Silicon Valley's Hearing Aide

As a founder of the California Ear Institute at Stanford University, Rodney Perkins met many of the founding fathers of Silicon Valley. Among the surgeon’s friends—and sometime patients—were William Hewlett and David Packard; Intel’s co-founder, Gordon Moore, and its former chief executive officer, Andy Grove; and Manhattan Project charter member Edward Teller, one of the inspirations for Dr. Strangelove. Over the years he lunched with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and worked with leading venture capitalist Eugene Kleiner. “I didn’t realize until very recently that I had actually been a voyeur at the biggest renaissance since Florence,” Perkins says.

Although few in the frenetic, youth-obsessed technology world know his name, Perkins, a 77-year-old otologist in Woodside, Calif., didn’t just watch that Valley renaissance from the sidelines. Starting in the mid-1970s, while he continued to practice medicine, he founded more than a dozen companies that operate at the intersection of medicine and technology. His startups included cosmetic pioneer Collagen, medical-device maker Laserscope, and ReSound, one of the first companies to incorporate digital signal processing into hearing aids.