Founder and Managing Partner | Investment Committee Chair
One of the leading early stage technology investors in the past several decades out of Silicon Valley, Steve O’Hara is the Managing Partner of Valley Capital Partners. Steve brings decades of operating and investing experience to lead Valley Capital, with 18 exits among his previous investments and operational roles, including 9 billion dollar+ exits and 8 IPOs. Steve is a former EIR at Kleiner Perkins and three time successful entrepreneur and operator, while actively investing and advising in some of the most successful technology success stories of the past several decades. In his role as Managing Partner, Steve currently chairs the Investment Committee at Valley Capital Partners.
Previously, Steve founded Nebula in 2010. Nebula is the co-creator of OpenStack (the world’s most widely deployed open source software for cloud computing) and the world’s first cloud computer for large scale computing. The company raised two rounds of venture financing from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), Highland Capital Partners, Comcast Ventures and Innovation Endeavors. Nebula’s other investors included Google’s first three investors — Andy Bechtolsheim, Ram Shriram and David Cheriton. Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) acquired Nebula in 2014.
In 1999, Steve founded OnFiber Communications, a leading U.S. optical carrier for enterprises and data centers. Steve founded OnFiber with seed funding from Andy Bechtolsheim, and later incubated the start-up at Kleiner Perkins under Vinod Khosla. OnFiber raised its Series A, B and C rounds from Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers (KPCB), Bear Stearns and Bechtel. OnFiber was acquired by Qwest (NYSE: Q) in 2006.
In 1994, Steve founded CoreLogic with backing from Intel Capital, Mitsubishi and a private syndicate of angel investors which included Jay Last, one the Traitorous Eight who founded Fairchild Semiconductor. CoreLogic was a virtual chip pioneer that designed Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) processors and technology. In 1998 Micron Technology (NYSE: MU) acquired CoreLogic.
Previously, Steve worked at Nortel Networks from 1988 through 1994. He held roles in systems engineering and was the VP of Data Platforms from 1992 through 1994. Prior to Nortel, Steve was a member of the technical staff at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), where he co-authored two U.S. patents on adaptive echo cancellation techniques using image waveforms and optimization algorithms.
Steve was an early investor in Arista Networks (NYSE: ANET), NetScreen (NASDAQ: NSCN, acquired by Juniper for $4.6 billion), SiByte (acquired by Broadcom for $2.1 billion), Cerent (acquired by Cisco for $7.2 billion), Infinera (NASDAQ: INFN), StorageNetworks (NASDAQ: STOR), Digital Island (NASDAQ: ISLD), Legato Systems (NASDAQ: LGTO), Pure Digital (acquired by Cisco), EuPhonics (acquired by 3Com), Ipsilon (acquired by Nokia) and Acclaim (acquired by Level One). He was also a shareholder in QuantumScape (IPO 2020) and Affirm (IPO 2021) via acquisition of earlier investments, and advisor to countless technology startups.
Steve graduated from Santa Clara University with a BS in Math and served as an advisor at the School of Engineering from 2007 through 2015.