Top image: William H. Draper III in 2016. Photo: Christopher Michel / CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

William H. “Bill” Draper III, one of the venture capitalists who helped turn the Santa Clara Valley’s orchards into Silicon Valley, died Sept. 8 at his home in Atherton, The Almanac reported in an obituary published Oct. 15. He was 98. The Town of Atherton marked his death in an Oct. 13 statement: “Town staff and council extend our sincere condolences on this profound loss. Our thoughts are with all who mourn their passing,” according to The Almanac.

Draper’s life traced the arc of the Peninsula’s establishment, from a time when the Valley’s money was a handful of partners and a phone book to today’s era of billion-dollar rounds, and it offers a measure of how much the region’s definition of power has changed.

Knocking on orchard doors

Draper was born Jan. 1, 1928, in White Plains, New York, the son of William H. Draper Jr., a banker, Army general and diplomat. After Yale, Army service and Harvard Business School, he joined his father’s newly formed Draper, Gaither & Anderson in 1959, a firm that both The Almanac and the nonprofit PAI describe as the first venture capital firm on the West Coast. He and his wife, Phyllis, drove from Chicago to Palo Alto in a new Chevrolet convertible to start the job, according to his 2011 oral history with the Computer History Museum, as recounted by The Almanac.

What he found was not yet a technology capital. “We … rented two Pontiacs, and we both went out and knocked on doors in the orchards because venture capital was not a known term, literally, at all,” he said in the oral history, quoted by The Almanac. “It was a lot of fruit orchards in Sunnyvale, in Santa Clara, and we’d go look for doors to knock on that looked like they (the company) had to do with some kind of technology or electronics.”

In 1962 he left to form Draper & Johnson Investment Company with Pitch Johnson, and three years later he founded Sutter Hill Ventures. Over a career that spanned decades, he was an early investor in companies including Yahoo, Skype and Tesla, The Almanac reported. His 2011 book, “The Startup Game,” drew on deals including Apollo Computer, Hotmail and OpenTable.

Sand Hill to Washington to the U.N.

Draper’s résumé also included a path that is rarer among today’s tech elite: a long detour into public service. President Ronald Reagan appointed him president and chairman of the Export-Import Bank of the United States, where he served from 1981 to 1986. From 1986 to 1993 he led the United Nations Development Programme, overseeing nearly 10,000 aid projects and helping launch the Human Development Index, according to PAI, the reproductive-health policy group his father helped found and on whose board Bill Draper served. PAI credits him with working behind the scenes at a 1984 U.N. population conference in Mexico City to keep the United States at the table after a sharp shift in U.S. policy.

He also tried electoral politics once, in a 1967 congressional race against Shirley Temple Black, and later hosted fundraisers and gave to local campaigns in Atherton and beyond, The Almanac reported.

A family business

Philanthropy, for Draper, borrowed the vocabulary of venture capital. He founded what became the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, which backs high-impact social enterprises, and in 2018 helped found The Mission Within, a program offering supervised psychedelic therapy to veterans, according to The Almanac. In a tribute, the foundation’s leaders, Robin Richards Donohoe, Rob Kaplan and Jim Bildner, wrote that “Bill’s anchor in life was his endless hope and optimism that each of us can make a difference in others’ lives if we choose to act.”

The venture business stayed in the family. His son Tim Draper co-founded Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and granddaughter Jesse Draper is also an investor. “We were so lucky to have him with us as long as we did,” Tim Draper wrote on X, as quoted by The Almanac. A grandson, Adam, wrote that the two had breakfast twice a month at Buck’s in Woodside for nine years. The National Venture Capital Association said Draper “believed deeply in humility and founder partnership, often reminding peers that the entrepreneurs sweating long hours are the true heroes carrying progress forward.”

He was preceded in death by Phyllis, his wife of almost 65 years, and is survived by three children, Polly, Tim and Rebecca, as well as grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

The long view

Draper’s generation built Silicon Valley’s money on proximity and relationships: a few partners, a few dozen companies, a social world centered on Atherton, Woodside and Palo Alto that moved easily between boardrooms and Washington. That world has not disappeared, but it has been eclipsed by scale. This year, capital has concentrated in a small number of enormous AI rounds, as we reported in our look at the quarter of the mega-round, and the Valley’s wealthiest now tend to exert civic influence through ballot-measure committees and PACs rather than appointed office, as the fight over the billionaire tax has shown.

The contrast is not a verdict on either era. It is a question the region’s new fortunes will have to answer: whether the people now accumulating Valley wealth will also take on the institutional public roles, the agencies, development banks and long-horizon causes, that Draper’s generation treated as part of the job.

Sources

• Bill Draper, Silicon Valley venture capital pioneer and Atherton resident, dies at 98, The Almanac, Oct. 15, 2026
• PAI Honors the Life of William H. Draper III, PAI
• Honoring Bill Draper, Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation
• Oral History of William H. Draper III, Computer History Museum, April 14, 2011