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ness,” Jordan says he was told.
Nevertheless, he took OpenTable
public and stayed for four years,
eventually becoming as restless
as a CEO as he’d been as a retiree.
“I had started advising compa-
nies on the side because I was
having fun doing that,” he says.
That’s when Andreessen and
Horowitz called.
T
HERE’S A FRAMED Chicago
Bulls jersey above a
plaque on the wall of
Jordan’s Sand Hill Road
office that reads:
JORDAN
A true leader.
A role model for other players.
Never steals the limelight.
Understands the need for
teamwork.
Never lets adversity get him
down.
Always practices excellence on
the court.
And we’re not talking about
Michael.
Good luck, Jeff.
“That was my going-away pres-
ent from Disney,” he says. And
then he shows his other busi-
ness trophies: framed charts and
graphs from his time at eBay and
PayPal. “I joined eBay in 1999,”
he says, pointing to the chart.
“They did $3 billion in gross
merchandise volume the first
year I ran it,” referring to eBay’s
preferred metric for total com-
merce conducted on its platform.
By the time he left, that number
had grown to $19 billion.
Not counting Reel.com, a mis-
take, and OpenTable, a modest
success by the outsize standards
of Silicon Valley, Jordan always
has played supporting roles. As
an executive at Disney and eBay,
he had helped contribute to the
success of high-profile CEOs like
Michael Eisner and Meg Whit-
man. His name will never be on
the door at Andreessen Horowitz.
But he has another measure
of success beyond the wealth he
accumulated at eBay, OpenTable,
and his early wins at Andreessen
Horowitz. He calls it his “score-
card,” otherwise known as a
personal track record. “My biggest
issue is that I don’t like to talk
about myself,” he says, while si-
multaneously noting that he con-
sistently ranks higher than anyone
else at Andreessen Horowitz on
industry investing lists, a humble-
brag of the first order. Indeed,
Jordan ranks No. 5 on the most
recent CB Insights list of top VCs,
a ranking known as more of a
quantitative measurement than a
popularity contest.
Jordan even wins praise from
competitors. “It looks to me that
Jeff ’s behind some of the firm’s
most iconic investments,” says
Benchmark’s Bill Gurley. (The
two have been allies as well as
rivals; Gurley was an OpenTable
investor when Jordan ran the
company.)
Asked why he’s still at it—
digging through company re-
ports, serving on boards, meeting
with so many people when he
could be off on his own on the
trail, Jordan leans forward and
says, “It keeps me young.” Later in
the day, Jordan joins six Stanford
Business School students for
lunch to discuss his career and
offer advice about theirs. Immedi-
ately after finishing his meal and
shaking hands with everyone, he’s
off to Seattle for a board meeting
of OfferUp, an e-commerce com-
pany. Prominent VCs at compet-
ing firms have recently opted to
scale back their investments. Not
Jordan, who has re-upped as a
partner in Andreessen Horowitz’s
newest fund. “I’ll be doing this for
a while,” he says.THE E ARLY
BIRD
GETS THE
WORM.
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