Don Valentine has died

https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/remembering-don-valentine/

by gatsby • 7 years ago

284 25 7 years ago

LeonM• 7 years ago

If you want to learn more about Don and how influential his work has been, I recommend listening the recent Acquired episode about Don and Sequoia [0].

[0] https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/sequoia-capital-part-1

mathattack• 7 years ago

Just listened to it. He’s a giant!

chriselles2• 7 years ago

Great episode. Will listen to it again on a long walk today.

I’ve always sought commentary and quotes from Don Valentine to help me learn more about being an angel investor the same way I have have always Warren Buffett’s commentary and shareholder letters to learn how to be a better long-term investor.

scapecast2• 7 years ago

One of his great talks at Stanford: “Target Big Markets” https://youtu.be/nKN-abRJMEw

joeblau2• 7 years ago

I loved watching this talk — After watching this I gained a new level of appreciation for the VC model they pioneered.

scapecast2• 7 years ago

If you then also listen to the episode on Acquired, it’s eye-opening on how he / sequoia decide on making investments.

ChuckMcM3• 7 years ago

Don was a pretty amazing guy. He was the chairman at NetApp when I was there and told me I was crazy to be pushing NetApp to use an untested AMD processor (Opteron) for the high end filer of the time.

What resulted was a solid discussion that ranged from how reliable AMD was to how important Intel was to Netapp, and how to measure the "betterness" of one technology over another. I really respected that he could be opinionated and listen at the same time, always willing to cede to a well reasoned argument about how he might be wrong about something. He was also really good at poking holes in an argument so I found myself on the defensive a lot!

tyingq2• 7 years ago

Great share. I remember the inflection point that Opteron was. Essentially, it killed Sparc, PA-RISC, Alpha, Itanium, etc. That was a unique moment in time. Hearing a personal anectode between someone relatively junior at the time, and a legend, is very interesting to me. It was, really, the moment Linux/x86 "won". That 64 bit hurdle defined where we are today.

At the time, it inspired me to make a pitch that "RISC was dead", despite it's technical superiority. Kind of a VHS vs Betamax moment. My pitch worked out, and was probably the defining moment of my career.

I'm pretty happy that AMD is, again, riding high. Underdog stories are more rare these days. And you had a not insignificant part in that.

gumby3• 7 years ago

At the time, it inspired me to make a pitch that "RISC was dead", despite it's technical superiority.

Is it? The microarchitectures of the big MPUs is essentially RISC -- as it always has been, but microcode isn't written 100% by scratch any more.

At the compiler level it's kind of true, and for what turned out to be generally good reasons such as compilers aren't as smart as Radin & co thought they'd be, or concomitant ideas like delay slots turned out to be incompatible with advances in memory architecture. So in that regard I'd say that it isn't technically superior at all, which was a surprise to me and many may people.

However CISC evolved too. The original CISC architectures that RISC was a reaction to had lots of features for programmers (think VAX string processing or function call instruction!). Nobody writes code like that (except for MPUs); those residual instructions are in fact much slower than compiled code because Intel et al won't pay anyone to optimize them. Instead the focus (apart from vector and some housekeeping) has been on writing instructions that communicate better to the CPU's instruction interpreter and scheduler what the programmer's overall intent was. And structured in a way that is easier for compilers than for humans.

So which won?

servrite• 7 years ago

Opteron never killed SPARC. The changing market dynamics of Cloud did.

jacquesm2• 7 years ago

Did he yield?

ChuckMcM3• 7 years ago

Effectively yes. He did let me know that if it didn't work out that I would bear the consequences :-). By that time in my career I knew that you're only as good as your previous decision, good or bad.

It became NetApp's best selling product at the time. I don't deserve any credit for that of course, the folks to did the work to get it out the door and sell it get the credit. My job was to do what the Army engineers do, land on the beach and clear the obstacles between the beach and the objective so that the main force can do what they came for.

When I interview managers I ask them why they want to be a manager. It is not uncommon for them to say, "Because I want to be able to make the right decisions." And I ask them, "And if they are the wrong decisions, are you prepared to be told to leave?" It is a good litmus test.

gumby3• 7 years ago

Really a great, supportive guy, and very kind in a pitch meeting, even when you are completely losing it. In general I've found the sequoia folks to be a class act (with a couple of, to me, egregious exceptions)

chriselles2• 7 years ago

I first recall reading about Don Valentine in the October 1982 issue of National Geographic on Silicon Valley.

An excellent snapshot of Silicon Valley and a glimpse of Don Valentine’s role in it.

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/high-tech-high-risk-and-high-...

Risk/Venture Capital, despite valid criticisms of it, has had an outsized effect on our world in the last 50+ years.

And Don Valentine played an outsized role in it.

jorgenveisdal• 7 years ago

Rest in peace Don!

melling• 7 years ago

“ his high school friend, Steve Wozniak.”

This can’t be right.

sokoloff• 7 years ago

That line also gave me pause, but I think it was meant to say that Woz was Jobs’ high school friend (which is also wrong, but much less wrong).

Don Valentine has died

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