Eugene Kleiner

About

Eugene 'Gene' Kleiner was an Austrian-born American engineer, entrepreneur, investor and mentor whose career joined the formative semiconductor and venture-capital eras of Silicon Valley. Born May 12, 1923 into a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna, he fled Nazi rule with his family in 1938 through France, Belgium and Portugal, reaching the United States and settling in New York in 1941. After U.S. Army service near the end of World War II, he used the GI Bill to earn a B.S. in mechanical engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1948 and later an M.S. in industrial engineering from New York University. He briefly taught engineering and worked at Western Electric's Kearny, New Jersey plant, where he met manufacturing engineer Julius Blank. William Shockley recruited both men to California in 1956. When Shockley's management and technical direction alienated seven colleagues, Kleiner proposed finding work for the group; his wife Rose typed the letter to his father's broker that reached Arthur Rock. Rock and Alfred Coyle persuaded the group to form a company and, after roughly 35 rejections, obtained Fairchild Camera and Instrument backing. The resulting $1.38 million agreement formed Fairchild Semiconductor in September 1957. Kleiner and Blank built or improvised production and test equipment that could not then be purchased; contemporary oral histories place Kleiner in engineering, manufacturing, administration, personnel and recruiting. Fairchild-wide achievements—the commercial double-diffused silicon mesa transistor, planar process and monolithic integrated circuit—were collective company outcomes with specific technical credit belonging principally to teams led by Gordon Moore, Jean Hoerni, Jay Last and Robert Noyce, not inventions attributable to Kleiner alone. Sources disagree on whether Kleiner left in 1961 or January 1962 and suggest Charlie Sporck's rise left him without a clearly consequential management role. In 1962 he founded Edex Teaching Machines, which made classroom and military response/training systems and was acquired by Raytheon in the mid-1960s. He then became a Davis & Rock limited partner and consultant, personally joined Intel's first financing in 1968, and supplied financing recalled by Microma co-founder Robert Robson. In 1972, after an introduction to Hewlett-Packard executive and entrepreneur Tom Perkins, Kleiner co-founded an $8 million venture partnership. The partners emphasized technical understanding, staged risk, customer demand, management quality, active boards and patient company building. Frank Caufield and Brook Byers joined in 1977, and the firm became Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Kleiner joined Genentech's board after Robert Swanson and Herbert Boyer founded it; an official firm history credits Swanson with originating the company and Perkins and Kleiner as directors, while a Guardian obituary says Kleiner led Genentech and Tandem investments. Because Perkins's oral history and Tandem records give Perkins the clearest direct Tandem formation and chair role, this dossier treats both as shared partnership successes and preserves the attribution conflict. Kleiner remained active through 1981 or 1982, became partner emeritus in the mid-1980s and continued advising. Amazon, AOL, Compaq, Google, Netscape, Sun Microsystems and the firm's hundreds of other investments illustrate institutional legacy, not automatic personal deal credit. His aphorisms, later collected as 'Kleiner's Laws,' favored product demand ('the dog wants to eat the dog food'), one business at a time, early risk tests, outside board perspective, skepticism of boom-time performance, genuine domain understanding and investing in people as well as products. No reliable inventor patent under his name was located; that absence reinforces the distinction between his manufacturing/company-building contribution and colleagues' patented inventions. He served as a Polytechnic trustee, received its honorary Doctor of Engineering in 1989 and Outstanding Mechanical Engineer of the Century recognition in 2000, and was inducted with Perkins into the Bay Area Business Hall of Fame. He and Rose Wassertheil, a Polish Jewish refugee whom he married in 1947, had Robert and Lisa and four grandchildren; Rose became a social worker and geriatric-care pioneer, and their family foundation supported education and aging. Kleiner died of heart failure at the Los Altos Hills home he had built, on November 20, 2003, aged 80.