20VC: John Doerr on Buying 12% of Google for $12M, His Biggest Investing Lesson from 30 Years in Venture & The Climate Crisis: Why Governments are The Biggest Problem and Where the Biggest Opportunities Are in Climate Investing?

John Doerr is an engineer, venture capitalist, the chairman of Kleiner Perkins, and the author of the #1 New York Times best-seller Measure What Matters. For over 40 years, John has helped build some of the most generational defining companies of our generation. He was an original investor and board member at Google and Amazon, helping to create more than a million jobs. A pioneer of Silicon Valley’s cleantech movement, John has invested in zero emissions technologies since 2006. Check out his latest book, Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now. In Today’s Episode with John Doerr You Will Learn: 1.) What was John's entry into climate change investing? Having backed the likes of Amazon and Google, why did John decide then was the right time to do a climate fund, a pandemic fund, an iPhone fund? How does John think about market timing risk today? How does John determine between risks he is vs is not willing to take? 2.) What was one of John's biggest lessons on risk and upside from working alongside Tom Perkins? How did the Google deal come together? Where did John first meet Larry and Serge? What convinced John to write them a $12M check for 12% of the company? Why was it a contested deal within the partnership? How did the discussion go internally? 3.) Why and how is climate innovating and investing different today than it was in 2008? What are the core OKR's laid out in the book, that we need to achieve as a society? Why does John believe that governments are the biggest problem to us achieving these objectives? What does John mean when he says, "I am hopeful but not optimistic"? 4.) What does truly great listening mean to John? How would John describe his style of board membership? What do the truly special board members do? What does John do that makes him often cited as one of the best at recruiting? What is John's biggest investing miss? How did it change his mindset and approach? What investment is John most proud of, that no one knows? Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with John Doerr John’s Favourite Book: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  Welcome back. This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. And I've always said I'm a student of venture capital and the greats of our industry. And so I cannot tell you how special this episode was for me to sit down with the legend that is John Doerr. This is one I've wanted to do since I started 20 VC over seven years ago. For some context on John, John is an engineer, venture capitalist, the chairman of Kleiner Perkins, and the author of the number one New York Times bestseller, Measure What Matters. For over 40 years, John has helped build some of the most generational defining companies of our generation. He was an original investor and board member at Google and Amazon, helping to create more than a million jobs. He's a pioneer of Silicon Valley's clean tech movement, having invested in zero emissions technologies since 2006.

• 0:41Harry Stebbings?

  And John has an incredible new book, Speed and Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now. It's a critical blueprint for anyone looking to take concrete steps to reach net zero emissions. I'd also, though, want to say huge thank you to Juliette at Bond, Anne Mamoun, and Bucky at Kleiner. Some amazing questions today, really did make the schedule so special. But before we dive into the show stage, you employ or pay workers in other countries. Yes, well, you need Remote. Remote makes it easy for companies of all sizes to employ global teams. They take care of international payroll, benefits, taxes, and local compliance. Remote helps you onboard full-time employees or contractors in countries all over the world in minutes on its simple, easy-to-use platform.

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• 2:05Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:50Harry Stebbings?

  But that is quite enough from me. So now I'm so thrilled to welcome the legend that is John Doerr.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 3:03Harry Stebbings?

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

• 3:13Speaker 01

  It's a privilege to be here. Let's do it.

• 3:14Harry Stebbings?

  That is very kind of you. But I do want to start, and I always normally start with context on getting into venture, but bluntly, we're focusing on climate today and the most important things. So I want to start there. You backed Google, you backed Amazon, some of the most legendary bets in venture. And then you made the move to invest in energy, climate, pandemics. Take me back to that moment. What first gave you that inspiration and transition to focus on energy and climate back then?

