John Doerr

Doerr is the dominant figure of Kleiner Perkins across The Power Law — Venture Capital & the Making of the New Future. Described as “hyperkinetic,” “magnetic and messianic,” with “the emotional commitment of a priest and the energy of a racehorse,” he became the go-to investor for fearless founders. He championed the “keiretsu model” — mimicking Japan’s industrial networks by turning Kleiner’s portfolio into a web of fertile associations, on the theory that VCs “could see the map and the territory” and tell heads-down founders how to navigate. His credo was that the craft is about people, not plans: “We’re not investing in business plans, we’re not investing in discounted cash flows, it’s the people.”

The book treats him as both the embodiment of VC value-add and its overreach. On the upside, he is credited with persuading the Google founders to bring in Eric Schmidt. On the downside, the GO story is told as “a parable of venture capital” exposing “Doerr’s swashbuckling overreach” — investing on an improvised pitch with no business plan because he believed he could “will huge technological leaps into being,” embracing maximum ambition where an incremental path might have worked. His later cleantech bet “set the stage for the cleantech fiasco” — when he “decided to bet the franchise on a challenging sector, nobody was there to check him,” and “by embracing change without slogging through the detailed work of implementing it, Doerr almost destroyed his firm.”

Context: John Doerr (b. 1951) is an American venture capitalist and longtime partner/chairman at Kleiner Perkins, an early backer of Google and Amazon, and author of the OKR-management book Measure What Matters.

Where this appears

• The Power Law — Venture Capital & the Making of the New Future — central Kleiner Perkins partner; the keiretsu model, the GO parable of overreach, the Google/Eric Schmidt save, and the cleantech fiasco