Don Valentine

Valentine was born on June 26, 1932, in New York City, and grew up in the Bronx in a working class family. He was Catholic, and his family has a Danish background. He attended Mount Saint Michael Academy. Valentine’s parents had limited formal education, and his father worked on a milk route, while his mother was a homemaker. Valentine’s mother suffered from tuberculosis, with her treatment placing her in an iron lung and only allowing Valentine and his brother to wave at her through the hospital window.

When Valentine was preparing to go to college, he chose Fordham University because it was affordable and close to home, and he paid tuition quarterly in cash. He later said that his Jesuit education at Fordham influenced his analytical style and interrogative, Socratic method of questioning that he became known for as an investor. Valentine graduated with a B.A. from Fordham. He briefly served in the U.S. military after college, which brought him to California for the first time, influencing his decision to live there permanently.

Early career

Valentine began his career as a sales engineer at Raytheon. He left and joined National Semiconductor, working as a senior sales and marketing executive. At Fairchild, Valentine managed worldwide sales during the acceleration of silicon-based integrated circuits and got early experience with semiconductor technology. Through continuous contact with early-stage chip customers, he started informally assessing young companies and developed instincts that would later attract him to venture investing.

Valentine said that the most transformational startups emerged at technological “inflection points” where industry disruption created openings for new entrants. His move to National Semiconductor gave him an opportunity to design a new sales strategy and contribute company's return to profitability, developing his understanding of how small tech firms scale.

Investment philosophy

Valentine’s investing philosophy was anchored on his belief that, ultimately, markets, not founders, dictated a company’s scale. He looked for companies in their “confusion phases,” where large incumbents had not figured out how new technologies would reshape their industries. He liked entrepreneurs who “knew what they didn't know” and favored intellectual humility and adaptability to charisma.

With his famously blunt, demanding boardroom style, Valentine employed a Socratic questioning method to probe founders' assumptions, financial discipline, and strategic priorities. Valentine was often skeptical of hype-driven trends such as the early "Information Highway" rhetoric, which he saw as distractions from the real business applications. Valentine was known for demanding brevity in business plans. He once required an entrepreneur to rewrite an entire proposal onto the back of a business card. Valentine was also a proponent of Bay-area companies, preferring to invest in companies based in Northern California, arguing that leaving Silicon Valley meant leaving behind more opportunity than could be found elsewhere.

Valentine was a chairman of NetApp and Traiana. He served on the boards of many other technology companies including Apple, Atari, C-Cube, Cisco Systems, Electronic Arts, Linear Technology, LSI Logic, Microchip Technology, Oracle, PMC-Sierra. Valentine was featured in the documentary film Something Ventured which premiered in 2011, which investigated the emergence of American venture capitalism in the mid-20th century.

Although best known for the major successes made by Sequoia, Valentine also made some unsuccessful investments. Valentine’s backing of Pizza Time Theatre, which overexpanded before failing, together with a string of poorly performing retail and grocery investments, led to him preferring the quickly growing technology markets over the generally slower consumer sectors.