(FORTUNE Magazine) – Anyone who has visited our Silicon Valley bureau in Palo Alto lately (it's in the quaint Victorian house located strategically across the street from the Gordon Biersch microbrewery) may have noticed an entangled chart growing on the whiteboard in writer Melanie Warner's office. Confusing as it is, the chart became essential to Melanie as she sought to untangle the magic and mystery of the Valley's most powerful venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Unfortunately, we couldn't reproduce Melanie's actual chart; fortunately, we could publish her story--and some other charts inspired by the original. It's a doozy. Most of us already are familiar with Kleiner Perkins' involvement in the financing of the explosive Internet industry; the firm backed such now familiar companies as Netscape, AOL, Excite, Amazon.com, and @Home. Also, readers of FORTUNE for years have followed the technology bets placed by John Doerr, KP's most famous and emblematic investor. What no one at FORTUNE, or anywhere else, has done until now, however, is figure out in fascinating detail how the KP folks actually run their firm, as well as how they earn tons of money for themselves and for those business associates--like Andy Grove, Scott McNealy, Jim Clark, and Steve Case--who have come to be regarded as members of the "KP family." The good news for FORTUNE readers is that this story is exactly what we had in mind when we plucked Melanie out of New York and sent her west with instructions to bring her Wall Street sensibilities and puckish storytelling style to bear on the fanciful, almost casino-like forms of finance that prevail in today's Silicon Valley. Expect more of the same.