• 3:38Speaker 01

  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. And so, yes, we made a major commitment to climate investing. But we also formed the iFund. It was Steve Jobs, and did the crazy thing of backing entrepreneurs who were selling games for a dollar a copy on the iPhone. 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-of-held basis today are

• 4:20Speaker 01

  Worth about $3 billion. It was hard, but it was not a financial failure. And it set the stage for a great deal of learning and a boom, really, of investments in climate 2.0, a second wave, if you will, of innovations around electric vehicles, batteries, wind, solar. Well, that's the story and the basis for this conversation today.

• 4:40Harry Stebbings?

  Of course it is. I do have to ask, you know, 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, energy fund strategy in terms of the segregation of funds?

• 4:53Speaker 01

  Well, 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. 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 better vaccines, another better ventilators. Others pivoted away from that initial mission. And overall, the returns for the fund were not really very good. We were hoping there wouldn't be a pandemic. That might have increased the returns, but it would have not been the point. 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 going to be a lot better if you know more about what they're trying to do and can assist them.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  But the other force at work here is building a portfolio. And so the risk of a climate fund in early climate days is 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 microinverters. 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. You can make many times that over.

• 6:17Harry Stebbings?

  It's a brilliant lesson to remember. The question that I'd just love to ask you here is, you know, I always say market timing risk. Honestly, John, I'm not smart enough to predict market timing. Bluntly, how do you think about market timing risk? Continuously been so far ahead of markets and so ahead of where things move to.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  So you can be too early. I'd rather be too early than too late. By the time it's too late, there's seldom a point in pursuing a market. But there's counter examples for all of these maxims. Google was the 18th search engine. Who would have thought that after 17th search engine, two Stanford dropouts would come up with an innovation that would organize all the world's information and the best investment of all time, at least for me and my partnership. $12 million bought 12% of Google, which is today as a company worth several trillion dollars. So you can only lose one time's your money.

• 7:07Harry Stebbings?

  I spoke to Juliette, we're kind of hopping around the schedule, but this is great. I spoke to Juliette before the show and she mentioned, you know, her joining Kleiner back in those very early days and you making the Google investment. And she said, that was not obvious, Harry. It looks it now, but it was the 12th search engine, Larry and Sergey. It wasn't as obvious as it looks now. Asked John what he saw in Larry and Sergey that gave him the confidence to actually write a big check in quite an expansive round at the time.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Well, great question. And I vividly recall my first meeting with Larry and Sergey in the conference room next to my office and they went through their slide deck. I still have a copy of it. It was some 20 pages or so. Only three of the pages had numbers on them. They added cartoons to try to beef up the story, but they were very circumspect about how much they wanted to disclose. At the end of the presentation, I turned to Larry and I asked him, so how big can this vision of yours be? And he said, without missing a beat, 10 billion. And I said, surely you mean market cap? And he said, no, I mean revenue. And he said, back in 1999, John, you have no idea how crummy search is today and how much better it will get over time and how important

• 8:18Speaker 01

  a contribution that is for every phase of human activity to get all the world's information immediately, instantly available and organized. And he was more than right. He understated the case at the time, but that together with his and my love for computers and technology and shared educational background made it for me an easy but controversial decision. We had a big debate in the partnership.

• 8:41Harry Stebbings?

  How did that get?

• 8:42Speaker 01

  How did it go? Well, people complained that the price for the investment was too high. It was effectively a hundred million dollar valuation. The entrepreneurs had never built a business before, and in fact, they weren't interested in building a business. We had no way to make revenue from it. What we had was a dramatically superior relevance engine. Page rank was the name of it, called Backrub, that ranked the relevance of pages based not on their keywords or content, but based on other pages that pointed to those pages. Laboriously, over several days, we'd crawl the entire web to update and refresh the index. Then we hit upon the business model. You would sell ads separate from the content. You'd use the same kind of ranking technology to establish relevance of ads as well as content.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  And then the ads were sold in an open auction. So the winning bidder for a keyword like Hawaii would pay the second highest price, a modified Queen's auction, it's called. And this in economic theory will ensure that markets don't get overheated and they're liquid and work well in the long run. Google brought those innovations to the business and as they say, the rest is history.

