Don Valentine

Donald Thomas Valentine (June 26, 1932 – October 25, 2019) was an American venture capitalist who was the founder of Sequoia Capital, with a concentration mainly on technology companies in the United States. Valentine was born and educated in New York City, and first came to California during military service, an experience that led him to remain in the region where he would later shape the venture capital industry.

Valentine was a major name for venture investing in Silicon Valley. Valentine was known for an investment style that emphasized large markets, early inflection points and humble founders, shaping Sequoia's reputation for discipline in early-stage technology investing. His approach to investing helped establish Sequoia Capital as an influential venture firm, backing companies such as Apple, Oracle, Cisco, Google, YouTube, NVIDIA, Airbnb, and WhatsApp.

Early life and education Valentine was born on June 26, 1932, in New York City, and grew up in the Bronx in a working class family. He was Catholic, and his family has a Danish background. He attended Mount Saint Michael Academy. Valentine graduated with a B.A. from Fordham. He briefly served in the U.S. military after college, which brought him to California for the first time, influencing his decision to live there permanently. Through continuous contact with early-stage chip customers, he started informally assessing young companies and developed instincts that would later attract him to venture investing. His move to National Semiconductor gave him an opportunity to design a new sales strategy and contribute company's return to profitability, developing his understanding of how small tech firms scale.

Founding of Sequoia Capital In 1972, Valentine founded venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. Initially, the company focused on early venture investments with small, risky tech companies. When Valentine founded Sequoia, the venture capital industry in America was still in its infancy, with less than $50 million in the United States focused on early-stage technology investing.

Sequoia's first investment was in Atari in 1975 before the company was sold for $28 million to Warner Communications. Sequoia was one of the original investors of Apple Computer and Atari after Valentine met Steve Jobs when he was a line engineer for Atari. In 1978, Sequoia invested $150,000 in Apple Inc. Sequoia Capital has also made early investments in companies including LSI Logic, Oracle Corporation, Cisco, Electronic Arts, Google, YouTube and many others. When markets became volatile, as during the mid-1980s downturn, he insisted on disciplined spending and rigorous evaluation, helping Sequoia avoid the speculative excesses that damaged other firms.

Investment philosophy Valentine’s investing philosophy was anchored on his belief that, ultimately, markets, not founders, dictated a company’s scale. He looked for companies in their “confusion phases,” where large incumbents had not figured out how new technologies would reshape their industries. Valentine was known for demanding brevity in business plans. Valentine was featured in the documentary film Something Ventured which premiered in 2011, which investigated the emergence of American venture capitalism in the mid-20th century.

Although best known for the major successes made by Sequoia, Valentine also made some unsuccessful investments. Valentine’s backing of Pizza Time Theatre, which overexpanded before failing, together with a string of poorly performing retail and grocery investments, led to him preferring the quickly growing technology markets over the generally slower consumer sectors. The Computer History Museum credited him as playing "a key role in the formation of a number of industries such as semiconductors, personal computers, personal computer software, digital entertainment and networking." Valentine’s disciplined, market focused approach influenced later generations of Sequoia partners, including Michael Moritz and Alfred Lin, who helped carry the firm’s philosophy into new eras of technology and global expansion.

Internationally, the structure and approach to investing by Sequoia Capital, largely shaped by Valentine, have extended into areas such as artificial intelligence and digital media, with Sequoia Capital China backing major global companies such as ByteDance. Journalists have described Valentine as tough, deeply knowledgeable, and uncompromising in his expectations, crediting him with shaping Silicon Valley’s standards for company building and board governance. He is survived by three children and seven grandchildren who all live in the Bay Area.