Eugene Kleiner

Eugene Kleiner ( born May 12, 1923 in Vienna, † 20 November 2003 in Los Altos Hills ) was an American engineer and venture capitalists. He was a member of the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory and co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and co-founder of Kleiner Perkins.

Life and work

In 1938, he fled with his family from Vienna and came to New York two years later. He served in World War II in the U.S. Army. In 1947 he married Rose water part (d. 2001), a Polish immigrant. Together they had two children, Robert and Lisa.

After his time in the military, he studied mechanical engineering at Brooklyn Polytechnic (now Polytechnic University of New York), where he earned his bachelor 's degree in 1948. It was followed by a Master's degree in Industrial Engineering (English industrial engineering ) at New York University. After he briefly taught engineering, he took up a position at at Western Electric.

In 1956, Little was one of the first to accept the offer of a William B. Shockley, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, the newly founded institution to join. However, he left the research laboratory in 1957 with seven other employees. This group later became known as the Traitorous Eight (Eng. " traitorous eight " ) announced they founded Fairchild Semiconductor. According to Arthur Little rock was instrumental in helping to obtain the 1.5 million dollars seed capital of Sherman Fairchild. With Fairchild Little took over various administrative tasks. Later Little money invested in Intel, a semiconductor company that was founded in 1968 by Fairchild co-founders Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore.

In 1972, Little founded with Tom Perkins (formerly Hewlett -Packard), the firm Kleiner Perkins, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. 1977 increased Brook Byers and Frank J. Caufield joined the company, which was later renamed as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The company was an early investor in more than 300 information technology and biotechnology companies, including Amazon, AOL, Brio Technology, Electronic Arts, Flextronics, Genentech, Google, Hybritech, Intuit, Lotus Development, LSI Logic, Macromedia, Netscape, Quantum, Segway, Sun Microsystems, and tandem Computers.