• 9:48Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask you something, which is, you know, you've invested in climate change across many different decades, well, a couple of different decades. You saw many different search engines, I'm sure. How do you keep the mental plasticity to see every opportunity as a new opportunity? And not be tainted by, oh, we lost money in solar before, so all solar loses money. Which is very hard in venture because you do have a tainted mind from the past. How do you keep that fresh mind?

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Well, Mamun Hamid, who you know is one of the leaders of the Kleiner Partnership, is fond of saying, you must bring a prepared mind to these decisions. And so I think it's important to read and learn and bring curiosity and energy work to staying abreast of what's important and why. So it's not enough to know that Bitcoin is a new means of conveying value. You ought to know how Bitcoin works and what the physics are behind it and the technology. Because that gives you a better opportunity to understand what the innovators and entrepreneurs are saying and figure out how you might assist them.

• 10:50Harry Stebbings?

  Totally agree with you in terms of that reading and prepared mind. Speaking of the reading, I spent the last few weeks reading Speed and Scale. I loved it. As I told you, it made my Covid recovery incredibly informative, educating, and so thank you for that. But I want to start though with the question of like, how does, bluntly, the innovation and the climate ecosystem today, how does that compare to 2006, 2007, when we had those dedicated KP funds?

• 11:15Speaker 01

  For the climate crisis?

• 11:16Harry Stebbings?

  For the climate crisis and for innovation in the climate space.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  Are dramatically different. The problem now is evident. It was the subject of some debate in 2006. But you just look around the world, the wildfires, the devastating floods, the hurricanes, the drought, the number of climate refugees, 10 million estimated today, and we're just beginning to feel the effects. This is not a new normal. This is a new abnormal, and it's going to get worse in the best of all possible cases. The planet will never be cooler tomorrow than it is today. And so what's happened from an investing point of view is investors have realized that most of them missed Tesla. Most of them haven't invested in Rivian or Beyond Meat.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  And so we're seeing big, decabillion valued enterprises make real measurable contributions to moving to a new clean energy economy. And I do think that this climate crisis is the greatest opportunity of our lifetime. It'll be the greatest opportunity of the coming century. And that's the wholesale transition of every human activity. How we produce things, how we consume things, how we move about, how we organize, from a fossil fuel based system to a clean energy renewable based system. And so it's both an imperative and an obligation. I think the notion of climate justice, I've tried to weave through this book. The US is historically the world's greatest emitter of greenhouse gases.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  China is the largest you know today. But climate change really amplifies inequities in the world. That's to say that those that are suffering the most have had the least to do with creating this problem, and they're least capable of dealing with it. obligation is the largest historic emitter to go first to prove to the world that you can decarbonize your economy. We have a second obligation and that's to drive down the costs for others because you've probably heard of Bill Gates's references to the green premium. This job will not be done until we drive the green premium for every good and service below zero. That's to say that, well, let me pick the key result around vehicles. We call

• 13:26Speaker 01

  for electric vehicles, this is key result 1.1, to achieve price performance parity with internal combustion engine vehicles in the US by 2024. That means they cost $35,000 and in India and China importantly by 2030 where the cost target has to be $11,000. That's what it would mean to have no green premium. Now, I went into that detail because it illustrates, I think, the book and the book is more than a book. It's a plan. There are six objectives, large scale things we must accomplish. We've got to electrify transportation. We've got to decarbonize our grid, which means shift to wind and solar, safe nuclear. We've got to fix our

• 14:05Speaker 01

  food systems, which means reduce, not eliminate, but reduce the amount of meat and dairy we consume, change how we grow plants and reduce food waste. Fourth, we've got to protect nature. That means stopping deforestation and protecting vast areas of the ocean for regenerative natural growth. The fifth thing we've got to do is clean up industry principally change how we make steel and cement, which are tremendous sources of greenhouse gas emission. And finally, Harry, after we've cut as much as we can in those first five areas, we've got to remove the stubborn carbon that remain. And this is in many ways the hardest of all. This means natural based means,

