C. Richard Kramlich, an early investor in Silicon Valley who co-founded the investment giant New Enterprise Associates, helping to fuel the booming tech industry, died on Saturday at his home in San Francisco. He was 89.
His death was announced by New Enterprise Associates.
Mr. Kramlich (pronounced CRAM-lick), whose career spanned more than five decades, was among the earliest backers of Apple Computer; the software companies Silicon Graphics and Macromedia; and the computer networking companies Juniper Networks and 3Com, whose founders invented the Ethernet.
He co-founded his own firm, New Enterprise Associates, or NEA, building it from an initial $16 million fund in the 1970s to one that now oversees investments of nearly $26 billion.
But he stood out among Silicon Valley’s sea of swashbuckling financiers because of his grace and kindness, said Scott Sandell, the chief investment officer and executive chairman of NEA. “He believed the venture business was a people business, and he acted accordingly,” he said.
Charles Richard Kramlich was born on April 27, 1935, in Green Bay, Wis. His father, Irvin Kramlich, was a grocer who started a chain of 25 food stores that Kroger bought in 1955; his mother, Dorothy (Earl) Kramlich, was an aeronautical engineer who later oversaw the household.
When he was 13, Dick followed in his father’s entrepreneurial footsteps, starting his own “little lightbulb company,” he said in a 2015 interview with the Computer History Museum. “My father encouraged me to do it if I used my own money, and so I bought half a train car worth of lightbulbs from Sylvania Corporation” and resold them from his bedroom.
He added: “I come from three generations of entrepreneurs, and once you get it in your DNA, everything else is boring.”
He attended Northwestern University, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in Russian history in 1957, and went on to serve in the Strategic Air Command division of the Air Force. After receiving a master’s degree from Harvard Business School, he went to work for Kroger, and then learned the ropes of investing while working for a firm in Boston.
In 1969, he landed a coveted job at Arthur Rock & Co., one of the first investment firms to make high-risk bets on unproven technology start-ups. He beat out more than a thousand other applicants, he said in the 2015 interview, by sending Mr. Rock a handwritten letter expressing his desire to find “a bigger life out there.”
In 1977, he started NEA with Chuck Newhall and Frank Bonsal, two investors he had met in Boston. Persuading others to back their new fund took more than a year, and during that time Mr. Kramlich met a pair of entrepreneurs who were both named Steve (Jobs and Wozniak).
Their company, Apple Computer, was not as good as two other personal computer companies in the market, Mr. Kramlich said in 2015. But their sense of design and entrepreneurial spark were impressive. “They had pizazz,” he said, “where the other two companies were more engineering oriented.”
He felt compelled to invest and used his own money to do so. The payoff came three years later, in 1980, when Apple went public. That investment made it possible for Mr. Kramlich to buy a 1927 Tudor house in the Presidio Heights neighborhood of San Francisco; he had bronze apples fashioned as the front gate’s doorknobs to remind him of the windfall. (Last year, he listed the house for sale for $19.5 million.)
Not long after, he met Pamela Kay Palmer through a mutual friend; they married in 1981.
Venture capital investing is designed to absorb many losses in pursuit of one home-run deal, leaving a graveyard of failed start-ups along the way. But Mr. Kramlich was known for sticking with struggling investments long after others had abandoned them.
“He used to say, ‘Never say die,’” Mr. Sandell said.
In the early 1980s, Forethought, the start-up behind PowerPoint software, was about to run out of money, and NEA’s partners refused to pony up more. So Mr. Kramlich convinced his wife that they should pause work on the house they were building on Stinson Beach and use the cash to keep the company alive instead. The gamble paid off: In 1987, Microsoft bought Forethought for $14 million, and PowerPoint went on to become one of the world’s best-known software programs.
Financial Engines, an investment advisory start-up backed by NEA, took 18 years to go public and “went through five different business models,” said Jeff Maggioncalda, the company’s chief executive. NEA, he added, patiently held its shares the entire time.
Thanks to that patience, and to Mr. Kramlich’s kindness, chief executives he had fired or threatened to fire never stopped wanting to work with him.
“People don’t leave a relationship with Dick with any anger,” said James Clark, a founder of the computer software and hardware company Silicon Graphics, whose board of directors Mr. Kramlich served on. “He’s just a fundamentally good man.”
In 2002, Mr. Kramlich told Mr. Maggioncalda that he would be pushed out by the end of the year if things didn’t turn around. But Mr. Kramlich’s delivery inspired trust rather than fear, Mr. Maggioncalda recalled: “He said it with a calmness and a supportiveness.” The company recovered, and Mr. Maggioncalda led it through an initial public offering in 2010.
After Mr. Kramlich retired from NEA in 2012, he continued to pursue a passion for art collecting. He and Ms. Kramlich were among the first private collectors to focus on new media as it emerged as an art form in the late 1980s, and they amassed an extensive collection that emphasized audio and computer art, video, film and photographic slides. Their collection of videos and installations grew to more than 300 pieces — so large that they built a three-level home in Napa Valley to display it.
In addition to Ms. Kramlich, he is survived by two children, Christina and Richard Kramlich; a stepdaughter, Mary Donna Meredith; and six grandchildren. A son, Peter, died in 2024. Mr. Kramlich was married twice before, to Deborah (Durbrow) Kramlich, whom he divorced in 1966, and to Lynne (Shamburger) Kramlich, who died in 1981.
In retirement, Mr. Kramlich continued to mentor founders and investors. He also started a new firm, Green Bay Ventures, with Anthony Schiller, a liquefied natural gas entrepreneur. The firm’s investments include Databricks, the A.I. data company; Dropbox, the file storage company; and Xiaomi, the consumer electronics company.
In their 12 years of working together, Mr. Schiller said in a statement, he learned a lot from Mr. Kramlich.
“There will be plenty of well-deserved recognition for Dick’s legendary career,” he said. “But he was just as extraordinary as a person. He taught me about dreaming big, loyalty, pride and alignment.”
