John Doerr

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

L. John Doerr (born June 29, 1951 in St. Louis, Missouri) is a successful venture capitalist at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers in Menlo Park, California, in the Silicon Valley.

Doerr obtained a bachelor's degree and master's degree in electrical engineering from Rice University and an MBA from Harvard University. Doerr joined Intel Corporation in 1974 just as the firm was developing the 8080 8-bit microprocessor. He eventually became one of Intel's most successful salespeople. He also holds several engineering patents.

He joined Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers in 1980, and since then, has directed venture capital funding to some of the most successful technology companies in the world including Compaq, Netscape, Symantec, Sun Microsystems, Amazon.com, and Google, as well as many unsuccessful companies, such as Friendster. Go corp and myCFO.

He currently serves on the boards of public companies Google, Amazon.com, Intuit, Homestore, and Sun, and on the boards of private ventures Zazzle, Good Technology, Miasole, Purkinje, and Spatial Photonics.

His success in venture capital has garnered national attention; he has been and is currently listed on Forbes Magazine's exclusive "Midas" list and is widely regarded as one of the top technology venture capitalists in the world.

He is described as brilliant, highly charismatic, and energetic. Today, Doerr remains one of Silicon Valley's most influential figures. He currently lives in Woodside, California; Forbes magazine estimates his net worth to be well over $1 billion, making him one of the richest people in the world. It was announced on September 9, 2006 that Doerr will be the Rice University 2007 commencement speaker.^[1] Doerr is a high profile supporter of the Democratic Party in Silicon Valley.

John Doerr is one of five children.