Money marries money

Tech billionaire meets impoverished beauty, and introduces her to a life of spousal entertainment on the fringes of TED: the Silicon Valley fairy-tale romance is about as likely as Richard Gere falling in love with a hooker picked up on Hollywood Boulevard. Although Yahoo co-founder David Filo did marry an East Palo Alto schoolteacher, the old rule still applies in supposedly classless Silicon Valley: money marries money. As we've been reminded, most recently in the new Time profile on the Youtube founders. A register of dynastic alliances, after the jump.

Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape and Ning, this autumn married Laura Arrillaga, daughter of billiionaire John Arrillaga, one of the Valley's most powerful real estate developers. Arrillaga's $100m gift to Stanford this year was the largest individual donation to the university.

Chad Hurley, co-founder of video sharing site Youtube, is the husband of Kathy Clark, daughter of Jim Clark, the legendary entrepreneur who founded Silicon Graphics, discovered Netscape, and backed Healtheon. In this case, the appropriate folk wisdom is not so much money marries money as money makes money. Chad Hurley was a humble web designer when he met Kathy in 2000. From the Time profile: "His daughter, 36, is an intensely private person—she was reticent when I visited the Clark-Hurley home in Menlo Park, Calif., for a brief meal of takeout burritos in their trophy kitchen (Wolf range, lovely). She asked that I not reveal the names of the kids. Kathy and Chad have never before publicly discussed her father's identity."

Mark Kvamme, a partner at Sequoia, is married to the daughter of Pierre Lamond, founder of National Semiconductor, also a partner at the venture capital firm. In this case, however, the marriage did not exactly cement an alliance between the two Silicon Valley families: Kvamme and his father are famously remote.

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