Tom Perkins earned a B.S. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT in 1953 and an M.B.A. from Harvard, then joined Hewlett-Packard in 1963 as manager of its computer hardware division and later ran the HP 3000 division. In 1972 he co-founded Kleiner Perkins with Eugene Kleiner. He provided the initial venture capital for Tandem Computers and served as its longtime board chairman, joined the board of Genentech with Kleiner in 1976, and was a board director at Compaq, where he helped arrange its 1997 purchase of Tandem and its 2002 acquisition by HP. He resigned from the Hewlett-Packard board in 2006 over the company's secret collection of phone records, and died in 2016 at age 84.
Education
B.S. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1953)