a landmark trial once it began in February 2015. On March 27, 2015 the jury found in favor of Kleiner Perkins on all counts.
Jared Seth Morgenstern is an American designer and entrepreneur who graduated from Harvard University with a Master's and Undergraduate Degree magna cum laude in Computer Science. Shortly after graduating from Harvard, Morgenstern began working on a social networking website called Metails.com with former classmate, Eddie Lim. Lim and Morgenstern plus a team of two more employees sold Metails.com to Buy.com in 2004. In January 2006, Morgenstern was recruited to join Facebook as its third designer. At Facebook Jared would eventually lead the product teams working on Virtual Gifts, Usernames, Games, Social Ads, and the Like button among other projects.
Hazelight Studios is a video game development company based in Stockholm, Sweden. Founded by director Josef Fares in 2014, the company is best known for developing cooperative multiplayer games A Way Out and It Takes Two. Both games were published by Electronic Arts under the EA Originals label.
Mark Skaggs is an American video game producer and executive. Skaggs is known for leading the team that created the Facebook game FarmVille for Zynga, leading the team that created CityVille. He served as Executive Producer and product lead for the PC real-time strategy games Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, Command & Conquer: Generals, and The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth.
