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.
Brook Byers is a senior partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and the brother of Stanford University Professor Tom Byers and Atlanta, Georgia engineering entrepreneur Ken Byers.
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.
Bertrand Serlet is a French software engineer and businessman; he worked first at the Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique (INRIA) before leaving France for the United States in 1985. He was the Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at Apple Inc.
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.
Frank J. Caufield was a co-founder and named partner of the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, based in Menlo Park, California.
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."
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.
Graphiq is a semantic technology company that uses artificial intelligence to rapidly create interactive data-driven infographics. Its intent is similar to Wolfram Alpha which is designed to provide users with direct information on a variety of subjects rather than going through a search engine.
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.
Mike Abbott is the Executive Vice President, Software for General Motors. He was formerly the vice president of Apple's Cloud Services team. He also previously worked as a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, vice president of engineering at Twitter, team lead for Azure at Microsoft and senior vice president of apps and services at Palm.
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.
Women in venture capital or VC are investors who provide venture capital funding to startups. Women make up a small fraction of the venture capital private equity workforce. A widely used source for tracking the number of women in venture capital is the Midas List which has been published by Forbes since 2001. Research from Women in VC, a global community of women venture investors, shows that the percentage of female VC partners is just shy of 5 percent.
Optoro is a reverse logistics technology company that works with retailers and manufacturers to manage and then resell their returned and excess merchandise. These products, which range from consumer electronics to home goods to clothing, are automatically listed on online marketplaces, including Amazon, eBay, Buy.com, BestBuy. Optoro also liquidates goods in bulk through its other proprietary website.
Eric Feng is an American software engineer, business executive, and financier. He is a former general partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, where he focused on leading early stage consumer investments before leaving in 2018. Previously he was CTO of Kleiner Perkins portfolio company Flipboard, along with other companies.
