John Doerr

Chairman

John Doerr

Chairman

John is an engineer, venture capitalist, and the chair of Kleiner Perkins. He is the author of bestsellers Measure What Matters and Speed and Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now.

For over 40 years, John has served entrepreneurs with ingenuity and optimism, helping them build bold teams and disruptive companies. A pioneer of Silicon Valley’s cleantech movement, he has invested in zero-emissions technologies since 2006.

Outside Kleiner Perkins, John works with social entrepreneurs who are tackling systemic issues across climate, public health, and education.

Sector

Partnered Since

Stage

Perspectives

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OpenEvidence: Expanding the world’s collective medical knowledge

Google: Organizing the world’s information and making it searchable

Amazon: Reimagining commerce

Sun Microsystems: Unleashing the power of networked computing

Slack: Building the workplace collaboration hub

Intuit: Expanding PC utility with powerful applications

DoorDash: delivering the future of local

Communication is fundamental to human beings. Slack has changed how we connect and work together, and makes work more fun for millions of people.

Slack: it’s where work happens

On February 27, 2019, John Doerr was honored by the NVCA with its Lifetime Achievement Award in venture capital. The Award honors those who have made significant contributions to foster innovation, advance technology and drive new company formation.

John Doerr NVCA lifetime achievement award acceptance speech

John Doerr’s Measure What Matters is available to order

OpenEvidence: Expanding the world’s collective medical knowledge

Perspectives
Google: Organizing the world’s information and making it searchable

Case Studies
Amazon: Reimagining commerce

Case Studies
Sun Microsystems: Unleashing the power of networked computing

Case Studies
Slack: Building the workplace collaboration hub

Case Studies
Intuit: Expanding PC utility with powerful applications

Case Studies
DoorDash: delivering the future of local

Perspectives
Slack: it’s where work happens

Perspectives
John Doerr NVCA lifetime achievement award acceptance speech

Perspectives
John Doerr’s Measure What Matters is available to order

Announcements

OpenEvidence: Expanding the world’s collective medical knowledge
Perspectives
Google: Organizing the world’s information and making it searchable
Case Studies
Amazon: Reimagining commerce
Case Studies
Sun Microsystems: Unleashing the power of networked computing
Case Studies
Slack: Building the workplace collaboration hub
Case Studies
Intuit: Expanding PC utility with powerful applications
Case Studies
DoorDash: delivering the future of local
Perspectives
Slack: it’s where work happens
Perspectives
John Doerr NVCA lifetime achievement award acceptance speech
Perspectives
John Doerr’s Measure What Matters is available to order
Announcements

Amazon

Kleiner Perkins invested in Amazon in 1996 after Coach Bill Campbell connected John Doerr to Leslie Koch, then VP of Marketing at Amazon. Two days after their initial meeting at Il Fornaio in Palo Alto, John met with Jeff Bezos in Seattle. Beyond capital, we served as business builders, recruiting two VPs of Engineering (Dave Risher from Microsoft for front-end, Rick Dalzell from Walmart for operations) and CFO Joy Covey. We facilitated key business development introductions to expand Amazon's product catalog. Through our network, we connected Jeff with Bing Gordon (then at Electronic Arts, later a KP partner), whose insight about the "magic" of receiving Amazon packages led to the concept for Amazon Prime, ultimately the most successful customer loyalty program in retail history. Bing joined Amazon's board as the program launched.

Website

Partnered Since

1996 Early
Stage

IPO AMZN
Founders

Jeff Bezos
Partners

John Doerr

Bing Gordon

Amazon: Reimagining commerce

Amyris

Synthetic biotechnology

Website

Partnered Since

2006 Early
Stage

IPO AMRS
Partners

John Doerr

Wen Hsieh

BetterWorks

Making work better

Website

Partnered Since

2013 Early
Stage

Early
Partners

John Doerr

Bing Gordon

Bloom Energy

Making clean, reliable energy affordable for all

Website

Partnered Since

2002 Early
Stage

IPO BE
Partners

John Doerr

Wen Hsieh

Compaq Computer Corporation

One of the most important bets in KP history. When Compaq set out to build the first IBM-compatible portable computer, KP backed the vision and helped recruit the sales leadership that would define the company's go-to-market strategy. In its first full year of operations, Compaq sold 53,000 PCs, generating $111 million in sales, a record at the time in the technology sector, and went public in 1983. KP's involvement didn't stop at the investment: Compaq hit the $1 billion revenue mark in 1987, doing so faster than any other company in history at that point. It was an early proof of what Kleiner Perkins believed then and believes now, that the right idea, the right team, and the right partners can create an entirely new industry.

