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).