Bill Draper, who started his pioneering career as a Silicon Valley investor by steering a rented Pontiac through the orchard-dotted Santa Clara Valley of Northern California in the early 1960s, drumming up business in an era when few entrepreneurs had even heard the term “venture capital,” died on Sept. 8 at his home in Atherton, Calif. He was 98. His death was confirmed by his daughter Polly Draper.

The “man who saw Silicon Valley before it existed,” as the magazine BW Businessworld recently called him, Mr. Draper began his career more than a decade before Silicon Valley acquired its name in the early 1970s, at a time when computer coding was still done using punched paper cards. As a founder or managing director of a string of trailblazing venture capital companies, including Sutter Hill Ventures and Draper Richards, he helped start an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars, alongside titans like Arthur Rock, Eugene Kleiner, Thomas J. Perkins and Don Valentine.

Known for his glass-half-full mentality, he was called Dr. Yes by his colleagues at Draper Richards because “he loved to say, ‘We’re in!’ to a deal at an initial meeting before we could do the due diligence,” Robin Richards Donohoe, the company’s co-founder, said in an interview. His long list of wins over the decades included placing early bets on the video game maker Activision, as well as Skype, Open Table, the printer company Qume and Corbin-Farnsworth, a pioneering maker of defibrillators, pacemakers and heart monitors. Armed with a Harvard M.

B. A., Mr. Draper arrived in California in 1959 to join Draper, Gaither and Anderson, which was co-founded by his father, William H. Draper Jr., a prominent New York investment banker, and was called the first venture capital firm west of the Mississippi River.

In 1962, Mr. Draper partnered with his friend Franklin Pitcher Johnson Jr., known as Pitch, to start their own firm, Draper & Johnson Investment Company. Around 1965, he and Mr. Johnson went their separate ways. Mr. Draper joined Sutter Hill, a real estate company that, under his direction and that of Paul Wythes, another industry trailblazer, branched off into venture capital. By 1978, Silicon Valley was beginning to resemble the tech hub we know today.