Tag: venture-capital

Sequoia backed Yahoo before its business model was settled, betting that control of Web navigation could become a durable media and advertising asset.

Benchmark backed eBay after its marketplace had already shown network effects, using capital and governance to scale a profitable community into a global platform.

Sequoia, Sutter Hill, and other early investors backed Nvidia before 3D graphics was an obvious platform, financing a fabless chip company that would later redefine computing.

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.

Early venture funding let Silicon Graphics commercialize the Geometry Engine and build an integrated 3D workstation stack that transformed engineering visualization and digital effects.

Sequoia's $2 million Cisco investment helped turn a Stanford-born router company into a commercial network infrastructure giant.

GO Corporation raised and consumed more than $75 million trying to create pen computing before the supporting hardware, software, and mobile market were ready.

Compaq combined $2.5 million of venture backing with a legally reverse-engineered IBM-compatible design, proving that startups could capture value from IBM's standard without copying IBM's code.

Lotus used unusually large venture financing and launch marketing for an early software company, turning 1-2-3 into the business application that made IBM-compatible PCs economically indispensable.

Trip Hawkins self-funded Electronic Arts before Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, and Sevin Rosen invested $2 million in a publisher built around treating software creators like entertainment talent.