Silicon Valley venture capital pioneer Dick Kramlich, an early investor in Apple, dies at 89
Dick Kramlich, founder of New Enterprise Associates, discusses on “Sexism in the valley” during the third day of Web Summit in Altice Arena on Nov. 8, 2017 in Lisbon, Portugal.
Horacio Villalobos | Corbis News | Getty Images
Dick Kramlich, the venture capital pioneer who co-founded New Enterprise Associates almost 50 years ago and built it into a Silicon Valley powerhouse that regularly raised billion-dollar-plus funds, died on Saturday. He was 89.
His death was sudden and “he didn’t have a long illness,” his daughter, Christina Kramlich, confirmed to CNBC, adding that the family will provide more details soon.
“We’ve lost our warm, curious, ever-optimistic family leader,” she said.
Long before venture capitalist was an established profession, Kramlich saw the opportunity, to invest some cash in tech entrepreneurs and profit alongside of them, assuming they were successful. He’d put some of his own money into Apple before joining with Chuck Newhall and Frank Bonsal to start NEA in 1977, a few years after heavy hitters Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins opened their doors in Menlo Park, California.
Kramlich hit it big in computer networking, writing an early check to 3Com, which Bob Metcalfe started as a way to commercialize Ethernet technology. The company went public in 1984, and soared to a valuation of over $28 billion during the dot-com bubble of 2000. 3Com’s technology was eventually bypassed by products from Cisco and others and the company was purchased by HP in 2010 for $2.7 billion.
Elsewhere in the space, Kramlich invested in Grand Junction, started by a 3Com co-founder, and saw that company through to a 1995 sale to Cisco. And then there was data center networking company Force10 Networks, which was acquired by Dell in 2011.
“So we’ve gone from the very inception of the Ethernet through to its becoming the dominant protocol of the internet for network communications,” Kramlich said in a 2006 interview with oral historian Mauree Jane Perry.
Kramlich also backed companies including, Macromedia, Ascend Communications and Juniper Networks. In the fusion power market, Kramlich invested in TAE Technologies, and sat on the board until the day of his death.
Kramlich retired from NEA in 2012, around the time the firm raised $2.6 billion for its 14th fund, one of the biggest ever at the time in the industry. But he wasn’t done with investing.
In 2017, Kramlich started Green Bay Ventures to invest in companies developing technology and products in manufacturing, energy, transportation, logistics, real estate and communications. He launched Green Bay with Anthony Schiller, who started managing Kramlich’s family money in 2011, and Casey Tatham, who was running finance for the family office.
The firm was named after the Wisconsin town where Kramlich was born in 1935. Kramlich’s dad started a food chain there and his mom became an aeronautical engineer. After moving around Wisconsin as a kid, Kramlich went to college at Northwestern and then moved to the Boston area to pursue a Masters in Business Administration from Harvard.
Following business school, Kramlich got into the world of investments in Boston, and eventually met early Apple and Intel investor Arthur Rock. He moved to California and helped start Arthur Rock & Co. in 1969. Eight years later, Kramlich splintered off to start NEA, with operations in Baltimore, Maryland and Silicon Valley.
Scott Sandell, NEA’s executive chairman, joined the firm in 1996. He said he was working as a consultant and met Kramlich after pitching a startup to the firm, initially in the Baltimore office. His career trajectory quickly changed, and rather than raising money for the startup, he landed a job at NEA and has remained for almost three decades.
“He was the reason so many of us joined,” Sandell said in an interview. “Dick was beloved by countless entrepreneurs and venture capitalists because of his undying optimism and perseverance against really all odds. It was that spirit along with his generous and gracious ways that made him more loveable than perhaps any venture capitalist I’ve ever known.”
Kramlich is survived by his daughter Christina, as well as by his wife, Pam, and his other children, Rix and Mary Donna.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai gestures to the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California on May 20, 2025.
Camille Cohen | Afp | Getty Images
Alphabet has joined the $3 trillion club.
