Richard Melmon began his career in Silicon Valley with Hewlett Packard in 1970. Finding HP a wonderful, albeit dull company, he quickly left, opting to get his MBA from Stanford. In 1972, while at Stanford, he wrote his required class thesis on the premise that the microprocessor, then nascent and only recently introduced, would take over the entire computer value chain. He leveraged that insight into a job with its inventor, Intel Corporation, from which he participated in the beginnings of the revolution still playing out more than five decades later. At Intel, he launched Microma, the world’s first digital watch, which forever set his perspective on how complex electronic devices would find their way into the world of the consumer.

With this background, he subsequently joined Regis McKenna, Inc., a marketing firm, from which he had the opportunity to play a major role in the launch of Apple Computer. At McKenna, he also had the opportunity to launch the world's first spreadsheet, VisiCalc, which arguably was the software product that truly launched the personal computer revolution. Somewhat later, in 1982, he and Trip Hawkins founded Electronic Arts. Squabbles between he and his partner occasioned him leaving EA only a few years after its founding, and he went on to found a high tech ad agency and then Objective Software, which developed Spreadbase, a relational database with a spreadsheet front end.

In 1995, he rejoined McKenna, where he met and began working with Hiroshi Menjo, serving enterprises in Japan as they began contemplating the Internet. This led them to found NSV in 2002. The partnership continued to focus its consulting on helping Japanese companies understand the disruptions coming with the rise of the Internet, while also making seed stage investments in what was, in hindsight, the beginnings of the Web 2.0 transformation. In 2010, NSV created its first of our strategic VC funds with Japanese LPs.