He Was a Tech Investor Before There Was a Silicon Valley

AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTYou have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.OBITUARYBill Draper began funding start-ups in the early 1960s, when the Santa Clara Valley was better known for apricot orchards than microchips. He has died at 98.Listen · 9:14 min Bill Draper in 2016. He started his career more than a decade before Silicon Valley acquired its name in the early 1970s, during an era when computer coding was still done with punched paper cards.Credit...Christopher MichelSept. 30, 2026Bill Draper, who started his pioneering career as a Silicon Valley investor by steering a rented Pontiac through the orchard-dotted Santa Clara Valley of Northern California in the early 1960s, drumming up business in an era when few entrepreneurs had even heard the term “venture capital,” died on Sept. 8 at his home in Atherton, Calif. He was 98.His death was confirmed by his daughter Polly Draper.The “man who saw Silicon Valley before it existed,” as the magazine BW Businessworld recently called him, Mr. Draper began his career more than a decade before Silicon Valley acquired its name in the early 1970s, at a time when computer coding was still done using punched paper cards.As a founder or managing director of a string of trailblazing venture capital companies, including Sutter Hill Ventures and Draper Richards, he helped start an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars, alongside titans like Arthur Rock, Eugene Kleiner, Thomas J. Perkins and Don Valentine.Known for his glass-half-full mentality, he was called Dr. Yes by his colleagues at Draper Richards because “he loved to say, ‘We’re in!’ to a deal at an initial meeting before we could do the due diligence,” Robin Richards Donohoe, the company’s co-founder, said in an interview.His long list of wins over the decades included placing early bets on the video game maker Activision, as well as Skype, OpenTable, the printer company Qume and Corbin-Farnsworth, a pioneering maker of defibrillators, pacemakers and heart monitors.Armed with a Harvard M.B.A., Mr. Draper arrived in California in 1959 to join Draper, Gaither and Anderson, which was co-founded by his father, William H. Draper Jr., a prominent New York investment banker, and was considered the first venture capital firm west of the Mississippi River.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT