Steve O’Hara

Steve O’Hara has been the principal founder in three venture-backed companies and a board member and investor in numerous others. Steve co-founded and is a general partner at Valley Capital Partners, an early stage venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, CA.

Previously, Steve founded Nebula in 2010. Nebula is the co-creator of OpenStack (the world’s most widely used open source software for cloud computing) and the world’s first cloud computer for large scale computing for enterprises. The company raised two rounds of venture financing from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), Highland Capital Partners, Comcast Ventures and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. Nebula’s other investors include Scott McNealy, Harris Barton, William R. Hearst III and Google’s first three investors — Andy Bechtolsheim, Ram Shriram and David Cheriton. Nebula is now part of Oracle.

In 1999, Steve founded optical facilities-based carrier and U.S. leader OnFiber Communications. Steve founded OnFiber with seed funding from Andy Bechtolsheim, and later incubated the start-up at Kleiner Perkins under Vinod Khosla. OnFiber raised its A, B and C rounds from from Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers (KPCB), Bear Stearns and Bechtel. OnFiber was acquired by Qwest (NYSE: Q) in 2006 for $173M.

In 1994, Steve founded CoreLogic with backing from Intel Capital, Mitsubishi (Visys) and a private syndicate of angel investors. CoreLogic was a virtual chip pioneer that designed Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) processors and technology to the netlist level. In 1997, CoreLogic merged with another venture-backed start-up, Rendition, and in 1998 Micron Technology (NYSE: MU) acquired the combined company for $92M.

Steve started his career at Nortel (NYSE: NRTLQ) in 1988 and worked at the company through 1994. He held roles in applications engineering, systems engineering, sales and business development. Steve also held an internship role in research at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), where he and two others earned two U.S. patents on adaptive echo cancellation techniques using image waveforms and optimization algorithms.

Steve was an early investor in Arista Networks (IPO 2014), NetScreen (IPO in 2001, acquired by Juniper Networks in 2004 for $4.6 billion), SiByte (acquired by Broadcom in 2001 for $2.1 billion), Cerent (acquired by Cisco for $7.2 billion), Infinera (IPO in 2007 Nasdaq: INFN), StorageNetworks (IPO 2001), Digital Island (IPO 1999), Pure Digital (acquired by Cisco for $590M in 2009), EuPhonics (acquired by 3Com for $65M in 1998), Ipsilon (acquired by Nokia for $140M in 1997) and Acclaim (acquired by Level One for $165M in 2000).

Steve graduated in 1988 with a BS degree in Math from Santa Clara University, where he served as an advisor at the School of Engineering from 2007 through 2013.

Steve was born in Los Angeles and currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.