• 14:46Speaker 01

  like planting more trees or making direct air capture and sequestration of carbon economic. Today, it's wildly expensive and uneconomic. These six things are the great big objectives. And so for every one of them, an OKR system has three to five very specific time bound, measurable key results. The climate world has the benefit today of Lots of goals and they're really great goals. But the difference between a set of goals and a plan is whether or not you have measurable key results. Date and time specific ways to judge if we're on track, making progress, falling behind. Do we have to shift our course? And I had the great fortune when I first came to Silicon Valley to work at Intel to have Andy Grove be a mentor.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  And he invented this amazing system called OKRs, which I've since taken to every organization I can get to listen to me about it. From the startup Gates Foundation to the Google guys, there you are. And it led to this book Measure What Matters.

• 15:44Harry Stebbings?

  What a brilliant book. I wonder who wrote that, John?

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Well, the truth is two thirds of it was written by entrepreneurs. I'm an engineer and I have a very, very hard time with words. And so I cheated, decided instead, like you do, to interview people and let them tell their stories.

• 15:59Harry Stebbings?

  Much better.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Much better approach. And so this book, Speed and Scale, allow me to finish, isn't just six big objectives for a mission or four more ways to get it done in time, the so-called accelerators. It is 55 key results, all on one page, that can help you answer the question, is there a way? Here's one way to reduce warming to no more than one and a half degrees Celsius. If we get on track, we're not on track today.

• 16:24Harry Stebbings?

  My question to you, John, is like, the world knows it, the consumer feels it. We all want to make a change and we all want this to happen. My question to you is, what about the governments? What about, you know, Russia, China, Brazil, some of the less climate friendly governments? What happens if they don't adopt our same mindset? And how do we think about controlling the uncontrollable?

• 16:46Speaker 01

  The governments are the biggest problem. And if the governments don't change, if they don't up the level of ambition and urgency, simply put, we're screwed. We will not succeed. And we need all the governments of the world to work on this. And I've especially focused the book on the 20 largest emitters. One of the hard facts about this problem, we are fast running out of time. The book is not written to exhort people to take individual action. And in fact, the book warns against being distracted by what I call bright, shiny climate objects. We've got to go for the gigatons. There's 59. Tons per year of greenhouse gas emissions. That's the UN report from 2019. And that number is growing. It's not declining.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  We have to drive that number, Harry, to net zero by 2050. And we have to get halfway there by 2030, which is just eight years from now. In the face of growing human activity, that means this coming year in 2022, to be on track, we need to reduce planetary carbon emissions by eight percent. And then another eight percent in 2023, in 2024, in 2025, to get to a cumulative 50% reduction by 2030. Do you know how many times we've reduced carbon emissions on the planet to date? Never, never. So what do you think are the odds we're going to pull this off? How can we get this?

• 18:02Harry Stebbings?

  Well, this is what I was thinking. I didn't want to say it, but you know, this is an investment. This is more than a bridge round, John. Are you hopeful? And I don't mean that negatively, but like when you listen to that and then you look at the stances of some of the governments we mentioned, how's this going to work, John?

• 18:15Speaker 01

  I'm going to directly answer your question. Yes, I am hopeful. I may not be optimistic, but I'm hopeful. And what gives me great hope are the movements, which we declare, and this is a subtle point, need to become action. See objective number eight. Greta Thunberg in 2018 was a lone Swedish teenager striking from school on Fridays out in front of the Swedish parliament. By 2019, her school strikes had spread around the world. And four million youth in 100 cities staged the largest climate strike that we'd ever seen in the planet. And measurably, it resulted in the following change in action. Climate in Europe, the crisis became a top two voting issue for European nations. Key result 8 dot 1 says that for voters,

