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names who nevertheless had no investing
experience—or didn’t stick around through
troubled times. Former Secretary of State
Colin Powell was a “strategic adviser.” Gore
was a full-on investor. Bill Joy, a cofounder of
Sun Microsystems and by acclaim a brilliant
technologist, was a Kleiner partner for nine
years. Vinod Khosla, another Sun cofounder
and the closest Doerr had to an investing peer,
jumped ship in 2004 to set up his own shop, a
formidable power on Sand Hill Road today.
Kleiner also became known as a firm full
of highly pedigreed young investors who
stayed for a number of years but left without
being given a shot at ascending to the top
ranks. Many constitute the next generation of
leadership in the venture capital world—but
not at Kleiner. Steve Anderson, for example,
did a four-year stint in the early 2000s. He
went out on his own and later became the
first investor in Instagram, which sold itself
to Facebook for $1 billion. Aileen Lee, famous
for coining the expression “unicorn” for the
once-rare billion-dollar startup, now runsin a company’s existence that it often has no
revenue yet, Kleiner had its share of stinkers.
But Kleiner’s overall investment results were
staggering: A mid-90s fund, for example,
returned $32 for every dollar invested. Its
power on Sand Hill Road was unquestioned.
“You could not do better than a Kleiner deal,”
says Silicon Valley historian Leslie Berlin.
“It was a sign of approval from the very
highest level. And it meant everything to
entrepreneurs.”
The firm’s ablest investor for two decades,
though his name wasn’t on the letterhead, was
John Doerr. A former Intel salesman, Doerr
joined Kleiner in 1980 and over time became
its de facto leader. Doerr scored a string of
hits—Netscape, Amazon, and Google—be-
coming an active and forceful board member
at the tech industry’s most exciting compa-
nies. He also was a prominent cheerleader for
Silicon Valley in the age of the Internet.
Doerr was so powerful, in fact, that he was
able to pivot Kleiner’s entire thrust away from
the Internet and toward his latest passion
project: renewable energy companies he
believed would be the next important wave
of tech investing. Doerr was a prominent
Democratic fundraiser and pal of former
Vice President Al Gore, whom Doerr made
a Kleiner partner. Between 2004 and 2009,
the firm had invested $630 million across
54 “clean tech” companies, and 12 of its 22
partners spent some or all of their time on so-
called green investments.
The firm’s heart may have been in the right
place, but its investments flopped. Some, like
electric-car maker Fisker Automotive, went
bankrupt. Others, like fuel-cell manufacturer
Bloom Energy, took 16 years from Kleiner’s
investment in 2002 to go public. The result
was a tarnished brand at a time Kleiner’s com-
petitors were killing it with investments in the
digital economy. Accel Partners, for example,
was the early backer of Facebook. Union
Square Ventures was among the first to put
money into Twitter. And Benchmark Capital,
which scored in the web’s first era by investing
in eBay, staked Uber in its early days.
Doerr had pushed Kleiner into an unfortu-
nate investment category, and he also failed to
assemble a team of investors that could lead
the firm past its troubles. On the one hand,
Kleiner had a penchant for collecting famous
Vinod Khosla
1986–2004Khosla cofounded
Sun Microsystems, a
computer hardware
firm, before joining
Kleiner Perkins as a
general partner. He
was the driving force
behind blockbuster
telecommunications
investments Cerent,
bought by Cisco, and
Juniper Networks,
an independent
company today.Steve Anderson
1999–2003Anderson joined
Kleiner Perkins
after graduating from
Stanford Business
School and helped out
on Kleiner’s Google
investment. He left the
venture firm for Micro-
soft and later started
Baseline Ventures, an
early-stage firm that
was the first to invest
in Instagram, bought
by Facebook.