Sutter Hill Ventures

Most venture firms work hard to be seen. Sutter Hill Ventures does the opposite. Its website is a single page with its name and a street address on Page Mill Road in Palo Alto. It publishes no team list, no portfolio and no blog. Yet this quiet firm, founded in the 1960s, built two of the biggest technology companies of the last 20 years inside its own office: Pure Storage and Snowflake.

This profile is a neutral explainer for visitors and founders. Because the firm publishes almost nothing, it relies on published histories and on reporting by CNBC. We note sources as we go. For the basics of how venture funds work, see our venture capital guide.

Founding in the 1960s

Bill Draper and Paul Wythes founded Sutter Hill Ventures in Palo Alto. Most histories, including our history of venture capital on the Peninsula, date it to 1964. A 2020 CNBC profile gave 1962. The firm began as an offshoot of a real estate company and was licensed as a Small Business Investment Company, a federal program that helped many early venture firms raise money.

Bill Draper came from a family closely tied to the start of venture capital on the West Coast. His father, General William H. Draper Jr., co-founded Draper, Gaither & Anderson in Palo Alto in 1959, often called the first venture firm in the West. His son Tim Draper later became a well known venture investor himself, according to CNBC.

The firm's early bets were in the computer hardware boom. Published histories name two of them. Qume made disk drives and printers and was bought by ITT in 1978. Diablo Systems, a pioneer of daisy-wheel printers, was sold to Xerox in 1972. In the 1980s Sutter Hill provided seed money for LSI Logic and Banyan Systems. Our page on Shockley, Fairchild and the semiconductor boom sets the scene for that era.

The office at 755 Page Mill Road

The only fact Sutter Hill publishes about itself is its address: 755 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto, CA 94304. Page Mill Road is one of the main routes through Stanford Research Park, the business park where Hewlett-Packard, Varian and many others set up after World War II.

The office is private and the firm does not take visitors.

The incubation model

Sutter Hill is best known today for a way of investing that is closer to company building than picking. Instead of waiting for founders to pitch, a partner develops an idea, recruits a founding team and sometimes runs the company in its first years. The approach is most closely linked to Mike Speiser, a managing director at the firm since 2008, according to CNBC.

CNBC's 2020 reporting described the pattern in two cases:

• Pure Storage, 2009. Speiser introduced the company's two inventors to each other, provided seed funding and helped make early hires. The company was incubated in Sutter Hill's office. At Pure Storage's 2015 IPO, Sutter Hill owned 27 percent of the stock.
• Snowflake, 2012. Speiser recruited founders Benoit Dageville and Thierry Cruanes, both former Oracle engineers, along with Marcin Zukowski. He served as Snowflake's first CEO and CFO from 2012 to 2014 and worked with the engineers on the design of the database.

Other partners played roles too, according to CNBC. Doug Mohr introduced Speiser to Snowflake's founders. Chad Peets helped the company's sales chief hire hundreds of people as it grew. The firm, in other words, acted less like an outside board member and more like part of the founding team.

For a founder, this model has trade-offs. An incubating firm brings an idea, early capital and hands-on help from day one. It also usually ends up with a much larger ownership stake than a typical seed investor, as the Pure Storage and Snowflake numbers show.

CNBC also reported that Sutter Hill runs an evergreen fund that takes in capital gradually rather than raising a new fund every few years. That structure suits long incubations because the firm is not racing a fixed fund deadline.

The Snowflake outcome

Snowflake went public in September 2020. CNBC reported that Sutter Hill owned 20.3 percent of the company's shares, including shares to be distributed to affiliates. After the first day of trading that stake was worth about $12.6 billion, from a total investment of less than $200 million. Sumo Logic, another Sutter Hill company, went public the same week.

Other public companies in which the firm has held positions, according to published histories, include Corcept Therapeutics and Restoration Robotics. In May 2025 the firm was reported to be an investor in io, the hardware startup founded by Jony Ive that OpenAI agreed to buy.

Sutter Hill at a glance

Because the firm discloses so little, any list like this is partial. It reflects what has surfaced in filings and press coverage rather than a full portfolio.

How founders reach Sutter Hill

Sutter Hill publishes no pitch process, contact form, email address or team page. That is unusual and worth knowing before you spend time trying.

• Its incubation model means partners often start with an idea and then recruit founders, rather than the other way round.
• Founders and engineers who end up working with the firm typically meet partners through personal and professional networks.
• Public SEC filings and press reports are the main way to learn who works there.

If you are raising, time is usually better spent on firms that publish how they invest. Our guides to pitching investors and seed funds list practical starting points. For other company-building programs, see accelerators and incubators.

The Palo Alto context

Sutter Hill's story runs in parallel with Palo Alto's own. The firm was founded as the town's electronics industry took off around Stanford. It invested through the chip, computer and internet eras. In the 2010s it incubated Snowflake, one of the best known cloud software companies of the decade. Our Silicon Valley history page covers the wider arc.

It also stands out among its neighbors. Most of the well known firms near Palo Alto now publish detailed websites, partner blogs, podcasts and fund announcements. Sutter Hill shares almost none of that. What the public knows about it comes mostly from IPO filings, which must disclose large shareholders. The occasional press profile fills in the rest.

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