How John built the fortune
John Doerr's wealth was made by placing early bets on companies that went on to shape the internet economy. He joined the Silicon Valley venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 1980, after several years selling microprocessors at Intel, and became one of its best known partners. Venture capitalists earn a share of the profits from the funds they manage and usually invest personally alongside those funds, so a handful of large successes can produce extraordinary returns.
Doerr had several such successes. He was involved in Kleiner's investments in Compaq, Lotus and Intuit during the personal computer era, then in Netscape and Amazon as the commercial web took off. The best known deal came in 1999, when Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital jointly invested in Google, then a small search start up. Doerr joined Google's board and stayed there for two decades, through the company's public listing in 2004 and its reorganisation under Alphabet.
Later he steered Kleiner toward clean energy and climate technology. Those funds produced mixed results, but Doerr has continued to argue that the climate transition is one of the largest investment opportunities of the century.
Doerr also became one of the most recognisable public faces of venture capital. In the 1990s he described the internet as one of the largest legal creations of wealth in history, and he spent much of his time recruiting executives and helping founders organise their companies, not only writing cheques.
Companies and holdings
Doerr's holdings are a mix of venture fund interests and personal stakes, many of them in companies that are now public. Investments linked to him include:
- Google, later Alphabet, where he served as a director from 1999 to 2019
- Amazon, where he sat on the board in the late 1990s
- Netscape, Intuit, Compaq and Sun Microsystems from earlier Kleiner funds
- Climate and clean energy companies backed in the 2000s and 2010s
He has moved from day to day dealmaking to the role of chairman at Kleiner Perkins.
Kleiner Perkins itself went through a period of reorganisation in the late 2010s, when its growth investing team spun out and the firm refocused on early stage venture investing. Doerr remained involved as chairman, while a younger group of partners took over most new investments.
Early life and career
Doerr was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1951. He studied electrical engineering at Rice University in Houston, earning a bachelor's degree and then a master's degree, and later completed an MBA at Harvard Business School. While at Rice he became interested in the young semiconductor industry.
He joined Intel in the mid 1970s and worked in sales and marketing, where he came into contact with Andy Grove and the management system Grove used to set objectives and measure results. Doerr later popularised that approach, known as objectives and key results, at Google and many other companies, and described it in his 2018 book Measure What Matters. A second book, Speed and Scale, published in 2021, sets out a plan for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
At Kleiner he worked under founders Eugene Kleiner and Tom Perkins and quickly took on a leading role. His background in engineering and sales gave him a way of judging both technology and the people building it, and he became known for intense involvement with the boards he joined.
Philanthropy and public life
Doerr and his wife, Ann, are among the most active donors in American education and climate work. They helped start the NewSchools Venture Fund, which supports education entrepreneurs, and have signed the Giving Pledge, committing to give away most of their wealth.
Their largest single gift went to Stanford University in 2022, funding a new school dedicated to climate and sustainability that bears the Doerr name. He has also been a political donor and a frequent public advocate for clean energy policy in the United States.
Beyond education and climate, the couple has funded work on public health and poverty. Doerr has also served on the boards of several nonprofit organisations and has spoken at events organised by universities and governments on energy policy and innovation.