Thomas James Perkins

About

Thomas James 'Tom' Perkins was an engineer, entrepreneur, corporate executive, venture capitalist, director, author and yachtsman. Born January 7, 1932, he grew up in a family without the means or precedent for college; high-school physics teacher Mr. Wilson helped him win an MIT scholarship. He earned an MIT electrical-engineering degree in 1953 and a Harvard M.B.A. in 1957, where Georges Doriot became an important mentor. After engineering work at General Radio, Perkins joined Hewlett-Packard in 1957, trained in its machine shop and moved into marketing. Restlessness led to a short, unhappy Booz Allen consulting period and roughly four years running the business side of Optics Technology; he left before its IPO, surrendered his stock and described the episode as a failure. Returning to HP in 1963, he became administrative manager of the new HP Laboratories, then turned the HP 2116 from an unsold instrument controller into a rapidly growing computer business by creating a specialist sales force, learning its software and challenging centralized practices. He became the first general manager of HP's computer division and later director of corporate development beside Bill Hewlett. With Dave Packard's permission, he simultaneously founded University Laboratories around his low-cost helium-neon laser invention, financed initially from household savings, merged it into Spectra-Physics and served there as a director. He regarded that founder-operator-liquidity sequence as his apprenticeship in venture capital. In 1972 he and Fairchild co-founder Eugene Kleiner raised an $8 million first partnership. Their original plan promised early entry near the 'big bang' of an idea, small staged investments to isolate the largest technical, market, legal or people risk, team building and direct long-term operating help. Tandem Computers and Genentech became the first fund's defining outcomes. Perkins helped conceive Tandem's fault-tolerant computer plan, recruited Jimmy Treybig, chaired Tandem from 1974 through its 1997 sale to Compaq and later helped arrange Compaq's acquisitions by HP. At Genentech, Bob Swanson and Herb Boyer were the founders; Perkins and Kleiner supplied institutional backing, Perkins served on the board and chaired it for about fifteen years, and he helped frame staged technical proof and scientist-friendly publishing. Acuson was another directly described Perkins investment: he backed first-time manager Sam Maslak on the strength of the ultrasound technology, recruited the senior team and chaired the company before leaving over product-roadmap disagreement. His documented boards also included Applied Materials, Compaq, Corning, Hewlett-Packard, Hybritech, LSI Logic, News Corporation, Philips, Spectra-Physics and Symantec. This record does not convert the later Kleiner portfolio—Amazon, AOL, Google, Netscape, Sun and hundreds of others—into personal Perkins deals. Failures were part of the method: first-fund Advanced Recreation Equipment/Snow-Job and American Athletic Shoe/Tread-Two failed; Perkins acknowledged many unnamed losses and warned that abundant capital could depress returns. At HP he returned as a director around the Compaq merger, supported Carly Fiorina's removal, then resigned in May 2006 after opposing the board leak investigation; HP later disclosed that investigators used pretexting to obtain phone records, including his, and his protest helped force public scrutiny. On News Corp's board during the 2011 phone-hacking crisis he strongly supported Rupert Murdoch and management and argued the facts differed from HP, a position criticized as overly credulous; he did not stand for reelection. In 2014 he was broadly condemned for comparing hostility toward the wealthy to Nazi persecution of Jews. He apologized for the Nazi analogy while maintaining his class-demonization argument; Kleiner said he had not been involved with the firm for years. He publicly disputed billionaire estimates, calling himself a multimillionaire, while displaying substantial wealth through homes, classic vehicles, yachts and the 289-foot Maltese Falcon. He authored the novel Sex and the Single Zillionaire and memoir Valley Boy, appeared in Something Ventured and on 60 Minutes, and endowed the Thomas J. and Gerd Perkins Professorship at MIT. His first wife Gerd Thune-Ellefsen died in 1994; they had children Tor and Elizabeth. His brief second marriage to novelist Danielle Steel ended in divorce, and they remained publicly friendly. Perkins died at his Belvedere, California home on June 7, 2016 after a prolonged illness.