Over the course of a half-century, the Draper family has carved out a name (and a fortune) in a place where breeding and ancestry are thought to be irrelevant. Now it's time for the debut of the youngest generation.
Bill Draper's salt-and-pepper eyebrows grow like weeds. They are the one feature on the venture capitalist's handsome, square-jawed 84-year-old face that give away his age; they're also a mark of the Draper gene pool, an optometric family crest. Bill's son, Tim, also a venture capitalist, has similarly unruly patches. And Tim's sons, Adam and Billy, both entrepreneurs, have a tamer twentysomething variation. "Those are some power brows," Adam says of his dad's and granddad's facial hair. "You meet them and you just look at their brows for a little bit--they're like visors."
Bill has the air of a vintage businessman. Dressed in a camel-hued sports coat and burgundy dress shoes, he looks like the kind of man who wouldn't dare enter an elevator without first holding the door for the women getting on. He credits his start in California to his father, General William H. Draper Jr., a former undersecretary of the U.S. Army who is considered the first professional venture capitalist on the West Coast. When the general opened his VC firm in the late 1950s, he recruited his son Bill, then living in Chicago, as one of his first employees, thus launching the Draper dynasty. "We rented a car and went out and knocked on doors in the orchards," says Bill, recalling the apricot groves that filled Sunnyvale. In those early days of working for his father, Bill would pull over to any storefront that had the word technology in its name. Then he'd ask the company if they wanted help in exchange for some equity.
Silicon Valley is thought to embody the new American dream: a place where nobody cares who your parents are--as long as you have good...[Source: Fast Company]
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