Valley Boy
By Tom Perkins
Gotham, 304 Pages, $28

Venture capitalists have not been in the news of late—hedge funds have proved a quicker way to squander capital—but in the late 1990s, they had their day. For a brief period coinciding with the dotcom craze, none were more confident, more sublimely endowed than venture capitalists. They conjured up the digital future; they launched companies; they even invented a lingo.

Remember brick and mortar? That was V.C.'s disparaging term for the unfortunate slice of America that remained, as it were, tangible and offline; venture capitalists themselves, or those of my acquaintance at least, were lofty and cerebral. They worked in offices with whitewashed walls, tasteful plants, and nary a screwdriver in sight.

One of the attractions of Valley Boy, Tom Perkins' quirky memoir, is that it recalls the gritty and quite physical origins of Silicon Valley. Perkins, a founder of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the most successful V.C. firm in history, was a teenage science nerd raised in the 1940s by a cold father and a suicidally inclined mother. (She would pose dramatically with a knife to her wrist when young Tom ventured into the kitchen.)

Perkins escaped from this domestic travail by pursuing an interest in electronics. He became handy with cooling tubes and photoelectric cells, and he assembled television sets from kits and sold them in the neighborhood. He fancied he would become a TV repairman, but a physics teacher insisted he could do better. An engineering degree from M.I.T. and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School followed, after which he worked for a string of high-tech companies, notably Hewlett-Packard, where he was lucky to have Dave Packard, H.P.'s legendary co-founder, as a mentor.

As a side project while at H.P., Perkins invented a Lasertron. It sounds like a kid's toy but is actually, Perkins assures us, a laser that is as easy to use as a lightbulb. This netted him a small fortune. Shortly afterward, he and Eugene Kleiner, a refugee from Hitler's Austria, resolved to start a venture capital firm.

Kleiner Perkins would launch an amazing roster of companies—more than 475 to date—including Compaq, Netscape, Amazon, Sun Microsystems, and Google. Perkins, however, is just as interested in recounting his myriad extracurricular escapades. A dashing entrepreneur who seems straight out of the Gilded Age, he collected racecars, rescued the troubled San Francisco Ballet, courted and married romance novelist Danielle Steel, learned the ropes as a volunteer firefighter, and created a stir on various corporate boards. Controversy dogged him. He was even convicted of involuntary manslaughter following a yachting accident in France (a conviction he claims was unjust).

But when he gets around to it, Perkins gives us just enough on Kleiner Perkins to understand the firm's success. He admits that luck played a part and is quick to own up to his foibles. When he was still working a corporate job, he used his profits from the Lasertron to buy a Ferrari and show up his bosses—stupid, he admits, but a lot of fun. His self-effacing humor sets a proper tone for the surprisingly humble story of his V.C. firm's beginnings.

In 1972, when Perkins and Kleiner, a veteran of famed Fairchild Semiconductor, decided to raise money, the concept of venture capital was nearly unknown. Hoping to raise $10 million, they had to settle for $8 million—pocket change in today's world. Weirder still, Kleiner and Perkins had trouble finding entrepreneurs to take the money. But the pair had a singular insight: Rather than look for ready-made business plans to fund from on high, they decided to get involved in creating ventures as well as closely nurturing and even managing them. An early partner worked with Perkins on an idea for a "fail-safe" computer (one that automatically protects data and programs against crashes) and left to found Tandem Computers. Another former partner started Genentech. Kleiner Perkins didn't merely finance these startups; it served as their incubator.

Perkins says his aim was to treat new ventures just as H.P. had, as investments to be closely shepherded within the V.C. family. Success depended on both analysis and intuition. As Perkins relates from his H.P. days, Bill Hewlett was once presented with a proposal to get into the pocket-calculator business. Naysayers, noting that slide rules were cheaper, said the idea was untenable. Hewlett listened politely, smiled, and said, "Well, I guess that gives us the go-ahead." Calculators proved a stunning success.

Needless to say, the reward for getting in on the ground floor could satisfy Midas. Kleiner Perkins acquired a third of Genentech, worth about $26 billion today, for a mere $250,000. Also, by working closely with affiliates, the partners developed a loyal network of entrepreneurs who continually fed them new prospects. Thus, a co-founder of Sun later tipped them to a search-engine prospect named Google.

My major beef with Perkins is that he skips the mad overreaching that took place during the dotcom bubble, for which Kleiner Perkins was as culpable as anyone. You will recall that in the late '90s, V.C. firms famed for their long-term perspective got caught up in the era's zany predictions and short-term greed. Perkins should have reckoned with it. A minor beef concerns his random style. The book begins, improbably, with an account of the recent boardroom scandal at H.P., where Perkins was a director at the time. Next comes his yacht, his first wife, then a bit later his turbulent union with Steel, and still later how he wrote a novel. This disjointed approach feels lazy; only a wealthy man could write such a book. But his yarns are engaging, and his unpretentious manner is rather a relief. Here is a businessman who had some fun.