Eberhard was born in Berkeley, California on May 15, 1960. He grew up in Kensington, California, attending Kensington Hilltop Elementary School. He attended middle school and high school in adjacent El Cerrito until the middle of eleventh grade, when his family moved to Elmhurst, Illinois. Instead, Marc Tarpenning was born in Sacramento, California on June 1, 1964. He later entered the University of California, Berkeley and earned a BA in Computer Science in 1985.Tarpenning was raised in Sacramento, Calif., and earned a bachelor’s degree (1985) in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. Tarpenning then developed software and firmware products for several companies.