Website

Partnered Since

1982 Early
Stage

IPO Acquired HP
Founders

Rod Canion Jim Harris Bill Murto
Partners

John Doerr

Coursera

World-class education, online

Website

Partnered Since

2011 Early
Stage

IPO COUR
Founders

Daphne Koller Andrew Ng
Partners

John Doerr

Coursera: Charting a new course for education

DoorDash

DoorDash is the largest food delivery platform in the United States and was founded in 2013 by Stanford students Tony Xu, Andy Fang, Stanley Tang, and Evan Moore. Kleiner Perkins entered the picture in 2015, leading DoorDash's Series B at a time when the company was competing in a crowded space that was poorly serving both restaurants and consumers, betting on what differentiated the team: their technology, customer obsession, and vision to build a true last-mile logistics platform. What Tony and the team achieved went far beyond food delivery, DoorDash became a platform helping local businesses thrive in the modern convenience economy.

Website

Partnered Since

2015 Early
Stage

IPO DASH
Founders

Andy Fang Evan Moore Stanley Tang Tony Xu
Partners

John Doerr

DoorDash: delivering the future of local

Google

In 1999, Andy Bechtolsheim introduced us to two Stanford graduates, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They'd built PageRank, a superior search algorithm that overwhelmed Stanford's network with demand. Banished from campus, they needed capital and scale—fast.

Their 17-page deck had just two pages of numbers and three cartoons. As the eighteenth search engine with no business model and no team, they faced long odds. But when John Doerr asked how big Google would be, they answered: "$10 billion in revenue." We wrote our largest check ever.

The founders weren't sold on traditional management or recruiting a CEO. John connected them with Scott Cook, Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs for advice. The executive search led to Eric Schmidt, an experienced tech leader from Sun Microsystems. We helped build their team with Wayne Rosing (VP Engineering) and Jonathan Rosenberg (SVP Product), introduced OKRs for goal-setting, and brought in executive coach Bill Campbell to develop leadership skills.

Our investment in Google delivered exceptional returns and transformed how the world accesses information. John continues as a board director of Alphabet, Inc.

Website

Partnered Since

1999 Early
Stage

IPO GOOG
Founders

Sergey Brin Larry Page
Partners

John Doerr

Thomas Kurian – Google Cloud – Competitor-Aware and Customer-Obsessed

Google: Organizing the world’s information and making it searchable

IControl Networks

Connected home technology

Website

Partnered Since

2008 Early
Stage

Acquired Comcast
Partners

John Doerr

Intuit

When Intuit was founded in 1983, popular understanding of how personal computers could be used was confined to basic word processing and spreadsheets. The founder saw something different: a chance to bring personal finance software to everyday households. Kleiner Perkins backed the company in 1990, and from the start the partnership was an active one. When Microsoft launched a direct competitor to Quicken, KP helped Intuit fight back and win. When it was time to find a new CEO, KP helped develop the candidate list, ultimately landing on a legendary Silicon Valley executive who took the helm in 1994. When Microsoft came back with an acquisition offer, KP was at the table for those negotiations too. The Department of Justice ultimately blocked the deal, and Intuit proceeded as an independent company and went from success to success. Today it is one of the most enduring software businesses ever built, a testament to what happens when a simple insight about everyday life meets the right backing at the right moment.

Website

Partnered Since

1990 Early
Stage

IPO INTU
Founders

Scott Cook
Partners

John Doerr

Intuit: Expanding PC utility with powerful applications

Lumeris

Value-based care strategy

Website

Partnered Since

2011 Early
Stage

Growth
Partners

John Doerr

Macromedia

Graphics, multimedia, and web development software

Website

Partnered Since

1989 Early
Stage

IPO Acquired Adobe Systems
Partners

John Doerr

MyFitnessPal

Health and fitness tracking

Website

Partnered Since

2013 Early
Stage

Acquired Under Armour
Partners

John Doerr

Netscape

Before Netscape, the internet existed but most people had no way in. Kleiner Perkins backed Netscape in 1994, betting that a fast, graphical browser could unlock the web for everyday users and spark a new era of commerce and communication. John Doerr joined the board, and in late 1994 the company shipped Netscape Navigator, one of the first browsers that made it genuinely easy to access and navigate the internet. The company's 1995 IPO priced at a $2.9 billion valuation, becoming one of the defining moments of the dot-com era. Netscape marked the beginning of the Internet Age, and while the company no longer exists, its legacy lives on in Mozilla, the open-source project built from Netscape's code. The investment also marked something else: proof that KP could identify not just great companies, but entirely new epochs.