Shares of the search giant jumped more than 4% on Monday, pushing the company into territory occupied only by Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple.
The stock got a big lift in early September from an antitrust ruling by a judge, whose penalties came in lighter than shareholders feared. The U.S. Department of Justice wanted Google to be forced to divest its Chrome browser, and last year a district court ruled that the company held an illegal monopoly in search and related advertising.
But Judge Amit Mehta decided against the most severe consequences proposed by the DOJ, which sent shares soaring to a record. After the big rally, President Donald Trump congratulated the company and called it “a very good day.”
Alphabet shares are now up more than 30% this year, compared to the 15% gain for the Nasdaq.
The $3 trillion milestone comes roughly 20 years after Google’s IPO and a little more than 10 years after the creation of Alphabet as a holding company, with Google its prime subsidiary.
CEO Sundar Pichai was named CEO of Alphabet in 2019, replacing co-founder Larry Page. Pichai’s latest challenge has been the surge of new competition due to the rise of artificial intelligence, which the company has had to manage through while also fending off an aggressive set of regulators in the U.S. and Europe.
The rise of Perplexity and OpenAI ended up helping Google land the recent favorable antitrust ruling. The company’s hopes of becoming a major AI player largely ride with Gemini, Google’s flagship suite of AI models.
Technology
Bessent: TikTok deal ‘framework’ reached with China, Trump and Xi will finalize it Friday
Samuel Boivin | Nurphoto | Getty Images
The U.S. and China have reached a ‘framework’ deal for social media platform TikTok, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday.
“It’s between two private parties, but the commercial terms have been agreed upon,” he said from U.S.-China talks in Madrid.
Both President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet Friday to discuss the terms. Trump also said in a Truth Social post Monday that a deal was reached “on a ‘certain’ company that young people in our Country very much wanted to save.”
Bessent indicated that the framework could pivot the platform to U.S.-controlled ownership.
TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The comments came during the latest round of trade discussions between the U.S. and China. Relations have soured between the two countries in recent months from Trump’s tariffs and other trade restrictions.
At the same time, TikTok parent company ByteDance faces a Sept. 17 deadline to divest the platform’s U.S. business or face being shut down in the country.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Monday that the deadline may need to be pushed back to get the deal signed, but there won’t be ongoing extensions.
Congress passed a law last year prohibiting app store operators like Apple and Google from distributing TikTok in the U.S. due to its “foreign adversary-controlled application” status.
But Trump postponed the shutdown in January, signing an executive order in January that gave ByteDance 75 more days to make a deal. Further extensions came by way of executive orders in April and in June.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in July that TikTok would shutter for Americans if China doesn’t give the U.S. more autonomy over the popular short-form video app.
As for who controls the platform, Trump told Fox News in June that he had a group of “very wealthy people” ready to buy the app and could reveal their identities in two weeks. The reveal never came.
He has previously said he’d be open to Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison or Tesla CEO Elon Musk buying TikTok in the U.S. Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity has submitted a bid for an acquisition, as has businessman Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty internet advocacy group, CNBC reported in January.
Trump told CNBC in an interview last year that he believed the platform was a national security threat, although the White House started a TikTok account in August.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Lisa Su, CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, testify during the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee hearing titled “Winning the AI Race: Strengthening U.S. Capabilities in Computing and Innovation,” in Hart building on Thursday, May 8, 2025.
Tom Williams | CQ-Roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images
In a sweeping interview last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman addressed a plethora of moral and ethical questions regarding his company and the popular ChatGPT AI model.
“Look, I don’t sleep that well at night. There’s a lot of stuff that I feel a lot of weight on, but probably nothing more than the fact that every day, hundreds of millions of people talk to our model,” Altman told former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in a nearly hour-long interview.
“I don’t actually worry about us getting the big moral decisions wrong,” Altman said, though he admitted “maybe we will get those wrong too.”
Rather, he said he loses the most sleep over the “very small decisions” on model behavior, which can ultimately have big repercussions.
