John Doerr is an American venture capitalist in the Silicon Valley.
He works with Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. In October 2015, he was ranked 135th among the list of world’s richest people by the Forbes magazine.
Personal Biography: L. John Doerr
John Doerr was born in St. Louis, Missouri on June 25, 1951. He then did his BS and MS in Electrical Engineering from Rice University. He also obtained his MBA degree from Harvard University in 1976. He has four other siblings.
John Doerr’s Family
John Doerr is married to Ann Howland and they reside in Woodside, California along with their children- Mary Doerr and Esther Doerr. John is a philanthropist and his family supports numerous charitable causes that concern the world health issues. He and his wife have also signed the Giving Pledge, making a promise to give away half of their fortune towards philanthropic causes during their lifetime.
Career
In 1974, Doerr joined Intel Corp. and eventually became one of their most successful salesperson. This was the time when the firm was developing its 8080 8-bit microprocessor. Many of the patents of the company’s memory devices are held by him.
In 1980, he joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers and has been directing the venture capital funding of some of the most famous tech companies of the world, some of which are Compaq, Netscape, Symantec, Amazon, and Google and so on. Also, he has backed some of the most successful entrepreneurs like Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Scott Cook and the list goes on.
Ventures that were sponsored by John have created more than 300,000 new jobs. He is the founder of Silicon Compilers which is a CAD software company and has also co-founded @Home, a broadband internet service.
Apart from KPCB, John extends his support to those entrepreneurs who focus on the issues like environment, education and poverty. Some of the orgs that work in the same direction are newschools.org, technet.org, the climate reality project and one.org.
Former US President Barack Obama appointed John as a member in the USA Economy Recovery Advisory Board in 2009 to help Obama and his administration on fixing the nation’s economic downturn.
Doerr announced the Kleiner Perkins $100 million iFund along with Steve Jobs in 2008, thereby making iPhones to be of more importance than personal computers. In 2010, he further increased the value of the iFund by another $100 million, along with the other members of the iFund and this made iFund the world’s biggest investment pool in any cell phone application industry.
After working for more than three decades at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, John Doerr was promoted to the Chairman’s seat in March 2016. He said that he will act as more of a coach to the company. This happened after a year of guiding KPCB through a lawsuit for gender discrimination that was filed by one of its former junior partner, Ellen Pao. The lawsuit ended in favor of the firm.
Doerr is currently on the board of Google, Amyris Biotech as well as Zynga. He was also the man behind Kleiner Perkin’s $150 million investment in Twitter. He has also been termed as one of the best members on the Google’s Board of Directors.
Awards and Achievements
In 1997, Doerr became a member of the Distinguished Alumnus of Rice University because of his business accomplishments. He was also named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. He was the instated into the California Hall of Fame in 2010.
Worth
John Doer’s net worth is $5.3 billion, making him the 126th richest man in the United States.
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