Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins jointly put $25 million behind Google in 1999, financing the leap from promising search engine to scalable Internet company.
Amazon survived its earliest years by moving from Bezos family capital to angels, Kleiner Perkins venture funding, and finally public markets.
Jim Clark and Kleiner Perkins turned the browser created in a university environment into Netscape, one of the defining venture-backed companies of the early Web.
Kleiner Perkins invested $1.7 million in Sun after the startup proved demand for open, networked UNIX workstations, helping turn a university prototype into a major systems company.
Tandem used venture capital to build fault-tolerant hardware and software for transaction processing, proving that continuous availability could support a valuable enterprise niche.
Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins institutionalized a repeatable model for financing young technology companies, helping turn Silicon Valley venture investing into an industry.