John Rea Radin, a longtime Silicon Valley venture capital
investor, died on Jan. 7, at Stanford University Hospital after a
three-month illness.
John Rea Radin, a longtime Silicon Valley venture capital investor, died on Jan. 7, at Stanford University Hospital after a three-month illness. He was 79 years old.
After graduating from Gilroy High School, he went on to Stanford in 1940 with the intention of majoring in physics or engineering.
His education was interrupted when he was drafted into the U.S. Army during World War II. He soon earned an appointment into the Army’s Manhattan Project because of his promising background in science and received further training at Washington University in St. Louis and Louisiana State University.
In the later years of the war, he was based at Oak Ridge, Tenn., where he met his wife, Mary Cox Radin, then of Knoxville, Tenn.
After the war, Mr. Radin returned to California and completed his degree in electrical engineering at Stanford in 1947, before taking a position as an engineer with the Pacific Gas and Electric Company in San Francisco.
Mr. Radin went to work for Ampex Corp. in Redwood City in 1958 before beginning a career in 1964 as a private investor specializing in stock investments and venture financing for small scientific startups in Silicon Valley. He continued as an active investor through the end of 2002. The family moved to Palo Alto in 1951.
He is survived by his wife Mary, of Palo Alto, sons; Richard and his wife Nancy, of Oakland, and John and his wife Dianne with children John Trenton and Chelsea Lee Radin, of Fairfax, Va.
In the spring, Mr. Radin will be memorialized with a family gathering in All Souls Garden at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Palo Alto.
