Background
Gage received his bachelor's degree in 1975 from the University of California, Berkeley. He also attended the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and the Harvard Business School. While at Berkeley, he was a three-time All-American swimmer. He was a leader in the anti-war movement and was a delegate for Robert Kennedy in 1968 for the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, representing Berkeley and Alameda County, California. He co-chaired the Robert Kennedy campaign in Alameda County. Gage had worked at Berkeley with Bill Joy, the person largely responsible for the authorship of Berkeley UNIX, also known as BSD, from which springs many modern forms of UNIX, including Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Gage joined Sun Microsystems in 1982 with Bill Joy and others.
In 1968, and again in 1970, he was a co-organizer of Vietnam Moratorium, anti-Vietnam War events in Boston and Washington, DC. In November, 1969, he produced the final show of the Rolling Stones 1969 tour, the Palm Beach International Music and Arts Festival, with Janis Joplin, Sly and the Family Stone, ShaNaNa, Jefferson Airplane, Wavy Gravy, and a cast of thousands. He co-produced the August 6, 1970 12-hour Festival for Peace in Shea Stadium, New York, with Peter Yarrow, Creedence Clearwater, Janis Joplin, Dionne Warwick, Johnny Winter, Miles Davis, Poco, Sha-Na-Na, Steppenwolf, Richie Havens, PG&E, John Sebastian, the Staple Singers, Joan Baez, the lighting and staging of Peter Fields and the sound systems of Bill Hanley. Bill Graham's Fillmore East provided on-stage support, along with the Hog Farm.
In April, 2002, Gage joined the Markle Taskforce on National Security in the Information Age, whose two reports explore how federal, state and local governments collect, analyze and use information as it relates to national security and homeland defense. Their two reports, when joined with the reports of the 9/11 Commission and the WMD Commission Report, formed the foundation for the 2004-2005 reforms of the intelligence and homeland security communities.
In June, 2008, Gage retired from Sun Microsystems and joined Kleiner Perkins as a venture capitalist along with Al Gore.
He left Kleiner Perkins in 2010.
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