John Doerr – Billionaire
| John Doerr | |
|---|---|
Doerr speaking at TED in 2007
|
|
| Born | June 29, 1951 St. Louis, Missouri, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Rice University (B.S. & M.S.) Harvard Business School (M.B.A.) |
| Occupation | Venture capitalist |
| Employer | Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers |
| Net worth |  US$4.1 billion (October 2015) |
| Spouse(s) | Ann Howland Doerr |
| Children | Mary Doerr, Esther Doerr |
L. John Doerr (born June 29, 1951) is an American venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in Menlo Park, California, in Silicon Valley. In February 2009, Doerr was appointed a member of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board to provide the President and his administration with advice and counsel in trying to fix America’s economic downturn. As of October 2015, Forbes ranked Doerr as the 135th richest person in the world, with a net worth of US $4.1 billion.
Early life
Doerr was born in St. Louis, Missouri. One of five siblings, Doerr graduated from Chaminade College Preparatory School in St. Louis. He obtained a B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Rice University and an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1976.
Career
Doerr joined Intel Corporation in 1974 just as the firm was developing the 8080 8-bit microprocessor. He eventually became one of Intel’s most successful salespeople. He also holds several patents for memory devices.
He joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 1980 and since then, has directed venture capital funding to some of the most successful technology companies in the world including Compaq, Netscape, Symantec, Sun Microsystems, drugstore.com, Amazon.com, Intuit, Macromedia, and Google.
Doerr has backed some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, including Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt of Google; Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com; and Scott Cook and Bill Campbell of Intuit.
Venture funding
Doerr co-founded and serves on the board of the New Schools Venture Fund, an education reform and charter public schools fund, and TechNet, a policy network of high tech CEOs advocating education and litigation reform, and policies for the innovation economy. Doerr co-chaired California’s Proposition 39 which lowered the threshold to approved school bonds, and Proposition 71 which created $3 billion in funding for California research into stem cell therapies. He serves on the board of Bono’s ONE campaign to fight global poverty, particularly disease in Africa. His success in venture capital has garnered national attention; he has been and is currently listed on Forbes magazine’s exclusive “Midas List” and is widely regarded as one of the top technology venture capitalists in the world.
Doerr advocates innovation in clean energy technologies to combat climate change, and has written and testified on the topic. In a 2007 TED conference he cited his daughter’s remark: “your generation created this problem, you better fix it” as a call to fight global warming.
In 2008 he announced with Steve Jobs the Kleiner Perkins $100 million iFund, declaring the iPhone “more important than the personal computer” because “it knows who you are” and “where you are.” In April 2010, he along with another iFund members announced an increase in iFund’s value by another $100 million, making iFund the worlds biggest investment pool in cell phone application industry. He currently serves on the boards of Google, Amyris Biotech and Zynga. Doerr led Kleiner Perkins’s $150 million investment in Twitter.
In 2013 he invested in DreamBox which has been acquired by Charter School Growth Fund. He had also funded the initial investments in Bloom Energy Inc. Doerr is a major backer of the education company, Remind.
Doerr mentored Ellen Pao when she first joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Before changing his mind in 2012, he was known for challenging those who gave her negative performance reviews.
Source:wikipedia
