Kyle Harrison
person

Tom Perkins

Tom Perkins

Tom Perkins is a co-founder of Kleiner Perkins (1972) and, across Kyle’s reading, the archetype of the activist, “entrepreneurs ourselves” venture capitalist. The line Kyle returns to most — quoted in both The Power Law — Venture Capital & the Making of the New Future and What Is An Investor — is Perkins’s framing of the firm: “We distinguished ourselves right from the beginning by saying: We are not investors. We’re not Wall-Street, stock-picker, investor people. We are entrepreneurs ourselves, and we will work with entrepreneurs in an entrepreneurial way… We will be in it up to our elbows.” In What Is An Investor - Research this anchors the essay’s “VCs who reject the label” thread, and Ho Nam’s own stance is noted as an echo of it.

The Power Law — Venture Capital & the Making of the New Future paints Perkins as “a Ferrari-driving, yacht-owning, self-regarding dandy” — the first venture capitalist “to revel unashamedly in the role of promoter and front man.” It credits him with Perkins’s law: “market risk is inversely proportional to technical risk,” because solving a truly hard technical problem leaves you facing minimal competition (drawn from the Tandem and Genentech bets). Mallaby uses Perkins, alongside Don Valentine, as evidence that great VCs “stamp their will” on portfolio companies rather than passively showing up. In VC — An American History, Perkins is one of three archetypal figures — with Arthur Rock and Don Valentine — whose styles defined the industry; Perkins is the one who “emphasized investments in technology.”

Context: Thomas J. Perkins (1932–2016) co-founded the venture firm Kleiner Perkins in 1972 and was an early backer of Genentech and Tandem Computers, among the most storied names in Silicon Valley venture history.

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