These decisions tend to center around the ethics that inform ChatGPT, and what questions the chatbot does and doesn’t answer. Here’s an outline of some of those moral and ethical dilemmas that appear to be keeping Altman awake at night.
How does ChatGPT address suicide?
According to Altman, the most difficult issue the company is grappling with recently is how ChatGPT approaches suicide, in light of a lawsuit from a family who blamed the chatbot for their teenage son’s suicide.
The CEO said that out of the thousands of people who commit suicide each week, many of them could possibly have been talking to ChatGPT in the lead-up.
“They probably talked about [suicide], and we probably didn’t save their lives,” Altman said candidly. “Maybe we could have said something better. Maybe we could have been more proactive. Maybe we could have provided a little bit better advice about, hey, you need to get this help.”
Last month, the parents of Adam Raine filed a product liability and wrongful death suit against OpenAI after their son died by suicide at age 16. In the lawsuit, the family said that “ChatGPT actively helped Adam explore suicide methods.”
Soon after, in a blog post titled “Helping people when they need it most,” OpenAI detailed plans to address ChatGPT’s shortcomings when handling “sensitive situations,” and said it would keep improving its technology to protect people who are at their most vulnerable.
How are ChatGPT’s ethics determined?
Another large topic broached in the sit-down interview was the ethics and morals that inform ChatGPT and its stewards.
While Altman described the base model of ChatGPT as trained on the collective experience, knowledge and learnings of humanity, he said that OpenAI must then align certain behaviors of the chatbot and decide what questions it won’t answer.
“This is a really hard problem. We have a lot of users now, and they come from very different life perspectives… But on the whole, I have been pleasantly surprised with the model’s ability to learn and apply a moral framework.”
When pressed on how certain model specifications are decided, Altman said the company had consulted “hundreds of moral philosophers and people who thought about ethics of technology and systems.”
An example he gave of a model specification made was that ChatGPT will avoid answering questions on how to make biological weapons if prompted by users.
“There are clear examples of where society has an interest that is in significant tension with user freedom,” Altman said, though he added the company “won’t get everything right, and also needs the input of the world” to help make these decisions.
How private is ChatGPT?
Another big discussion topic was the concept of user privacy regarding chatbots, with Carlson arguing that generative AI could be used for “totalitarian control.”
In response, Altman said one piece of policy he has been pushing for in Washington is “AI privilege,” which refers to the idea that anything a user says to a chatbot should be completely confidential.
“When you talk to a doctor about your health or a lawyer about your legal problems, the government cannot get that information, right?… I think we should have the same concept for AI.”
According to Altman, that would allow users to consult AI chatbots about their medical history and legal problems, among other things. Currently, U.S. officials can subpoena the company for user data, he added.
“I think I feel optimistic that we can get the government to understand the importance of this,” he said.
Will ChatGPT be used in military operations?
Asked by Carlson if ChatGPT would be used by the military to harm humans, Altman didn’t provide a direct answer.
“I don’t know the way that people in the military use ChatGPT today… but I suspect there’s a lot of people in the military talking to ChatGPT for advice.”
Later, he added that he wasn’t sure “exactly how to feel about that.”
OpenAI was one of the AI companies that received a $200 million contract from the U.S. Department of Defense to put generative AI to work for the U.S. military. The firm said in a blog post that it would provide the U.S. government access to custom AI models for national security, support and product roadmap information.
Just how powerful is OpenAI?
Carlson, in his interview, predicted that on its current trajectory, generative AI and by extension, Sam Altman, could amass more power than any other person, going so far as to call ChatGPT a “religion.”
In response, Altman said he used to worry a lot about the concentration of power that could result from generative AI, but he now believes that AI will result in “a huge up leveling” of all people.
“What’s happening now is tons of people use ChatGPT and other chatbots, and they’re all more capable. They’re all kind of doing more. They’re all able to achieve more, start new businesses, come up with new knowledge, and that feels pretty good.”
However, the CEO said he thinks AI will eliminate many jobs that exist today, especially in the short-term.
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