Website

Partnered Since

1994 Early
Stage

Acquired AOL
Partners

John Doerr

Netscape: Bringing the internet to the world through the web browser

Nuna

Healthcare technology

Website

Partnered Since

2014 Early
Stage

Early
Partners

John Doerr

OpenEvidence

The medical information platform

Website

Partnered Since

2025 Early
Stage

Growth
Founders

Daniel Nadler Zachary Ziegler
Partners

Nadia Cochinwala

Josh Coyne

John Doerr

Mamoon Hamid

OpenEvidence: Expanding the world’s collective medical knowledge

QuantumScape

Building the best solid state battery

Website

Partnered Since

2010 Early
Stage

IPO QS
Partners

John Doerr

Remind

Communication platform for education

Website

Partnered Since

2013 Early
Stage

Acquired ParentSquare
Partners

John Doerr

Renmatix

Plant ingredient innovation

Website

Partnered Since

2007 Early
Stage

Growth
Partners

John Doerr

Slack

Slack holds a special place in KP's history. It is literally where three Kleiner Perkins partners first worked together, and that collaboration became the basis of our partnership at Kleiner Perkins today. KP backed Slack across its first three investment rounds, beginning with an early bet based on extraordinary engagement metrics and a product that was still finding its footing. By wrapping human communication, signals from critical apps, and a high-powered platform into a single unified experience, Slack captured the hearts and minds of knowledge workers around the world. Many had tried to displace email before. Slack actually did it. The pivot that gave birth to Slack is by now a familiar Silicon Valley story, but what is less often noted is that pivots rarely pan out, and the fact that this one found lasting success owes to the founders' extraordinary foresight and entrepreneurial grit.

Website

Partnered Since

2014 Early
Stage

IPO Prior Salesforce
Founders

Stewart Butterfield Cal Henderson
Partners

John Doerr

Ilya Fushman

Mamoon Hamid

Slack: Building the workplace collaboration hub

Slack: it’s where work happens

Sun Microsystems

In the early 1980s, existing computing technology operated in proprietary, walled gardens. The vision for Sun was to take companies into the Network Age, built on an open system where different types of computers could talk to each other. Kleiner Perkins backed Sun in 1982, convinced by both the market opportunity and the exceptional team behind it. A KP partner joined the board and later took a sabbatical from the firm to work directly with Sun, helping develop the SPARC microprocessor. Sun's growth was explosive, expanding its range of products to include Java, the Solaris operating system, and SPARC, and contributing significantly to Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing. The relationship ran deep in both directions: Sun became something of a farm system for Silicon Valley, and several of its founders and leaders went on to become partners at Kleiner Perkins.

Website

Partnered Since

1982 Early
Stage

IPO Acquired Oracle
Founders

Andy Bechtolsheim Bill Joy Vinod Khosla Scott McNealy
Partners

John Doerr

Sun Microsystems: Unleashing the power of networked computing

Symantec

Security and information management software

Website

Partnered Since

1983 Early
Stage

IPO SYMC
Partners

John Doerr

Twitter

Kleiner Perkins invested in Twitter in 2010, backing the platform as it evolved from a scrappy real-time messaging service into one of the world's most influential public squares. We believed early in the power of open, instantaneous communication, and in Twitter's unique ability to connect people, ideas, and breaking moments at global scale. The platform became essential infrastructure for public discourse, journalism, and culture, reaching hundreds of millions of users worldwide.

Website

Partnered Since

2010 Growth
Stage

IPO TWTR
Partners

John Doerr

Bing Gordon

Uber

Modern transportation

Website

Partnered Since

2014 Growth
Stage

IPO UBER
Partners

John Doerr

Watershed

Carbon accounting

Website

Partnered Since

2020 Early
Stage

Growth
Partners

John Doerr

Taylor Francis – Watershed – Worthy Missions

Zynga

Interactive entertainment

Website

Partnered Since

2008 Early
Stage

IPO ZNGA
Partners

John Doerr

Bing Gordon

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John Doerr

John Doerr

Amazon

Amyris

BetterWorks

Bloom Energy

Compaq Computer Corporation

Coursera

DoorDash

Google

IControl Networks

Intuit

Lumeris

Macromedia

MyFitnessPal

Netscape

Nuna

OpenEvidence

QuantumScape

Remind

Renmatix

Slack

Sun Microsystems

Symantec

Twitter

Uber

Watershed

Zynga

Perspectives

Amazon

Partnered Since

Stage

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Amyris

Partnered Since

Stage

Partners

BetterWorks

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Stage

Partners

Bloom Energy

Partnered Since

Stage

Partners

Compaq Computer Corporation

Partnered Since

Stage

Founders

Partners

Coursera

Partnered Since

Stage

Founders

Partners

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DoorDash

Partnered Since

Stage

Founders

Partners

Related

Google

Partnered Since

Stage

Founders

Partners

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IControl Networks

Partnered Since

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Partners

Intuit

Partnered Since

Stage

Founders

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