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Key people at Sybase.
Sybase was an enterprise software and services company started in 1984 in the Berkeley home of Bob Epstein with co-founder Mark Hoffman. Mark, a former IBMer who had been at West Point, reached out to Kleiner Perkins partner and fellow Army cadet, Frank Caufield, to explore a potential investment.
At the time, Sybase (initially called System Ware) was a tiny company and there wasn’t much to analyze to inform an investment decision. But Sybase was pursuing an interesting idea: the need for large companies to share information across their organizations to complete accounting reports, calculate sales estimates and invoice customers, among other things. At the time, these tasks were largely manual. Sybase’s relational database management system promised to automate the sharing, updating and tracking of information across organizations. We had a strong gut instinct about the potential for the business and Frank was confident in Mark’s leadership abilities. In 1985, we invested in Sybase.
Frank was Kleiner’s point person on the Sybase investment, playing an active role until shortly after the company’s 1991 IPO. SAP acquired Sybase in 2010 for $5.8 billion.
Sybase, Inc. was a pioneering enterprise software company focused on managing and analyzing information through relational databases. Founded in 1984, Sybase built one of the first commercially successful client-server relational database management systems (RDBMS), enabling organizations to efficiently share, update, and track data across distributed networks. Its core product, Sybase SQL Server (later renamed Adaptive Server Enterprise), solved the challenge of automating complex business processes that were previously manual or siloed, especially in high-performance environments like financial services. Sybase served large enterprises—particularly in banking, telecommunications, and government—where reliability, scalability, and real-time analytics were critical. The company enjoyed strong growth throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, establishing itself as a major player before being acquired by SAP in 2010 for $5.8 billion.
Sybase was founded in 1984 by Mark Hoffman and Bob Epstein, both of whom brought deep expertise in database technology. Hoffman had previously worked at Britton Lee, a pioneer in database computing, while Epstein was instrumental in developing the Ingres relational database during his time at UC Berkeley. The idea for Sybase emerged from the recognition that relational databases—then largely confined to academic settings—could revolutionize how businesses managed information. Development began in Epstein’s Berkeley home, with early funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Hambrecht & Quist. After two years of intensive development, Sybase shipped its first product in 1986, quickly gaining traction among Wall Street firms seeking a competitive edge through faster, more reliable data processing. The company’s early success was further accelerated by a strategic partnership with Microsoft and Ashton-Tate to port SQL Server to PC platforms, which helped establish Sybase as a foundational player in the enterprise software ecosystem.
Sybase rode the wave of the enterprise software boom in the 1980s and 1990s, as businesses increasingly sought to digitize operations and leverage data for competitive advantage. The timing was pivotal: the rise of networked computing, client-server architectures, and the need for real-time analytics created a perfect storm for Sybase’s technology. The company played a foundational role in shaping the modern database landscape, influencing not only competitors like Oracle and Microsoft but also setting standards for how enterprises manage and analyze information. Its early adoption by Wall Street cemented its reputation for performance and reliability, and its technology became a blueprint for future generations of database systems.
While Sybase as an independent company no longer exists—having been fully integrated into SAP—the legacy of its innovations lives on in today’s enterprise data platforms. The trends that fueled Sybase’s rise—cloud computing, real-time analytics, and the growing importance of data governance—continue to accelerate. As organizations seek to extract more value from their data, the principles Sybase pioneered remain highly relevant. The future of enterprise data management will likely see further convergence of database, analytics, and AI capabilities, with Sybase’s foundational work continuing to influence the evolution of the field. Just as Sybase once transformed how businesses managed information, the next generation of data platforms will redefine what’s possible in an increasingly data-driven world.
Key people at Sybase.
