By Matthew Strozier | Photography by Jonah Reenders for WSJ
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People in Silicon Valley talk about waves of innovation. Venture capitalist John Doerr calls them tsunamis -- and they come about every 13 years.
Doerr's timeline starts in 1980 with the personal computer and microchip revolution, followed by the browser and the internet, the iPhone and cloud computing.
Now comes what he believes is the biggest tsunami of them all: generative artificial intelligence. "Just three years after ChatGPT was launched, 50% of Americans say they use generative AI, and the value creation is off the charts," Doerr says.
Doerr has tracked these innovation tsunamis as an investor at venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He joined Kleiner in 1980 as a partner and has backed a long list of groundbreaking founders, including those at Alphabet's Google and at Amazon.com. Doerr became Kleiner's chairman in 2016, and he now invests through his family office. He also is on the board of Alphabet.
The Wall Street Journal asked Doerr, age 74, to discuss how he finds and funds innovation. Edited excerpts follow:
Biggest thing ever
WSJ: What is your investing focus these days?
JOHN DOERR: I'm focused on accelerating progress on some of the most challenging problems that we have. That means I'm looking to find, fund and accelerate the success of entrepreneurs in using artificial intelligence to address the climate transition, which is under way, and to transform healthcare.
WSJ: Finish this sentence for me: The latest AI revolution is the biggest thing since...
DOERR: Biggest thing ever. Since everything. It has been underhyped. We don't know how AI is going to shape the new world of education, employment, healthcare -- life as we know it. But I do know there is an insatiable hunger and appetite for electrons, and as in previous tsunamis, there will be winners and there will be losers. My job as an investor is to help these entrepreneurs find, fund and accelerate their success.
WSJ: What are the three or four most important hallmarks of an entrepreneur looking to do great things?
DOERR: What I look for first is, would I mind getting into trouble with them? Because no matter how successful these ventures look from the outside, the truth is you take the lid off the can and inside it's a can of worms. It's a struggle to build any of these companies.
The most amazing entrepreneurs see the world differently than everyone else. They are fluent in using technology to change that world, to realize that new world. They have a sense that it takes a team to do something extraordinary, so they're very good at recruiting. And finally, I find that they're good at selling. They're selling their vision, they're selling their teammates, they're selling their customers.
WSJ: What founders have taught you the most?
DOERR: There are two of those stories that I like to tell and, unsurprisingly, the first is Amazon.com. In 1996, I met Jeff Bezos in their scrappy offices, and he was very frugal and ambitious. He obsessed on the customer. And he asked all of us on the board to help him fight the institutional "no." And so I dived in with Jeff.
The second one is Google. It was three years later, in 1999, that I met Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google's birthplace, a garage in Menlo Park. I invested $12 million in the company for a 12% level of ownership, which people thought was a crazy high price. Indeed, it was the largest check at the highest price that we had ever written at the time, but the market cap today of that company, which was valued at $100 million when we invested, is $3.89 trillion.
What made me fall off my chair was how big Larry and Sergey thought [improving search] could be. They saw something the rest of us hadn't yet.
Those are successes. I've also had deals that have fallen apart.
WSJ: What lessons have you taken from those?
DOERR: There's a saying in venture capital that my partners reminded me of, and that was never invest in anything with wheels. And of course, I did that with the Segway, and I also invested in a car company. [That company was Fisker.] I chose the wrong one. I missed Tesla, but we're in the innovation-funding business, and you can only lose one time your money. You can make many times it if you get it right.
A human-capital business
WSJ: America is known for its entrepreneurial spirit. How much credit can venture capitalists claim for fostering and sustaining that?
DOERR: A considerable credit. Over the last half-century, venture-backed companies accounted for 81% of the patents issued to U.S. public companies by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. And most important to me, they're powering good jobs. There were 5.3 million jobs at VC-backed companies in 2022 alone. That's extraordinary. That isn't an accident. That's a structural phenomenon that America enjoys.
WSJ: Are there some industries where venture investment makes more sense than others?
DOERR: Oh yeah, I think so.
WSJ: How come?
DOERR: Because I believe at its heart, the venture-capital business is a human-capital business, and there are businesses to varying degrees that depend on human capital. I may have been contrary in this regard, but I haven't invested in cryptocurrency. I didn't see human capital playing a powerful role in the kind of innovation and market development, but there is still plenty of time for me to be wrong in that judgment.
WSJ: What do you believe now about VC that you saw differently 20 or 30 years ago?
DOERR: When I showed up on Sand Hill Road [in Silicon Valley], there were a handful of venture capitalists and we hatched out deals at Buck's, [a local restaurant]. From my perspective, the heart of venture will always be Sand Hill Road, but backing startups has gone from a cottage industry to a global movement that has created millions of jobs.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 23, 2026 11:00 ET (15:00 GMT)
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