Founder and Managing Partner | Investment Committee Member
One of the leading Seed and Series A 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 Partners, with 18 exits among his previous investments and operational roles, including 9 billion dollar+ exits and 8 IPOs, delivering top decile returns to partners and investors. Over the past thirty years, Steve has served on over 30 boards in Silicon Valley with co-investors from a16z, Accel, Greylock, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, Sequoia, NEA, 8VC, Highland Capital, Intel Capital, Norwest, Comcast Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, Benchmark, and Index.
Prior to founding Valley Capital Partners, Steve was a General Partner at the Valley Fund, an early stage investment firm investing broadly across all industries and sectors in Silicon Valley, where he led investments into notable deals such as Yubico, Affirm (Sweep), Renasar, Simility, and Platina.
As a founder, Steve was an EIR at Kleiner Perkins and three time successful entrepreneur and operator while actively investing in and advising in some of the most successful technology success stories of the past several decades.
Steve’s first major foray into venture was founding 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.
Steve also 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.
Most recently as an operator, Steve founded Nebula, 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, with Nebula’s other investors included Google’s first three investors — Andy Bechtolsheim, Ram Shriram and David Cheriton. Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) acquired Nebula in 2014.
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.