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

John Doerr on supervoting shares

Investors have gotten the greatest rewards from the companies that take a long-term point of view.  In the right circumstances, I'm a fan of founder control.  Google's three-class stock structure allows the founders to concentrate on the long run. [Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin own the supervoting Class B shares.]  The structure is fully disclosed, and investors don't have to buy the stock if they don't like it.

~ John Doerr, "John Doerr on Leadership, Education, Google, and AI," Barron's, May 5, 2018

John Doerr on his plan to deal with climate change

We’re really on the verge of a catastrophic irreversible climate crisis.  The evidence is all around us: devastating hurricanes, floods, heatwaves and wildfires.  The hard reality is that what we’re doing is not enough, and so we need a clear course of action.  I want to acknowledge that it’s not going to be easy.  If we succeed at it, we’ll not only save the planet, but we will create the economic opportunity of a lifetime.   I’m pretty shameless in wanting to get people to pay attention to this plan.

~ John Doerr, former head of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins and author of Speed and Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now

John Doerr on the difference between the old and new economy

The old economy was about people acquiring a single skill for life; the new economy is about life-long learning.

~ John Doerr

John Doerr on big tech trends of the future

Barron's: What are the big tech trends that investors ought to watch today?

John Doerr: About every dozen years in the tech world there is a tsunami—a huge wave of disruption. I have been fortunate to witness three, and I’ll predict the fourth. In the 1980s, it was the microchip and personal computer. The biggest winners were Intel and Microsoft [MSFT]. Then came the internet wave, which created winners such as Amazon.com and Google. Mobile was the next wave; Apple’s iPhone was launched in 2007. We’re almost at the end of that wave. The next one will be artificial intelligence, or AI, which will build on the three prior waves. It will be even larger.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are unlocking capabilities that previously were unthinkable. Autonomous vehicles are one example, but AI will be used to improve health care, better understand language and knowledge, improve fraud detection, make systems more secure, and much more.

~ John Doerr, "John Doerr on Leadership, Education, Google, and AI," Barron's, May 5, 2018

Kevin Duffy on the statist Hillary Clinton and pseudo-capitalist Warren Buffett tag team

Next up: American capitalism's folk hero, Warren Buffett, raising funds for Hillary Clinton. According the WSJ:

"The fund-raising 'Conversation with Warren Buffett' drew over 1,500 people, including a mix of Silicon Valley executives such as John Doerr, a partner at venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers... Tickets ranged from $100 to more than $2,300, drawing in around $1 million, according to the Clinton campaign."

How ludicrous - the country's prominent venture capitalists and its best known and beloved "capitalist" raising funds for a committed welfare statist and socialist. On CNBC, Hillary agreed with Buffett's position to maintain the estate tax because, in her words,

"It's really a tax to prevent us from having inherited wealth generation after generation which would undermine the kind of spirit and meritocracy that the United States stands for."

This is awfully charitable of Hillary and Warren to provide such a vital service to our "free" society. Never mind that Mr. Buffett sells life insurance to these very people attempting to protect their family businesses and family estates from the ravages of the tax man, just so they can keep them intact for their children. Buffett chooses to hand over the vast majority of his $57 billion fortune to charity, so why should he care? Repeal the exemption on charitable giving and you would see him go apoplectic. In 1995, Buffett was quoted on the subject:

"I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I've earned. If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru or someplace, you find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil... I work in a market system that happens to reward what I do very well -- disproportionately well... I do think that when you're treated enormously well by this market system, where in effect the market system showers the ability to buy goods and services on you because of some peculiar talent -- maybe your adenoids are a certain way, so you can sing and everybody will pay you enormous sums to be on television or whatever -- I think society has a big claim on that."

So on the one hand, Buffett realizes the free market maximizes human potential, and on the other supports Big Government, itself the greatest threat to free markets. Some capitalist. Note to Oracle of Omaha: If you feel the need to give back, why not write a few checks to free market think tanks?

~ Kevin Duffy, Bearing Asset Management, "Beam Me Up," LewRockwell.com, December 14, 2007