Arthur Rock

Arthur Rock is a foundational figure in both books’ accounts of how venture capital began. In The Power Law — Venture Capital & the Making of the New Future, Rock is the financier who provided the impetus for Fairchild’s creation and “opened the founders’ eyes to the possibility of owning the fruits of their research” — the originating move behind Silicon Valley’s stock-for-everyone culture. Through the Davis & Rock fund he and his partner deliberately rejected modern-portfolio-theory diversification, making concentrated bets on roughly a dozen companies; their initial $3.4M fund wound up worth almost $77M by 1968 — a 22.6x return that, the book notes, “easily eclipsed Warren Buffett in this period.” Rock treated venture investing as a subjective art (“the seat of the pants” or “the top of the hat”) and crystallized the people-first creed: he skipped the financial projections in business plans and flipped to the founders’ résumés, arguing that the only real asset of a tech startup was human talent — what he called “intellectual book value.”

VC: An American History places Rock in the same canon, naming him alongside Tom Perkins (Kleiner Perkins) and Don Valentine (Sequoia Capital) as the three figures who personified the industry’s core investment styles: Rock identified opportunities by investing in people, Perkins by investing in technology, and Valentine by investing in markets. The book dates the founding of Davis and Rock to 1961.

Context: Arthur Rock (b. 1926) was an early venture capitalist who helped finance Fairchild Semiconductor, then backed Scientific Data Systems (SDS), Teledyne, Intel, and Apple, where he chaired the board. He is widely credited with helping invent the modern West Coast VC model.

Where this appears

• The Power Law — Venture Capital & the Making of the New Future — central early-VC figure; Davis & Rock’s concentrated-bet model, 22.6x return, “intellectual book value,” and Fairchild’s stock-ownership culture.
• VC: An American History — named with Perkins and Valentine as one of the three figures personifying VC’s people/technology/markets investment styles; Davis and Rock founded 1961.