Jean E. de Valpine
Jean England de Valpine (born 1921 in St. Louis, Missouri) became the chief executive officer of Memorial Drive Trust in 1960 and immediately began Providing new venture financing. In 1973 he helped organize the National Venture Capital Association which he served for many years as a founding director. de Valpine played a key role in changing Venture Capital into an industry. His own venture capital activities helped launched the cable TV and Artificial Intelligence industries.
Jean E. de Valpine was a 1943 field artillery ROTC and engineering science graduate of Harvard College, and of the Tank Destroyer School at Camp Hood (later Fort Hood), Texas. He served as forward observer and battery commander in the 25th Infantry Division in the Philippines and Japan, where, - as commanding officer of Battery A, 89th FA - he was assigned occupational military police responsibility for approximately one third of the city of Nagoya. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1949.
He practiced law in Boston for ten years during which he formed the antitrust committee of the Boston Bar Association. In 1960, at the request of Royal Little, Chairman of Textron, lnc., and a trustee of Memorial Drive Trust (MDT), de Valpine undertook the management of MDT, the profit sharing trust and sole stockholder of Arthur D. Little, Inc. de Valpine immediately began investing part of the Trust assets in real estate development and early stage ventures, an investment category then called "risk capital," later to become known as "venture capital".
Starting with early cable television operators, this asset portfolio grew over the years to include an array of armaments, electronics, cryogenic technology, computer, communications and software companies. Jean de Valpine served as a director of many of these companies as they evolved from small startups to mature public enterprises. Inter alia, he was chairman of Realty Income Trust, the first publicly traded REIT, and in 1964-66 served as Assistant Attorney General of Massachusetts.
From 1969 until 1977 he was chairman of Space Research Corporation, an armaments firm engaged under the direction of its president and chief technical officer, Dr. Gerald Bull in the design of artillery systems and extended range ammunitions, based on gun technology research and development conducted mainly at the company's aeroballistic laboratory and 10,000 acre range straddling the Quebec-Vermont border and also at its Barbados range and its Antigua field artillery test site. Principal projects included gun launched satellites and “Supergun” concepts tracing back to World War I German research data relating to the Paris Gun. The Quebec-Vermont border straddle enabled selection from time to time of the jurisdiction (U.S. or Canada) least restrictive with respect to a contemplated international arms shipment or technolgy transfer.
He was active in financing the development of the cable television industry between 1965 and 1990, including American Television and Communications, later merged into Time, Inc., and Continental Cablevision, which ultimately became part of Comcast's systems.
In the 1980's he supported the emergence of Al technology based enterprises out of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and other research institutions. The most notable of these enterprises was Symbolics, Inc., the first dotcom. Later he became associated with Russell Noftsker, Richard Petti, Landon Clay (benefactor of the Clay Mathematics Institute) and others in Macsyma, Inc., an attempt to migrate MIT's pioneering computer algebra system, authored by MIT Prof. Joel Moses and his colleagues on DEC timesharing computers, ported to DEC minicomputer Unix platforms (along with Unix) by Berkeley Prof. Richard Fateman, first commercialized by Symbolics, Inc. on Symbolics workstations and DEC VAXes, and finally ported to the rapidly evolving Wintel PC standard under MS Windows by Macsyma, Inc.
In 1973, together with a number of other nationally prominent venture capitalists, he worked on the organization of the National Venture Capital Associationwhich he served for many years as a founding director.
Since 1994 he has served from time to time as director of several asset management firms and as chairman of MDT Funds, a mutual fund family now known as Federated MDT Funds. He is currently a director of Tradecraft Corporation. Netcraft Corporation, a subsidiary of Tradecraft Corporation, is a patent licensing firm managed by Andrew Egendorf.
references
- E.J.Kahn,Jr., The PROBLEM SOLVERS (Little,Brown 1986)
- James Adams, BULL'S EYE (TIMES BOOKS 1992)