92
FORTUNE.COM // JULY 2019
J
ORDAN’S FIRST REACTION to Airbnb was that it was “the
stupidest idea I had ever heard.” It was 2011, and he was
at an Allen & Co. tech-investing meeting in Arizona. Brian
Chesky, then a relatively unknown entrepreneur, was ex-
plaining his business, and Jordan couldn’t help mentally listing the
number of risks associated with opening up one’s home to strang-
ers. Then it hit him. Airbnb’s fast growth and online marketplace
that matched homeowners with renters reminded him of eBay. It
was, he says, “a déjà vu experience.” Having worked in top positions
at eBay for seven years, he literally had seen this picture before.
Jordan and Chesky met after the entrepreneur’s talk, and the
two discussed network effects, the notion that a product or service
becomes increasingly valuable the more people who use it. Chesky
was looking for investors, and Jordan was interested in becoming
one. He’d grown bored running OpenTable, a restaurant reserva-
tion site, when Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz asked if he’d
be interested in joining their young firm. The duo asked Jordan to
name a hot company in the consumer sector. The first to come to
mind was Airbnb. He got the job and the deal. Jordan guided the
firm’s $60 million investment in Airbnb, a stake that has grown
30-fold at the private company’s last valuation. Chesky chose
Jordan over Andreessen to be an Airbnb board member. “Fromthat he’s “right on the introvert-extrovert line.”
Says Jordan: “It’s the only thing in my day I do
that’s solitary. Everything else is meeting after
meeting after meeting.”
Fortunately for Jordan and his partners,
his enervating face time has proved fruit-
ful. On behalf of Andreessen Horowitz,
Jordan invested early in what are now some
of the hottest companies in tech, including
home- sharing giant Airbnb, grocery delivery
company Instacart, and the hobbyist site
Pinterest. The firm’s bet on Pinterest alone,
one of Jordan’s first after joining the firm in
2011, is worth $1 billion. Jordan’s nonmon-
etary reward: Earlier this year he became
managing partner of the decade-old firm,
meaning he’s now responsible for personnel,
budgeting, day-to-day operations, and the
like, all while continuing to invest and sit
on boards. (He’s currently on nine, includ-
ing still-private Airbnb and Instacart, newly
public Pinterest, and high-stakes e-scooter
startup Lime.)
Jordan is a bit of an outlier at the epicen-
ter of the global technology industry, a place
of titanic egos and triumphs borne of bril-
liant ideas. He didn’t become a VC, widely
acknowledged to be a young person’s game,
until he was in his fifties. He’s not a technolo-
gist but rather a general-management type,
typically second-class citizens in the Valley.
And he at least professes to hate being in the
spotlight. What he has, in spades, is some-
thing that is gaining currency amid the scan-
dals and missteps of the Valley’s behemoths:
experience. Says Meg Whitman, Jordan’s
boss at Disney and later at eBay: “Investing
requires pattern recognition, and Jeff was able
to recognize the potential” of the companies
he has invested in, thanks to what he had seen
earlier in his career, particularly at eBay.
Thanks to these successes, and the battle
scars Jordan makes no effort to hide, entre-
preneurs young and old now want to learn
from him. Pattern recognition can’t necessar-
ily be taught. But getting advice from some-
one who can see it—especially when that
someone didn’t always make the right call or
climb to the highest rung on the ladder—is
beyond valuable. As for what drives him,
well, let’s just say Jordan isn’t above having
something to prove, a trait that makes him fit
in rather well in Silicon Valley after all.