John Doerr

John Doerr is an American investor and venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins in Menlo Park, California. As a member of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, he was an economic advisor to Obama. As of 2017, Forbes ranked him 303rd richest person in the world with a net worth of 7.5 billion dollars as of February 16, 2018.

He wrote the book, Measure What Matters.

He was born in St Louis, Missouri. He graduated with a B.S and M.E.E in electrical engineering from Rice University. He later obtained his M.B.A from Harvard Business School in 1976. He started working for Intel in 1975 as a successful salesperson.

He holds several patents for memory devices.

In 1980, he started working for Kleiner Perkins. At Kleiner, he has overseen the funding of several successful technology companies such as Amazon.com, Intuit, and Google. He serves on the boards of Google and Zynga. He led Kleiner’s $150 million investment in Twitter in 2012. He serves on the board of the Obama Foundation and ONE.org.

He founded and serves on the board of the New Schools Venture Fund, which has the goal of reforming education. He also founded Technet, a policy network of high tech CEOs that seek education and litigation reforms. He co-chaired California’s Proposition 39, which decreased the threshold to approved school bonds, and Proposition 71, which facilitated $3 billion in funding for research into stem cell therapies. 

He supports climate change and clean energy. In 2007, he held a TED talk about fighting global warming.

Doerr married Ann Doerr. They have two children. He pledges to give back his fortunes to charity over his lifetime.