• 18:59Speaker 01

  we must make the climate crisis a top two voting issue in the 20 top emitting countries by 2025. We have no more time than that to waste. So it's an excellent key result. It's measurable, it's specific, it's time bound. And if we achieve that, we'll find that not only Europe, where she has made it a top two voting issue, but India, the US, and China can develop that public sentiment. But I want to see a detailed plan with the steps that will get us there. That's what we need to get that part of this job done. And it may surprise you, but in this Look, I have Doug McMillan, the CEO of Walmart, not as an investor, not as an innovator, but as an activist, because he's leading a movement throughout his supply chain. When Walmart, the Fortune one company, stands up and says to all their suppliers,

• 19:44Speaker 01

  "We want you to drive for net zero in our supply chain by 2040." And you see the concerted action of Walmart against this problem. It gives you hope. It gives you a belief that the businesses are ahead of the governments, the youth are ahead of the governments, the entrepreneurs and innovators are ahead of the governments, the investors are well ahead of the governments. That's not because the governments are bad. They respond to their body politic. The US is divided like a knife edge on this issue. And so it's the same old story. What we're doing is not enough. We need more youth speaking up. We need more climate officials elected. I set a goal that says a majority of government officials globally, either elected or supported, need to support the drive to net zero.

• 20:27Harry Stebbings?

  You know, when I hear you, it's about kind of governments listening to the different constituents and cohorts. When I spoke to many of our mutual friends, they said that you were one of the best listeners they've ever worked with and been lucky enough to know. What does great listening mean to you, John?

• 20:42Speaker 01

  Somehow along the way, I learned that great listening is active listening. You'll have a deeper conversation and a better level of communications if you can, in the form of a question, play back what the communicator, in my case, I worship at the altar of entrepreneurs, what the innovator is trying to say. So I'm an active listener. I try to listen by repeating what I've heard and doing that in the form of a question.

• 21:06Harry Stebbings?

  In terms of the questions that you ask and the words that you use, one thing that's striking and challenging for you in many ways is your words have a lot of weight, especially at a board or in meetings in particular. Do you kind of watch the weight of your words and are careful? Because they can have such a large impact on a company's direction, a strategy. How do you think about the weight of your words?

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Well, I think honestly, you overweight the impact of those words. What I've long believed is that the best thing a good board member can do is bring three to five questions for a meeting, have maybe half of those. Be questions that the team hasn't thought about and have one of them be truly useful. So I think being a good board member is not about telling people what needs to be done, but asking them questions that they've not yet thought of.

• 21:50Harry Stebbings?

  In terms of kind of being a good board member, another important aspect is like recruitment, recruiting the best talent. I mean, Jim Barcsdale, I mean, you know, no one is better than you at recruitment, as I heard.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  I love recruiting people, I think. Building, inspiring, retaining your team is the hardest thing an entrepreneur has to do.

• 22:06Harry Stebbings?

  Why do you love it so much? And I guess, and I'm saying this for you, but what makes you so good at it? Because everyone says you're the best in the world.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  I think it starts with, I truly love people and I love being with people. And finding the right fit for a new recruit to a team or an organization is an exhilarating bit of magic. These ventures are not transactions, they're not deals. They are the hopes and dreams of an impassioned group, a growing group to change the world. When you can help them do that by adding credibility or an affirmation or a commitment that this is the way I see the Netscape venture, Jim Barcsdale, and it won't run out of money and it could well change the world, that makes me happy.

• 22:48Harry Stebbings?

  No, I totally get you in terms of that impact. Speaking of that impact, we mentioned earlier the Google and the Amazon, they're the chosen children that everyone likes to mention. One suggestion that someone that we both know asked was, what investment are you most proud of that few people have heard of or that few people cite, but you're most proud of it?

