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Perkins lives with his wife and two children in a spacious 1920s-vintage house overlooking San Francisco Bay. Most weekends he putters in his garage or enters one of his roadsters in a classic-car show. He may risk his capital on the newest computer technology, but he invests his passion in mechanical relics of an earlier age. "I don't turn on to the latest electronic gadget," he says. "I turn on to older, nonelectrical things."
William Hambrecht: Green Thumb. Hambrecht feels a great sense of accomplishment when he picks a bunch of ripe, juicy Zinfandel grapes from his 140-acre vineyard in Sonoma County, Calif., or clips a dazzling orchid in his San Francisco greenhouse. "I like to grow things," he says.
Among the things Hambrecht, 48, grows best are seedling companies. As a general partner in San Francisco-based Hambrecht & Quist, he has nourished several electronics firms in the fertile fields of Silicon Valley, including Convergent Technologies and VLSI. Unlike most other investment companies, Hambrecht & Quist will do it all for clients: provide venture capital, underwrite stock issues and lend management help.
Hambrecht & Quist oversees seven venture-capital funds with total assets of more than $350 million. Clients range from institutional investors such as Yale University and American Express Co., which must chip in at least $1 million, to wealthy individuals, who put up $150,000 or more. The first fund, started in 1970 with $3.5 million, is worth more than $100 million.
In the first half of 1983, Hambrecht & Quist had a hand in underwriting 26 stock issues worth $1.3 billion. Hambrecht is a director of eleven companies, including People Express, the discount airline, and NBI, which makes word processors.
In 1968 Hambrecht, a Princeton graduate who grew up on Long Island, N.Y., was a discontented broker working in the San Francisco office of Francis I. du Pont & Co., a now defunct New York City investment firm. One evening he stopped for a drink at the Kona Kai Club in San Diego with George Quist, a friend who was a venture-capital specialist for Bank of America. After commiserating a while over the excessive caution of big companies and consuming two bottles of wine, Hambrecht and Quist decided to launch their own venture-capital fund.
Today Hambrecht & Quist has a staff of 350 in five U.S. offices and one in London. That is big enough, insists Hambrecht: "I have no desire to be a Merrill Lynch or E.F. Hutton." Since Quist's death in 1982 at age 58, from a heart attack, Hambrecht has had to shoulder a greater burden at the top.
A millionaire many times over, Hambrecht has personal stakes in numerous firms. But no sooner does he make money on a stock than he risks it again. "I'm a hopeless addict to investing in early-stage companies," he says. "I once had a stock that paid a dividend, and I hated it."
Married, with five children, Hambrecht lives in an Edwardian-style home in San Francisco's opulent Pacific Heights district. In recent years he has begun diverting some of his attention, and money, to Democratic politics. A major backer of Presidential Candidate Alan Cranston of California, Hambrecht explains that in politics, as in business, he has "a natural affinity for the underdog."