Primary Job Title Founder & Managing Partner Primary Organization Valley Capital Partners
Location Menlo Park, California, United States Regions San Francisco Bay Area, Silicon Valley, West Coast Gender Male
Investor Type
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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 was a general partner at The Valley Fund, an early stage venture capital fund that was co-founded by former investment professionals out of the Stanford Management Company. In 2018,
Steve founded Valley Capital Partners, an early stage venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, CA. Steve focuses on early stage investments in the areas of AI, enterprise infrastructure, cybersecurity, workflow automation, data, and cloud computing.
Previously, Steve founded Nebula in 2010. Nebula designed developed cloud computing software and 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 William R. Hearst III. OnFiber raised its Series A, B and C rounds from from Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers (KPCB), Bear Stearns Ltd, Bechtel and GE Capital. OnFiber was acquired by Qwest (NYSE: Q) in 2006 (Qwest is now CenturyLink).
In 1994, Steve founded CoreLogic with backing from Intel Capital, Mitsubishi's venture arm (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.
Steve started his career at Nortel (NYSE: NRTLQ) in 1988 and worked at the company through 1994. He held roles in systems engineering, product management and business development. Steve also a member of the technical staff at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), where he and two others earned four U.S. patents on adaptive echo cancellation techniques using image waveforms and optimization algorithms. Steve previously held an internship role at Cray Research, the pioneer in massively parallel processing supercomputers.
Steve was an early investor in Yubico (IPO in 2023), 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 in 1998), Ipsilon (acquired by Nokia in 1997) and Acclaim (acquired by Level One in 2000).
Steve graduated in 1988 with a BS degree in Math and a minor in English from Santa Clara University. He also attended the executive MBA program at Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley and completed the executive education program in general management at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Steve was born in Los Angeles and currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
