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.
Technology
Samsung expects second-quarter profits to more than halve as it struggles to capture AI demand
A Waymo autonomous self-driving Jaguar electric vehicle sits parked at an EVgo charging station in Los Angeles, California, on May 15, 2024.
Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images
Waymo said it will begin testing in Philadelphia, with a limited fleet of vehicles and human safety drivers behind the wheel.
“This city is a National Treasure,” Waymo wrote in a post on X on Monday. “It’s a city of love, where eagles fly with a gritty spirit and cheese that spreads and cheese that steaks. Our road trip continues to Philly next.”
The Alphabet-owned company confirmed to CNBC that it will be testing in Pennsylvania’s largest city through the fall, adding that the initial fleet of cars will be manually driven through the more complex parts of Philadelphia, including downtown and on freeways.
“Folks will see our vehicles driving at all hours throughout various neighborhoods, from North Central to Eastwick, and from University City to as far east as the Delaware River,” a Waymo spokesperson said.
With its so-called road trips, Waymo seeks to collect mapping data and evaluate how its autonomous technology, Waymo Driver, performs in new environments, handling traffic patterns and local infrastructure. Road trips are often used a way for the company to gauge whether it can potentially offer a paid ride share service in a particular location.
The expanded testing, which will go through the fall, comes as Waymo aims for a broader rollout. Last month, the company announced plans to drive vehicles manually in New York for testing, marking the first step toward potentially cracking the largest U.S. city. Waymo applied for a permit with the New York City Department of Transportation to operate autonomously with a trained specialist behind the wheel in Manhattan. State law currently doesn’t allow for such driverless operations.
Waymo One provides more than 250,000 paid trips each week across Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin, Texas, and is preparing to bring fully autonomous rides to Atlanta, Miami, and Washington, D.C., in 2026.
Alphabet has been under pressure to monetize artificial intelligence products as it bolsters spending on infrastructure. Alphabet’s “Other Bets” segment, which includes Waymo, brought in revenue of $1.65 billion in 2024, up from $1.53 billion in 2023. However, the segment lost $4.44 billion last year, compared to a loss of $4.09 billion the previous year.
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