• 23:06Speaker 01

  Well, it's an investment that my partnership made, not that I singly sponsored, because I think groups make better decisions than individuals. It may surprise you, but it's in this book and it's called Endphase. We invested twenty nine million dollars in Endphase. Ben Cordlang led the investment for our partnership. That twenty nine million dollar investment today is worth a billion dollars. It is the leading maker of micro inverters. So out of our eight solar ventures, seven were solar panels, but one of them made the smarts, the intelligent, so that rooftop solar, residential solar would be economic and effective. That company went through some very difficult times. It almost ran out of cash, even after it was public. That, by the way, was true also.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  So of Amazon, Amazon almost ran out of cash after it was public as well. But Enphase today is a member of the S and P five hundred. I think an investment that I'm proud of because it's enabled a whole new solution for the climate crisis. It shows that if you stand by entrepreneurs, help them through the struggles, that you can be well rewarded.

• 24:10Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask one thing that I've been thinking about as I've been listening to you today is every fund should be investing in climate. Every fund should be investing in innovation within the climate space. And then honestly, John, and I'm just being very transparent with you here. I get enterprise SaaS like no one, like many other people do, but I know it well. I know product led growth. I know it well. Honestly, I do not know climate well. I read your book, I read the MIT breast, but what we don't know about climate change. But I'm not well versed like I am in enterprise SaaS. And when I think about it, I'm going, oh, I'm not as confident investing in climate change as I am enterprise SaaS. Should every fund just be investing in climate? Is there wasted dollars going into climate? Advise me, John, from an investment strategy.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  So every fund should not be a climate fund. That's my first piece of advice. But let me speak to your situation as a SaaS investor. There will be SaaS, climate, accounting, marketing, marketplace transaction that will depend very heavily, I think, on your insights and success in SaaS based investing. I believe I've made one of the best of them. I've described it in this book called Watershed, setting out to help people with supply chains manage their carbon equation. Everyone will do carbon accounting. Governments will do carbon accounting. They will score legislation for carbon. It's a new currency, a more important currency, I dare say, than Bitcoin is. Take your area of expertise, it might be in materials or robotics or enterprise or consumer applications,

• 25:38Speaker 01

  and develop a prepared mind, have a point of view about how this once in a century transition is going to affect that field of human activity. And then you'll be better prepared for the innovations that entrepreneurs come forward with.

• 25:51Harry Stebbings?

  By the way, totally agree with you in terms of Watershed and incredible company. I think you're right also in terms of the transferability of skills. But tell me, I do want to move into my favorite, which is. A quick fire round. So I say a short statement and then you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

• 26:05Speaker 01

  It depends what the statement is.

• 26:07Harry Stebbings?

  Trust me, it's a very entertaining round. My favorite book is obviously Speed and Scale now. What's your favorite book and why, John?

• 26:13Speaker 01

  My most favorite recent book is one by Bill Gates called How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. Familiar with it?

• 26:18Harry Stebbings?

  I am familiar with it.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  I have a theme here to what I'm interested in.

• 26:22Harry Stebbings?

  There is a theme, huh?

• 26:23Speaker 01

  But I want to tell you something about Bill Gates also. He's extraordinary. He's a Harvard dropout and he has a practice that I'm trying to emulate, which is every night before he goes to bed, he reads for an hour. He's self-educated and I just think it's, books are my friends. Ever since I was, started hanging around with Jeff Bezos, Jeff said, you know, John, it's going to be really hard to replace the bookstore. People go to books to feel better about themselves, to see ways in which they can grow. There's a social dimension to people wanting to meet physical bookstores. Physical bookstores will be with us and ought to be with us forever. You heard it here. That's Jeff Bezos.

• 26:57Harry Stebbings?

  What's the most memorable moment you have from working with Jeff that you tell your children, your family most often?

