John Doerr on his early investments in Amazon and Google

I met Jeff [Bezos] when he was thirty years old and he and I were both computer science kinds of geeks. And Amazon had a business plan: it was growing to be the best bookseller online. And so I invested - I think it was $8 million for 15% of Amazon - and Jeff and I set out to build an amazing, world-class team.  And he had a vision, which is true to this day, that if he had the broadest selection with the most affordable prices and the best customer experience, that flywheel he could get to grow by obsessing on the customer.  And yes, I believed he was successful.  No, I had no idea that it would be worth $1.2 trillion today.

But the same thing happened a few years later when I met two 21-year old Stanford University PhD dropouts, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.  And in that case I invested $11 million for 11% of the company, which was very controversial.  They had no business plan, no revenues.  And I asked Larry Page.  He sat across the table from me.  I said, "Larry, how big do you think this can be?"  Without batting an eyelash he said $10 billion.  I said, "Surely you mean market cap, right?"  He said, "No, I'm talking revenues."  He said to me, "John, you have no idea how much we're going to be able to improve search and how important search is for finding all the world's information and services.

~ John Doerr, Bloomberg Wealth inverview with David Rubenstein, August 23, 2022