The venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has been behind a multitude of major high tech companies in its 30 year history. Working at a startup funded by Kleiner Perkins lends some cachet to your cause, as their successes are famous. Sun, AOL, Lotus, Intuit, and Compaq are some of the names in their older portfolio. Then there was Netscape, Amazon, Macromedia, and Genentech. Now there’s Google, Friendster, the Segway, and possibly the Next Big Thing. Eugene Kleiner, the first partner in the list, died Thursday. Kleiner was one of “the Traitorous Eight” who left William Shockley’s group to form Fairchild Semiconductor. Prior to teaming up with Tom Perkins, Kleiner also invested in Intel Corp. He was truly one of the founding fathers of Silicon Valley.