Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, June 10

• Thomas J. Perkins, Pioneering Venture Capitalist in Silicon Valley, Dies at 84: Thomas J. Perkins, who nurtured Silicon Valley’s venture capital industry into a force that later helped foster the growth of companies like Google and Amazon, died Tuesday night at his home in Marin County, Calif. He was 84. Mr. Perkins co-founded the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 1972, at a time when parts of Silicon Valley were still fruit orchards. Mr. Perkins and his partners popularized a model of investment that involved putting small amounts of money into promising young start-ups in return for a stake in the companies, giving them advice and counsel to spur their growth. Some of the investments turned into gigantic hits. Mr. Perkins had said that his favorite investment was Genentech, a biotechnology company that has since been acquired by Roche. Over time, Kleiner Perkins — and its home on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, Calif. — became a destination for other venture capitalists. Mr. Perkins helped recruit venture capitalists like John Doerr to his firm, leading to investments in a new generation of technology companies, including Netscape, AOL, Amazon and later Google. The firm’s success transformed Silicon Valley and the technology and biotechnology industries, leading to a proliferation of venture firms in the region and creating an ecosystem of investment in start-ups that today remains unrivaled in any other part of the world. Later in his life, Mr. Perkins was embroiled in several controversies. In 1996, he was convicted in France of involuntary manslaughter from a yacht collision. In another, he stepped down from the board of Hewlett-Packard in 2006 after he said the company had used illegal methods to obtain his phone records. The allegations led to the resignation of H.P.’s chairwoman and an overhaul of the board. He also publicly broke with Kleiner Perkins in 2014 after writing an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal in which he compared the “progressive war on the American 1 percent” to the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. The comments set off a firestorm, and the firm moved to distance itself from Mr. Perkins, who later apologized for his language. David A. Kaplan, who wrote a biography of Mr. Perkins titled “Mine’s Bigger: The Extraordinary Tale of the World’s Greatest Sailboat and the Silicon Valley Tycoon Who Built It” (2007), said in an interview on Thursday that Mr. Perkins’s “legacy won’t be helped by all the excessive things he said in recent years and the grudges he nursed,” though he was a “seminal figure” for Silicon Valley.

• Amazon confirms international expansion of its Fresh grocery delivery service: Amazon announced an overseas expansion of its Amazon Fresh grocery delivery service on Thursday, starting with a rollout in certain neighborhoods in London. Recode reported two weeks ago that Amazon planned to expand to a variety of new markets this year, including the U.K. and Boston in the U.S., after an 18-month hiatus on new city launches. The service will cost Londoners about $10 a month on top of their regular Amazon Prime membership, or about $120 a year. In the U.S., an Amazon Fresh membership costs about $200 on top of the normal $99 Prime membership program. Orders of around $58 or more come with free delivery in London. Amazon delivers the groceries — which can include both packaged groceries as well as perishable items like meat and cheese — on the same day for morning orders, or the next day for late afternoon and evening orders. Amazon Fresh launched nearly a decade ago, but has expanded slowly as the company has tried to figure out a business model that works. The service was previously only available in parts of Washington, California, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The online grocery market is still tiny in the U.S., but is more mature in the U.K. That means more competition for Amazon, but perhaps the opportunity to grow the business more quickly.

• Uber Feels UberPop Hangover With French, German Legal Setbacks: Uber Technologies Inc. is feeling the sting of European judges from Paris to Frankfurt over UberPop, suffering setbacks in France and Germany months after it took the ride-sharing option out of its app there. On Thursday, a French criminal court fined the company and two of its executives a total of 850,000 euros ($960,000), half of which was suspended, and a German appeals court separately said it wouldn’t overturn a ban of UberPop in the country. French prosecutors had attacked Uber for fraudulent commercial practices and encouraging illegal activity through UberPop, as well as improper use of personal data. “UberPop went on for months illegally, though the company and its executives knew very well what the applicable legal context was,” judge Cecile Louis-Loyant said in Paris. She fined Uber France 800,000 euros, the head of its French operations, Thibaud Simphal, 20,000 euros and Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, the company’s general manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, another 30,000 euros, saying they incited others to break the law by working for the service, leading to riots and taxistrikes in the French capital. UberPop, which allows anyone with a vehicle and driver’s license to offer a cab-like service, stopped in July in France and was banned in Germany in March 2015. Meanwhile Uber’s main chauffeured-car service, that requires registration with authorities, is still going.