Kleiner Perkins

The React hydration errors in Kleiner Perkins's console tell you everything about how Silicon Valley's most storied whaling expedition approaches their own digital presence. Founded in 1972 when ARPANET had fewer nodes than their current JavaScript bundle has dependencies, KP's website serves up a bloated 3.2MB of client-side scripts that would make even the most wasteful railroad baron blush. Their Next.js implementation exhibits the same hubris that Leland Stanford showed building the Central Pacific—technically impressive infrastructure deployed with zero consideration for the end user experience. The irony cuts deeper than a harpoon through blubber: a firm managing $18 billion can't manage to implement proper code splitting, resulting in a Time to Interactive that clocks in at 4.7 seconds on desktop. When robber barons laid track across America, at least trains eventually moved.

Diving into their source reveals a fascinating archaeological dig through Silicon Valley's technical evolution. The site's component architecture suggests they migrated from a WordPress installation circa 2019 (remnants of wp-content URLs still litter their sitemap.xml), through a brief Webflow period (ghost .w-container classes haunt their CSS), before landing on their current React monstrosity. Their portfolio grid implements virtual scrolling—a noble optimization rendered pointless by loading every portfolio company's hero image at full resolution on initial page load. The CSS-in-JS implementation bloats their stylesheet to 890KB, because apparently when you're funding the next generation of startups, you can afford to serve every possible button variant to every visitor. Like the original whaling industry, they've harpooned performance in pursuit of unnecessary technical sophistication.

The tracking apparatus would make even the NSA envious—seventeen third-party scripts including HubSpot, Segment, Google Analytics (both GA3 and GA4, naturally), Hotjar, and something called "kp-analytics.js" that phones home to a subdomain returning 403 errors. Their privacy policy, ironically hosted on Notion, mentions "minimal data collection" while their site fires 34 tracking events on page load alone. The security headers read like a masterclass in 2018 best practices: no CSP policy, permissive CORS settings, and X-Frame-Options set to SAMEORIGIN because apparently clickjacking is only a concern if you're not a Sand Hill Road institution. When Cornelius Vanderbilt monopolized shipping routes, at least he didn't pretend to champion user privacy while doing it.

Perhaps most tellingly, their GitHub organization (github.com/kleinerperkins) contains exactly three repositories: two archived portfolio tools from 2016 and a "careers-site" repo with its last commit reading "fix typo in recruiter email." For a firm that preaches technical excellence to portfolio companies, their own engineering discipline resembles the chaotic expansion of the transcontinental railroad—functional enough to reach the destination, but littered with technical debt and questionable architectural decisions. The mobile experience, tested on actual devices rather than Chrome DevTools, reveals their responsive breakpoints were clearly designed by someone who thinks "mobile-first" refers to their investment thesis rather than CSS methodology.