Eugene Kleiner (1923—2003)

Mechanical Engineer, Founder and Venture Capitalist of Over 300 Technology Firms

Helped establish Fairchild Semiconductors, becoming one of history’s most influential investors and pillars of Silicon Valley.

Eugene Kleiner built his career around calculated risk. He risked moving to California to develop semiconductors with Nobel Prize winner William Shockley, then he risked jumping ship to help establish a new company, Fairchild Semiconductors. He risked starting a venture capital firm (before the term even existed), parlaying his early success into choice investments in cutting-edge technology. The result of all this risk? Kleiner is known as one of history’s most influential investors, and his fingerprints are all over what we now call “Silicon Valley.”

Yet for all his bold financiering, Eugene Kleiner was, at heart, an NYU-trained engineer. In fact, it was Kleiner—whose partners were mostly theoretical physicists—who actually built Fairchild Semiconductor’s transistor-manufacturing machines. Kleiner invested with an entrepreneur’s spirit and an engineer’s mentality; he wanted to see interesting things come into the world. “To the day he died,” Kleiner’s son Robert says, “whenever my father was asked to list his occupation, he wrote down, ‘Engineer’.”

The world has been irrevocably altered by Eugene Kleiner’s contributions. He was both a pioneer of the digital age and a thoroughly analog mechanical engineer. He brought his love of building things to venture capitalism and helped erect—company by company—the world of today and tomorrow. Intel, Genentech, Sun Microsystems—these and many others are part of his legacy. His lengthy list of honors includes being named Polytechnic’s Outstanding Mechanical Engineer of the Century. “Yet somehow,” Robert Kleiner says, “he was always home for dinner.”