Compaq

Compaq was founded in 1982 by three former Texas Instrument engineers, Rod Canion, Bill Murto and Jim Harris. They had considered founding a Mexican restaurant (and then a hard disk drive company) but ultimately decided to develop a new line of personal computers that were portable, 100% IBM compatible, but with better features and performance than other IBM clones on the market. The new venture capital firm of Sevin Rosen approached Kleiner Perkins to co-invest in the fledgling company. John Doerr, who had recently joined Kleiner Perkins from Intel where he had been working on a portable computer, loved the idea and we agreed to invest in Compaq.