VeriSign

Kleiner Perkins met Stratton Sclavos when he was vice president of sales at GO Corp., a portfolio company that was an early developer of pen-based user interfaces. He and Kevin Compton, then a partner at Kleiner Perkins, had taken a business trip to Japan in the early ‘90s. That started a friendship that several years later would lead Kleiner Perkins to invest in Stratton’s next venture, Verisign.

In 1995, after a short stint heading marketing for Taligent, a joint venture between Apple, HP and IBM, Stratton was recruited to be CEO of Verisign, a company created from the spin-out of the RSA Security Certification services business. By providing authentication certificates, the company hoped to deepen end-user trust in e-commerce. Kevin bumped into Stratton at one of his kid’s soccer games, where he learned that Verisign had just closed its Series A financing. Eager to partner with Stratton again, Kevin called the other investors in the round who agreed to allow Kleiner to participate. In 1996, we invested in Verisign.

The partners believed in both Stratton and the opportunity. People were beginning to adopt e-commerce and there were questions about transaction security. What Verisign did to authenticate the vendor and secure the transaction would go a long way to overcoming those concerns.

E-commerce growth exploded during the mid-to-late ‘90s with the advent of Amazon and other Web retailers. Verisign went public in 1998, raising $42 million in a deal that valued the company at $282 million. Two years later, Verisign acquired Network Solutions for $21 billion, then one of the largest acquisitions ever. Through the transaction, Verisign acquired the right to operate the .com, .net, and .org internet domains under an agreement with the US Department of Commerce. Verisign became a one-stop shop for e-commerce, providing both web addresses and security software.