Overview

Gender

male

Investor Type

Investment Partner

Steve O'Hara has been the principal founder in three venture-backed companies and a board member and investor in several others.

In 2013, Steve co-founded and is a general partner at The Valley Fund (and Valley Capital Partners in 2018), an early stage venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, CA. Steve focuses on early stage investments in the areas of AI, enterprise infrastructure, security technology, SaaS and deep tech sectors such as robotics and machine learning.

Previously, Steve founded Nebula in 2010. Nebula designed developed cloud computing appliances for large scale enterprises and was the creator of OpenStack, the world's most widely used open source software for compute and storage. 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 was acquired by Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) in 2014.

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 and Will Hearst. OnFiber raised its Series A, B and C rounds from from Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers (KPCB), Bear Stearns Ltd, Bechtel, Amerindo and GE Capital. OnFiber was acquired by Qwest (NYSE: Q) in 2006 for $200M. (Qwest is now CenturyLink).

In 1994, Steve founded CoreLogic with backing from Intel Capital, Mitsubishi (Visys) and a private syndicate of angel investors. CoreLogic designed and developed Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) processors and technology Micron (NYSE: MU) acquired CoreLogic in 1998 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), Legato (acquired by EMC for $1.2B), EuPhonics (acquired by 3Com for $55M 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 2014.

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