Steve Ohara

Steve O'Hara is Founder and Managing Partner of Valley Capital Partners, an early-stage venture capital firm he launched in 2018 and based in Menlo Park, California. The firm reportedly manages over $250 million in assets and pursues a "high conviction, high concentration" strategy, typically making roughly 8–12 core investments per fund alongside co-founders/partners including Mitchell Kokko, Mike Lempres and Steve Erbst. Before Valley Capital Partners, O'Hara co-founded The Valley Fund in 2013, an early-stage fund whose founding team included former investment professionals from Stanford Management Company.

O'Hara has been the principal founder of three venture-backed operating companies. In 2010 he founded Nebula (originally Fourth Paradigm Development), co-founded with former NASA Ames CTO Chris C. Kemp and Devin Carlen; Nebula built cloud computing software and appliances and was a creator/commercializer of OpenStack, the widely used open-source cloud platform. Nebula was acquired by Oracle in 2014. Earlier, he founded OnFiber Communications in 1999 (an optical carrier for enterprises, acquired by Qwest in 2006) and CoreLogic in 1994 (a RISC/virtual-chip pioneer acquired by Micron Technology in 1998).

Earlier in his career, O'Hara served as VP of Data Platforms at Nortel Networks (1992–1994) and was a member of the technical staff at Xerox PARC, where he co-authored two U.S. patents on adaptive echo-cancellation techniques. He holds a BS in Mathematics from Santa Clara University (1988) and later served as an advisor at the university's School of Engineering (2007–2015). Outside of investing he lists interests including rugby, fly-fishing, and artificial intelligence.

• Invests at the earliest stages — pre-seed, seed and Series A — with the firm concentrating capital in a small number of high-conviction bets per fund rather than spreading across many companies.
• Core sectors: AI/ML infrastructure, enterprise infrastructure, cybersecurity, software platforms, deep tech (including AI & robotics), plus workflow automation, data, and cloud computing.
• Backs "highly technical, mission-driven founding teams" building "technology that solves hard problems at scale" — a founder-and-operator lens shaped by O'Hara's own history building infrastructure and deep-tech companies.
• Emphasizes hands-on, operational partnership after investing — governance, talent recruiting, and strategic enterprise partnerships — rather than passive check-writing.
• Firm track record cited publicly: ~23 exits, including 14 billion-dollar outcomes and 11 IPOs, spanning from Arista Networks two decades ago to Yubico in 2023.