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Robert Noyce: Scientist Turned Investor. Noyce is the co-inventor of the integrated circuits that form the core of all modern computers, winner of the 1979 National Medal of Science and a co-founder of two pioneering and profitable California electronics companies, Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel. Noyce, 55, also plays a less publicized role as a venture capitalist. With his success has come enormous wealth. His 1.5 million shares in Intel, where he now serves as vice chairman, are worth $60 million. Along with Arthur Rock, his friend of 30 years, Noyce in 1977 helped bankroll Diasonics, the medical-instrument manufacturer. Noyce's 8% stake in Diasonics is worth $30 million. He helped finance Monoclonal Antibodies, which sells pregnancy-testing kits and hopes to market a product that will predict the timing of ovulation. Noyce has also suffered a few setbacks. Through a venture-capital fund, he invested in Osborne Computer, the maker of portable models, which filed for bankruptcy four months ago.
The son of a Congregational minister, Noyce grew up in Iowa. After earning a Ph.D. in physics from M.I.T., he got his start working for William Shockley, the Nobel-prizewinning co-developer of transistors. Noyce is married to Ann Bowers, a vice president of Apple Computer. He enjoys piloting a twin-engine Cessna Citation jet and is an avid downhill skier. Friends consider Noyce something of a daredevil, both in the way he lives and in the way he invests.
Thomas Perkins: Master Mechanic. For fun, Perkins tinkers with very old automobiles. Using well-worn wrenches and lots of elbow grease, he and a team of mechanics have restored a collection of nearly two dozen 1930s sports cars. Among them: a Mercedes-Benz Special Roadster, a deep sea-blue Bugatti and a Duesenberg once owned by a maharajah. "They have to run right," he says, "or they're not worth having."
In his professional life Perkins, 52, displays the same perfectionism toward a collection of-very new companies. As a founding partner of San Francisco's Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, he has since 1972 managed four venture-capital funds that have invested $80 million in 65 companies, including Genentech, a leader in genetic engineering, and Tandem Computers, a rising manufacturer of large mainframe machines. The original $200,000 that Perkins' firm put into Genentech is worth $60 million today, while its $1.5 million stake in Tandem has grown to $250 million. Like many venture capitalists, Perkins often helps run the companies he invests in. He is chairman of the board of Genentech and Tandem.
An M.I.T.-trained electrical engineer with a Master's in business from Harvard, the Illinois-born Perkins went west 27 years ago to work at Hewlett-Packard, the Palo Alto, Calif., electronics firm. In 1966 he took $15,000 that he and his wife had been saving to buy a house and invested it in University Laboratories, a Berkeley, Calif., laser company. That stake returned $2 million and launched Perkins' career as a venture capitalist.