(p. B12) C. Richard Kramlich, an early investor in Silicon Valley who co-founded the investment giant New Enterprise Associates, helping to fuel the booming tech industry, died on Saturday [Feb. 1, 2025] at his home in Oakville, Calif., in the Napa Valley. He was 89.
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He co-founded his own firm, New Enterprise Associates, or NEA, building it from an initial $16 million fund in the 1970s to one that now oversees investments of nearly $26 billion.
But he stood out among Silicon Valley’s sea of swashbuckling financiers because of his grace and kindness, said Scott Sandell, the chief investment officer and executive chairman of NEA.
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When he was 13, Dick followed in his father’s entrepreneurial footsteps, starting his own “little lightbulb company,” he said in a 2015 interview with the Computer History Museum. “My father encouraged me to do it if I used my own money, and so I bought half a train car worth of lightbulbs from Sylvania Corporation” and resold them from his bedroom.
He added: “I come from three generations of entrepreneurs, and once you get it in your DNA, everything else is boring.”
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. . . Mr. Kramlich met a pair of entrepreneurs who were both named Steve (Jobs and Wozniak). Their company, Apple Computer, was not as good as two other personal computer companies in the market, Mr. Kramlich said in 2015. But their sense of design and entrepreneurial spark were impressive. “They had pizazz,” he said, “where the other two companies were more engineering oriented.”
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Venture capital investing is designed to absorb many losses in pursuit of one home-run deal, leaving a graveyard of failed start-ups along the way. But Mr. Kramlich was known for sticking with struggling investments long after others had abandoned them.
“He used to say, ‘Never say die,’” Mr. Sandell said.
In the early 1980s, Forethought, the start-up behind PowerPoint software, was about to run out of money, and NEA’s partners refused to pony up more. So Mr. Kramlich convinced his wife that they should pause work on the house they were building on Stinson Beach and use the cash to keep the company alive instead. The gamble paid off: In 1987, Microsoft bought Forethought for $14 million, and PowerPoint went on to become one of the world’s best-known software programs.
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(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Feb. 6, 2025, and has the title “C. Richard Kramlich, Early Investor in Silicon Valley, Dies at 89.”)