Why life has been one rollicking venture for Pitch Johnson and protégé Brook Byers.

At a Stanford Business School event in 1970, grad student Brook Byers listened to venture-capital pioneers Pitch Johnson and Bill Draper discuss the firm they had founded in 1962. Byers, who would go on to become one of the founding partners of the famed VC shop Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, was smitten. After graduation, he took a job with a semiconductor company but dreamed of getting into the VC field, which united his two passions: science and business.

By 1972, Johnson had struck out on his own, and he needed some help. Through a mutual friend he learned about Byers's interest, and soon hired him. Together they made several successful investments, including seed money for what would become the biotech juggernaut Amgen. Five years into Byers's apprenticeship, Johnson helped him reconnect with friend Tom Perkins, who wanted a second pair of eyes to help analyze a startup called Tandem Computers. Byers strongly recommended that Perkins invest in the company, and soon afterward he joined Perkins and Eugene Kleiner at their young outfit. Johnson would have preferred a smaller firm that primarily invested family money, rather than raising institutional funds, as Kleiner Perkins planned to do. Nevertheless, he has continued to do deals with Byers over the last 30 years.

Johnson: [Byers] had energy, brains and honesty. That was the most important thing. He didn't mislead. That was a quality of the venture-capital business at the time. I don't think he liked it then, but I threw him into the pool and let him swim.

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