Bill Draper, who asked the awkward stupid question

The Pontiacs were rented, two of them, because the firm had two partners and each partner needed a car. In 1962 Bill Draper drove his down the peninsula toward Mountain View and read the signs on the low buildings as he passed. If a sign said Prune Distributors he kept going. If it had "electronics" in it, or anything that sounded technical, he pulled in, knocked, and introduced himself. Nobody out there knew the words "venture capital." There was no Silicon Valley, only Sunnyvale and Mountain View and the orchards, and since nobody else was doing this, the two men in the Pontiacs were, for a few years, the whole industry. The first door they tried opened on a man named Jack, who showed them the first dollar-bill changer. They did not invest.

He had come to the orchards from a steel mill. For five years after Harvard Business School he sold steel for Inland in East Chicago, Indiana, in a mill town where coke dust settled on the walls and his wife, Phyllis, washed them, and where he made a friend on the furnace side named Pitch Johnson. Georges Doriot, who taught him at Harvard, had said to go where there was real business, and in 1954 real business was steel. The two wives compared notes. Phyllis said Bill would be president of Inland Steel; Kathy Johnson said she had assumed Pitch would be. When he quit in 1959 the shares stood at $59, and the chairman sat him down to tell him about a man in Highland Park who had gone into finance and lost his house. The stock never saw $59 again.

The job he left for was his father's. William Draper Jr., who had been General Clay's economic adviser in occupied Germany and then run the Marshall Plan from Paris, had just opened Draper, Gaither & Anderson on the Stanford campus with $6m from the Rockefellers, Lazard and two individuals, and a partnership document (20 percent carry, a 2.5 percent fee, ten years) whose terms the industry still uses. The son was the junior man, paid $10,000 a year and budgeting on a yellow sheet of paper: one movie a month, one dinner out. The partner who mattered to him was not one of the names on the door but Larry Durig, a small man whose cigarette ash burned holes in his shirts and who told the young men not to be mesmerized by the gold watch. You were not investing in the gimmick. You were investing in the people who were making it.

He never pretended to more than that. He had no technical degree and, by his own account, never did understand the technology; he asked people who did whether the thing worked, and then he looked at the management. Bill Shockley had the transistor and was a lousy manager, so his team left and there was Intel. Would you rather have backed Shockley? Four engineers came to Sutter Hill in 1980 wanting to build disk drives and had not thought about who would run the company. Well, Jim, why don't you be president, you have the least to do. That was Quantum, a $2bn company by 1994. When a board adopted one of Draper's own engineering suggestions he grew nervous, because it meant the founders had not thought through the things he could not think of, and the deal would fail. It usually did.

The Pontiac firm became Sutter Hill. Johnson missed the furnaces and left after three years, so Draper merged into a real-estate outfit that had just hired Paul Wythes and done one deal, and the two of them worked together for twenty years. In 1970 a Canadian conglomerate called Genstar put in $10m, and for four years, through the recession, the fund was flat to the dollar; Draper went to Montreal each year to say so. He had insisted on an evergreen structure, one pie everyone shared rather than a fund to spend down for a bigger piece of the next one. Genstar's president later told him the $10m had returned half a billion in earnings. In 1972 he bought a house by Bernard Maybeck on four and a half acres in Atherton, the most expensive in town, and felt for the first time that he had money.

He was also, all his life, his father's son, which meant leaving. The general had walked away from venture capital at 70 to spend what remained on family planning, and when it came right down to it had more interest in that than in any deal. Bill ran for Congress in 1967 and finished behind both Pete McCloskey and Shirley Temple Black; Time noted that he delighted small groups. In 1981 Reagan sent him to run the Export-Import Bank, and in 1986 the United Nations gave him its development program, 10,000 projects across the poor world for seven years. He said he might someday write a book about the UN years, and never did. What he brought back was the conviction that the method traveled. Deng Xiaoping had done more for entrepreneurs than any man in history by letting them work; India had been held down by one family for forty years until Manmohan Singh let go. So in 1994 he raised the first American fund for India, and made sixteen times the money in six years. His foundation gave $100,000 a year for three years to nonprofits that had raised nothing else, and looked for what it had always looked for, the fire in the eye. When people credited him with Skype he said all he had done was hire the man in the next office.

The failures he told with more relish. A copying machine meant to put Xerox out of business was demonstrated to Genstar's president, who was asked for a bill to feed it; the machine caught fire and the bill with it, and the $10m arrived anyway. A patented fork for dental floss cost Draper & Johnson $2,000, after the bookkeeper confirmed she used floss. At 77 he had a live deal, pasteurized mothers' milk for neonatal units, that kept him up at night, because he had let friends put profits from the India fund into a single company, the one thing he told everyone never to do and the thing his father had done in 1929 with a German coffee-maker patent and a mortgage.

Phyllis died in 2018, after 65 years. Tim, his son, wrote the morning after his father died that the family had been lucky to have him as long as they did.

In October 2005, home from Virginia the night before, he had fed a bill into a machine in an airport garage to get his car out, and thought of Jack and the first door in Mountain View. Things were happening then that today you just take for granted. He drove home.