John Doerr

“So if you look at my 2001 PowerPoint presentation, which was the pitch to Kleiner Perkins, who was my first investor, John Doerr, the summary page puts out a data center, it puts out a bloom box, powering the data center, the waste heat providing the cooling f…”

“It's only a, 16 Z and a couple of other folks, John door who really kind of created the, Hey, I'm going to be the individual investor and I'm going to propagate a certain set of ideas and that's going It creates gravity within Silicon Valley and influence foun…”

“Peter Fenton John Doerr early on those guys were astounding at picking deals.”

“Famously, Kleiner and Sequoia end up splitting the deal, and Michael Moritz and John Doerr, the two most legendary VCs in the world, they team up, they join forces, they split the deal, and they both join the board of Google at the Series A.”

“John Doerr had very begrudgingly extracted a promise from Larry and Sergey to hire a quote-unquote professional CEO.”

“My first week at Kleiner working on a deal with John Doerr, and we were doing diligence on a company And he was in this diligence document at three in the morning.”

“This was good technology Kleiner Perkins benchmark were investors John Doerr, Bruce Dunleavy were on the board acquired by Motorola. And it was a half a billion dollar exit for the company.”

“You can hold on to your Google stock forever as John Doerr has done over the last 25 years.”

“And I asked John Dole, do you think you can help me with someone at Apple? Cause there's this Apple, but he's like, what do you need? Can you drop me a note? And then, 12 minutes later, I had an introduction to Tim Cook saying, can you help this kid with like …”

“When John Dorris didn't share, like, they don't run their venture fund on OKRs. Like if OKRs are so good, why isn't Kleiner Perkins running OKRs?”

“I sat on a board at a company called Elance, which became Upwork with John Doerr years ago. He was always the first person in his seat at board meetings. He was always on time, always read the materials. I also spent some time with Mike Moritz, who was also, n…”

“He was definitely intense. I remember coming out of the meeting calling John Doerr and saying, let's just do this. Remember, the internet was this ambiguous thing. It was one of these triggering moments I call instigations for me. That's what he was like. It d…”

“We're now a 129 Families fund all the overhead, and it's people that I'm sure you've had on here. It's been Jack Dorsey, and Sean Parker, and Johnny Ive, and Angela Aarons, and Matt Mullenweg, and Daniel Eck, and it's been a lot of John Doerr, venture capitali…”

“I mean, he was alone the 800 pound gorilla in the VC ecosystem in the early 19 nineties and specifically leading up to and during the internet era.”

“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.”

“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. And Jeff, of course, didn't let that happen, but many entrepreneurs did.”

“So David ends up doing the CEO searches for Netscape. He brings in Jim Barksdale, which of course is a Kleiner company and a John Doar company. He does the same for Excite.”

“John Doerr was pretty widely known to be the greatest of all time at this point in history.”

“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 for the Point in time.”

“Where you have brilliant individuals, when those people go off the boil, or they retire, or whatever, the performance is going to collapse. And that's sort of what happened with Kleiner Perkins. They had two amazing investors, Vinod Kostler and John Doerr. Vin…”

“He had never sold a single share of Amazon that was distributed to him, and he had only sold a handful of shares of Google only to fund future capital requirements at Kleiner at the time.”

“So I think John Doerr is one of the best, if not the best salesperson I've ever met.”

“He has actually come to some of our sales pitches with me, and it's just incredible to see him in action.”

“We went in to, ah, meet with John Doerr, and we spent a good morning, probably three or four hours, being questioned, and sure enough, ah, about a week later, ah, we got a call that they were willing to invest, and so it was a go.”

“And it was one of the remarkable things about John is just, he lights up a room when he walks in and he's got this incredibly humble personality, but he can really quickly get to the core of a problem or an issue and very quickly start to ask the questions tha…”

“The thing that was so incredible about working with John is that he was really good at quickly identifying the big question, the big issue. He never got distracted by the small minutiae that so many folks can get distracted by. He was always laser focused on w…”

“The way most people do diligence is they run up and down Sand Hill Road, and they say, hey, Mike Moritz, who's good? Hey, John Doerr, who's good today? And you're just getting this warmed over conventional wisdom with sometimes a healthy, you know, dose of pol…”

“I remember at Flipboard, for example, when the service first launched, The load was so tremendous that it actually took down the back end for a few weeks, and our board member John Doerr came by and actually answered customer support emails all night. He even …”

“So we basically flew out to Silicon Valley, and we went in to meet with John Doerr, and we spent a good morning, probably three or four hours, being questioned, and sure enough, about a week later, we got a call that they were willing to invest, and so it was …”