Valley Boy

18 Jan 2008 09:58

Venture capitalist Tom Perkins recounts stories from his eventful life, which includes several spells on HP's board, funding companies like Netscape and Google, marriage to a best-selling novelist, and a revolutionary video compression technology that got away.

Intermittently, he takes swipes at Carly Fiorina, her book, and her time at Hewlett-Packard — a company he worked for and left four times. The last of those was a stint on the board (the one with all the leaks and illegal surveillance), which he quit in protest. The memoirist, Tom Perkins, in short, has lived the sort of life that Lady Bracknell would definitely feel was overcrowded with incident.

But the reason you might be reading all those pieces of his life in Valley Boy (subtitle: 'Deals, venture capital, entrepreneurs, ocean racing, vintage cars and extraordinary women — a heavy mix of picaresque adventure and high finance') is even more incident. Perkins is the 'Perkins' in Kleiner Perkins, the famed Silicon Valley venture capital firm that started or financed Tandem, Genentech, AOL, Netscape, Amazon and Google. Along the way, Kleiner Perkins reinvented the way venture capitalists do business. Some people call them 'vulture capitalists', Netscape founder Jim Clark among them. However, as Perkins points out, Clark can't have disliked Kleiner Perkins too much, since the company financed three companies for him.

In Valley Boy, Perkins recounts all these stories and more in varying amounts of detail, beginning with the physics teacher who engineered his escape from a modest life as the son of a fire-risk assessor by insisting he apply to MIT. The one subject he glosses over is his marriage to Danielle Steel. Finding it too difficult to write about but knowing readers are curious, he handles it by reprinting an interview he gave on the subject to Celebrity Wire.

Yet the biggest deal of his career is one that got away. Dutch TV repair technician Jan Sloot claimed to have invented a technique for compressing full-motion video into kilobytes by using look-up tables to generate images. Disbelieving, Perkins insisted on a live demonstration — and signed up as an investor when 20 minutes of the TV programme he chose randomly played back, froze, fast forwarded and rewound from the 75KB smart card on which Sloot had stored it. Some still argue that Sloot's invention was a hoax, but Perkins certainly believed he had seen a technology that was going to change the world and make billions. The next day Sloot died, taking with him the key secret that made the technology work.

Story URL: http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/software/productivity/0,1000001108,39292240,00.htm