John Doerr, every mention
58 scenes (2022) · ← back to John Doerr
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every year 2022 anyone David Rosenthal 58Ben Gilbert 5Jason Calacanis 3Peter Fenton 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where John Doerr comes up
Benchmark Part II: The Dinner · Acquired
- ▶ 1:41:48 Peter Fenton But, you know, John Doerr, Mike Mertz, my former partner, Jim Getz, those are the people who've shown that you can do both.
ACQ Sessions: Jason Calacanis · Acquired
- ▶ 1:50:01 Jason Calacanis John Doerr, here's Gurley, like, if we are making a Mount Rushmore.
- ▶ 1:54:57 Jason Calacanis John Doerr.
- ▶ 2:04:07 Jason Calacanis John Dorr would ask Bezos.
Benchmark Part I · Acquired
- ▶ 8:43 David Rosenthal Uh, not just Kleiner Perkins, but specifically John Doerr's Kleiner Perkins.
- ▶ 8:50 Ben Gilbert After a very successful generational transfer of their own from Kleiner and Perkins to John Doerr.
- ▶ 8:55 David Rosenthal Here in the 19 nineties, I mean, John Doerr, we've talked about him this season on the Amazon episode.
- ▶ 9:48 David Rosenthal John also knew the future.
- ▶ 10:22 David Rosenthal But if you were ambitious, boy, you needed a damn good answer about how you were going to beat John Doerr.
- ▶ 11:15 David Rosenthal I mean, it was crazy when John and Mike Moritz did Google at a hundred million dollar valuation in the Series A, you know, that was earth changing.
- ▶ 11:25 David Rosenthal So to understand John, you know, we've painted the picture of how dominant he and Kleiner
- ▶ 11:33 David Rosenthal There were two very specific aspects to his style and Kleiner's style.
- ▶ 11:39 David Rosenthal One was he was unquestionably the guy.
- ▶ 11:45 David Rosenthal He was the CEO of the firm.
- ▶ 11:48 David Rosenthal He was the leader.
- ▶ 11:50 David Rosenthal He was also the best player on the field.
- ▶ 11:52 David Rosenthal It's like if he was Michael Jordan and Phil Jackson and the front office.
- ▶ 11:59 David Rosenthal He did everything.
- ▶ 12:01 David Rosenthal So that led to plenty of situations like we talked about on the amazon.com episode of he called Tom Alberg's wife.
- ▶ 12:07 David Rosenthal He aggressively came in to try and court the deal, win the deal, and then he would try and pass off the board seat to a junior partner.
- ▶ 27:03 David Rosenthal If we do a deep dive on it someday, I would be very curious to know how the Kleiner management company transitioned from Kleiner and Perkins and Caulfield and Byers to John Doerr.
- ▶ 36:35 David Rosenthal It was to do the John door path.
- ▶ 36:37 David Rosenthal Like if people had ambition, if young folks had ambition, it was like, Hey, I'll put my time in and like, look at John.
- ▶ 36:44 David Rosenthal He was still quite young at this point in time.
- ▶ 36:46 David Rosenthal And he had the keys to Kleiner Perkins.
- ▶ 51:02 David Rosenthal And like, would benchmark have beaten John Doerr to do Amazon?
- ▶ 58:50 David Rosenthal Dave gets his big break, and he gets through to John Doran.
- ▶ 58:55 David Rosenthal John makes him his preferred executive recruiter for CEO searches for his portfolio companies.
- ▶ 59:32 David Rosenthal He brings in Jim Barksdale, which of course is a Kleiner company and a John Doar company.
- ▶ 1:14:24 David Rosenthal Shaw with a full-fledged business plan and building everything out and then, you know, John Doar from Kleiner Perkins cold calling him.
- ▶ 1:38:31 David Rosenthal Part of it was counter-positioning against John Doerr.
- ▶ 1:38:44 David Rosenthal John wasn't going to make the other partners at Kleiner Perkins equal partners to him.
- ▶ 1:38:50 David Rosenthal And there's downstream impacts of that to portfolio companies, to winning deals, but also to then working with portfolio companies, you know, John and Kleiner almost lost the Amazon deal when he tried to hand off the board seat.
- ▶ 1:39:23 David Rosenthal And then there's the other counter positioning aspect versus John and Kleiner of like, you know, there's no Koretsu here.
- ▶ 1:55:29 David Rosenthal Even despite all that, the game just got way harder for them because they went from the people painting the targets on the back of John Doerr and other people to now they're the ones with the targets on their backs.
- ▶ 2:06:06 David Rosenthal He started his career as an engineer at Compaq, a John Doerr company, goes to Wall Street, starts writing above the crowd.
- ▶ 2:23:29 David Rosenthal Would they have beaten John Doerr for Google?
Amazon.com · Acquired
- ▶ 1:32:35 David Rosenthal And my wife says, do you know some guy named John door?
- ▶ 1:32:50 David Rosenthal And then Tom says, it was one of John's great strengths, which is his persistence, tells you something about how to sell yourself and show your interest.
- ▶ 1:33:00 David Rosenthal And of course, that is the legendary John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins.
- ▶ 1:33:15 Ben Gilbert John Doerr was pretty widely known to be the greatest of all time at this point in history.
- ▶ 1:33:26 David Rosenthal If you aggregate all of those all-stars into one single person, that would have been John Doerr at that point in time.
- ▶ 1:33:37 David Rosenthal John had what a just the hustle, the persistence, even though he was the legendary John door, he's calling Tom like every 15 minutes calling Tom's wife to get a lead on the deal.
- ▶ 1:34:20 David Rosenthal And Amazon and Jeff went with John and Kleiner cause they were John and Kleiner.
- ▶ 1:34:26 David Rosenthal And there's a fun little sidebar of John wins the deal.
- ▶ 1:34:43 David Rosenthal Yeah, they brainstorm, they come up with an idea, and Jeff calls John back and is like,
- ▶ 1:34:57 Ben Gilbert You know, and John's like, I don't know the bandwidth.
- ▶ 1:35:15 David Rosenthal This was such a hot deal, and Jeff was so persuasive that John made time, and I think he's probably glad that he made time to join the board.
- ▶ 1:36:18 David Rosenthal I didn't write down the quote, but somebody who was involved in the company at that point said something like, Jeff viewed this stamp of imprimatur from Kleiner and John Dora as like a shot of steroids into himself and the company.
- ▶ 1:37:02 David Rosenthal Decline around and John joining the board was absolutely that for him.
- ▶ 1:37:38 David Rosenthal And I'm sure John had something to do with this.
- ▶ 1:37:41 David Rosenthal My understanding from the history is that, like, one of John's real superpowers was recruiting.
- ▶ 1:43:57 David Rosenthal John Doerr had joined the board.
- ▶ 1:43:58 David Rosenthal The average person didn't give a crap about John Doerr or venture capital or startups.
- ▶ 1:44:03 David Rosenthal John Doerr was a legend in Silicon Valley, but that was a very small place.
- ▶ 2:00:38 David Rosenthal Probably John Doerr was involved too.
- ▶ 2:02:12 David Rosenthal So Jeff and Joy and John and the board these years were like, if we can get this guy, he's the key.
- ▶ 2:26:18 David Rosenthal I couldn't figure out what it was, but the Series A that would happen shortly thereafter of Google famously split between John Dora Kleiner and Mike Moritz at Sequoia was at a hundred million dollar post-money valuation, which was insane…