Mr. Donald Valentine

Valentine grew up in the Bronx, New York, and went to Mount Saint Michael Academy. After graduating with a B.A. from Fordham University, Valentine began his career as a sales engineer at Raytheon. He was in the position for less than a year before moving on to Fairchild Semiconductor, where he built up the sales force for seven years. He left and joined National Semiconductor, working as a senior sales and marketing executive. In 1972, Valentine founded venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. Initially, the company focused on early venture investments with small, risky tech companies.[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, and 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. Valentine was a chairman of NetApp and Traiana. He served on the boards of many other technology companies including Apple, Atari, C-Cube, Cisco Systems, Electronic Arts, Linear Technology, LSI Logic, Microchip Technology, NetApp, Oracle, PMC-Sierra.. Valentine was featured in the documentary film Something Ventured which premiered in 2011.