Silicon Valley venture capital pioneer Dick Kramlich, an early investor in Apple, dies at 89

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.