Richard Raymond (publisher)

Richard Harrington Raymond (November 30, 1923 – September 16, 2015), entrepreneur, publisher, and organizer, was a key figure in Northern California environmental and cultural developments. Some of his projects had a role in the Santa Clara Valley becoming a premier high-tech industrial district nicknamed the "Silicon Valley."

After his employment in the Stanford Research Institute in the early to mid-1960s, Raymond supported numerous ventures through the Portola Institute, a non-profit organization that he founded and presided over. The Institute supported developments in digital tech and personal-computer applications, explored potentials of computers in educational contexts, and published the Whole Earth Catalog.

Raymond later co-founded the POINT Foundation to financially support the organization of environment- and community-related projects. The Foundation's many undertakings included sending Bay Area environmentalists to the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, in Stockholm, as well as supporting the founding of the Trust for Public Land. POINT also published the CoEvolution Quarterly which, a decade later, was expanded in scope as the Whole Earth Review.

The Briarpatch Network — a mentoring and mutual-aid system to support small-scale entrepreneurs — was a brainchild of Raymond's, launched in collaboration with a few of his friends.