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Well, not long after Amazon went public, we were running out of money. And we had to raise over a billion dollars in new financial instrument. It was a convertible euro bond. And this was at a time when analysts from Lehman Brothers, Ravi, was convening investors monthly to forecast when Amazon would go bankrupt, when it would literally run out of cash. And this was based on some rather flawed analysis on his part, which I played a role in trying to get corrected. But everyone now looks back on Amazon and believes it was this unparalleled success. It was looking pretty risky for quite a while, even after it was public. I'll just say one more thing about Bezos. My most memorable impression of Jeff Bezos was my very first meeting,

• 27:45Speaker 01

  when he came bouncing down from the loft in a second floor story of a really dilapidated building opposite the Free Needle Clinic in Seattle, and with his incredible honking voice and laughter, persuaded me on the spot that I wanted to be in business with him. I tried to form an opinion early on about whether or not I would mind getting in trouble with an entrepreneur, because my experience is no matter how good the plan, how great the market Or the team, we're going to get in trouble. In that instant, I knew that Jeff would bring an optimism and energy to building one of the most important companies in the world and transforming how we buy, sell, entertain, inform ourselves.

• 28:23Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, I love it. I do also feel immensely sorry for Paul Ravi. That analyst has got a, you know, a big wall of shame on that note that he wrote, poor chap.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  Well, Barron's as well. They had a whole cover that, you'll recall, said amazon dot bomb on it. And then a decade later printed a retraction, so.

• 28:39Harry Stebbings?

  Oh, very good of them to retract it. I do want to ask, what three traits, and I know your children obviously are grown up, but what three traits would you most like your children to adopt?

• 28:47Speaker 01

  Well, most important, I want them to be strong willed and they have a strong independent view of the world, how it is, how it ought to be, and their role in it. I also think they pay more attention to what we do than to what we say. I believe they are and I want them to be optimistic and I want them to make meaning out of life through their relations with others, that they have empathy, that they genuinely care. And so even though they yell at me, I'm enormously proud of both of my daughters.

• 29:12Harry Stebbings?

  They always love you. They may yell, but they always love you. Tell me, what's your biggest strength and your biggest weakness, John?

• 29:18Speaker 01

  I think my greatest strength is sense of optimism and a real love for people. Some people say I'm a very good salesman. I think selling is a high calling. It's looked down too much. I think everybody in a new company and a business or a cause is selling all the time, in a good way, hopefully, solve a problem, get in order. My weakness, I think, is that I'm a sucker for really big ideas and breakthrough technologies. And with my enthusiasm to try to see someone transform search, I can get carried away.

• 29:44Harry Stebbings?

  Would you say you're loyal to a fault? And I mean that nicely, but I hear that you unwaveringly backed people and ideas. And I guess the question is, is there ever a time to stop?

• 29:55Speaker 01

  Yes, and that's a hard decision to stop and I probably don't stop soon enough. I'll cop to that criticism. But you know, what's at stake isn't money, it's people's lives and careers and their time. By staying the course with a venture, you can see amazing things happen. Endphase is an example. Symantec was an example. A number of investors gave up on Symantec after its first product failed. We stayed the course and it ended up being a large and very successful company, so.

• 30:21Harry Stebbings?

  Penultimate one, you've sat on some of the most incredible boards, John. Who's the most memorable board member that you've sat on a board with?

• 30:27Speaker 01

  That would be Coach Bill Campbell, and I dedicated the book Measure What Matters to him. An executive who I recruited out of Apple, he ran all Apple sales and marketing, to be the CEO of Go, one of my biggest failures. There's a book that's been written about it called Startup. It should have been called Screw Up, because Jerry Campbell and I got pretty much everything wrong. But what we got right was Bill Campbell. And Campbell had this amazing ability to bring into a workplace setting the notion of love, unabashed, inspirational, tough-loving way. He could walk into a meeting room with colorful, hearty oaths, have everyone in the room know that he had their back, and yet he was going to call things like he saw them.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  And so after Go failed, I recruited Campbell to Intuit with Scott Cook, who became chairman of the company. And then post Intuit, got Bill involved in the board, in fact, beyond the board, in weekly staff meetings, for example, at Google Company. And this is while Bill was on the board of Apple, which drove Steve Jobs crazy. He said, "These people at Google, they're ripping off my technology. They're competing with me. You can't work with both companies." And Bill thought about that. His response was very measured and correct. And he said, "Look, Steve, I'm not helping them with their technology. I can't even spell HTML5, you know? I'm helping them be a better business every day." And so Bill attended the weekly Monday staff meetings with Eric Schmidt

