How I Bought 12% of Google for $12M; How VC is Fixing Climate Change | John Doerr Full Interview

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John, this is such a pleasure to do. I've wanted to do this for a long, long time. As I've said, heard so many good things from Bing, from Juliet, from many more. So thank you so much for joining me today.

I- i- it's a privilege to be here. Let's do it.

-- about it. That is very kind of you. But I do wanna start, and I always normally start with context on getting into Venture, but bluntly, we're focusing on Climate today and the most important thing, so I wanna start there. You backed Google, you backed Amazon, some of the most legendary backs in Venture, and then you made the move to invest in energy, climate pandemics. Tell me, take me back to that moment. What first gave you that inspiration and transition to focus on energy and climate back then?

So it was Energy and Climate, and also interestingly, the mobile application store, the App Store, and the cloud. All of those came together in 2006 and in 2007.

Mm-hmm.

And so, yes, we made a major commitment to climate investing, but we also formed the iPhone with Steve Jobs, and did the crazy thing of backing entrepreneurs who were selling games for a dollar a copy on the iPhone.

(laughs)

And it's good that we made both of those bets because the climate investments took a lot longer and more money to produce returns. But over the course of three or four funds, we invested about a billion dollars in 70 or so climate-related investments. Those investments, on an as-it held basis today, are worth about $3 billion. It was hard, but it was not a financial failure, and it set the stage for, uh, a great deal of learning and a, a boom, really, of investment in Climate 2.0, a second wave, if you will, of innovations around electric vehicles, batteries, wind, solar. Well, that's the story and, and the basis for this conversation today.

Of cou- of course it is. I do have to ask you, I'm a Venture nerd, why the separate funds, and do you think for funds investing in climate today, we should have the same dedicated climate fund, you know, energy fund strategy in terms of the segregation of funds?

Well, I, I, I don't have an answer for the industry at large. In the case of Kleiner, we set up a separate fund to focus on pandemic preparedness, and the science told us there'd be a pandemic, simple observation said we're not well-prepared. We invested in nearly 20 companies, I think, one of which, Novavax, produced in- s- better vaccines, and other better ventilators. Others pivoted away from that initial mission. Uh, and overall, the returns for the fund were not really very good. Uh, we were hoping there wouldn't be a pandemic. That might have increased the returns, but it would have not been the point. Uh, I, I think that focus is a really powerful advantage when you're trying to serve entrepreneurs and help them succeed in their businesses. It's gonna be a lot better if you know more about what they're trying to do and can assist them. B- but the other force at work here is building a portfolio, and so the risk of a climate fund in early climate days is that all of the upside of the fund could be decimated by the actions of a nation state like China, which is what happened to the Kleiner Solar portfolio. We invested in seven solar companies. The Chinese crushed six of them, all six of which made solar panels. The seventh one made micro inverters. Its name is Enphase, and the gains from Enphase made up for the losses across all the rest of the solar investments. So it reminds me of a maxim from Tom Perkins which said, "You know, you can only lose one times your money in venture capital."