• 31:53Speaker 01

  and then with Larry Page to help the Googlers make better business decisions. At the same time that Steve Jobs said, "This is maybe my most valuable board member." That's Coach Bill Campbell, and I miss him today.

• 32:03Harry Stebbings?

  That's a pretty special one. Tell me, penultimate one, we mentioned Go there. In terms of misses, I always find that misses lead to changes in investment mindsets. What's a memorable miss for you? And how did it change your investing mindset?

• 32:15Speaker 01

  Well, my biggest investment failure was to back Fisker instead of Tesla. And I talk about that in the book. It was this very uncertain time. Tesla was running out of money. Its Sportster wasn't on the road. They were taking deposits to ship cars, but using those to pay And Elon had never built a car company before. So he had a radically different idea that the whole car was basically software and a platform. And as much ought to be engineered as possible by Silicon Valley technologists. On the other hand, we had Henrik Fisker, who came with a great pedigree of designing autos for Aston Martin and BMW. And was going to make an electric vehicle at the luxury end to begin with, and then move down market. Relying on traditional automotive suppliers.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  We got it wrong, really wrong. Has reinforced for me today, the authenticity and importance of an entrepreneur who deeply understands the technology. And is willing to innovate down to the bare metal and the fundamental physics.

• 33:11Harry Stebbings?

  I do want to ask one final one, which is like, when we look at the next five years for you, John. How do you think about spending them and being most efficient with your time? Is it another book? Is it more activism? How do you want the next five years to go?

• 33:24Speaker 01

  Well, I'm immensely proud of Kleiner Perkins, chairman there, involved weekly in investment meetings. Choosing with my own investment dollars and some of Kleiner's, like in watershed, to focus on this entrepreneurs for this climate crisis. I'm open to the best ideas of innovators, regardless what field it's in. But I think, Harry, we've got a small number of years till 2030, really, to cut emissions in half. And so do I want to write another book? No, but I expect there'll be an annual update to this book. I expect there'll be a Chinese version of the book, an Indian version of the book. And more important than the book, there's going to be a website that goes live with the best practices around the world.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  I expect that I'll be advocating for more governmental action, that I'll be speaking with enthusiasm, hopefully credibility, about the size of this opportunity. You know, the last interview in the book is with Lorene Paul Jobs. And her last quote in the book, I won't get exactly right, but it goes something like, John, we should look on the climate crisis as the greatest gift that mankind has ever had. And she's saying that in order that we can redress longstanding injustices. Reimagine a healthy world, a healthy economy, a healthy set of nation states, all triggered by the imperative of avoiding this disaster, making this change.

• 34:40Harry Stebbings?

  John, I have to say, I've just loved doing this. This has been such a special, fun, educational discussion for me. Thank you so much for joining me today, and this really has been a fantastic episode.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  Thank you for the privilege of being a guest of yours.

• 34:56Harry Stebbings?

  What an incredible guest and I think the thing that struck me so much with John was just the humility and warmth with which he has within himself and it was just incredible to have the chance to interview him today. If you'd like to see more about speed and scale, you can on the 20minutevc.com. We'd love to see you there. But before we leave you today, do you employ or pay workers in other countries? Yes. Well, you need Remote. Remote makes it easy for companies of all sizes to employ global teams. They take care of international payroll, benefits, taxes and local compliance. Remote helps you onboard full-time employees or contractors in countries all over the world in minutes on its simple, easy-to-use platform. They own full local legal entities in all their covered countries, guaranteeing you never have to deal with a third party ever. And to save you money,

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