V.C. JOHNNY APPLESEED COMPANY Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Partner AGE 47 E-MAILjdoerr@kpcb.com BIO In a world of Midas touches, venture capitalist John Doerr's handshake is the
most golden. An electrical engineer by training at Rice University, Doerr has used
his perch at one of Silicon Valley's best-known venture-capital firms to back
small high-tech start-ups over the past two decades. You may have heard of a
few of them: Sun, Netscape, Intuit, Compaq. The recent flood of cash for new
Internet companies--writer Michael Lewis has called it "capitalism with too much
capital"--has only enhanced the currency of Doerr's judgments.
Central to his longtime teachings is the tight keiretsu network of Kleiner-backed
companies. The past year has seen it put into practice with a vengeance, first in
November 1998, when the Kleiner-backed 800-lb. gorilla America Online bought
out Kleiner-backed Netscape. Then eight weeks later, Kleiner-backed
broadband giant @Home shored up Kleiner-backed Yahoo challenger Excite
by--yes--buying the company. On the @Home board: John Doerr. Even more
impressive were the Doerr-centric synergies evident in Drugstore.com, an online
store that announced it would go public a mere two months after opening for
business in the spring. Why not? Amazon took a stake and sent it customers;
Doerr, already an Amazon director, joined Drugstore.com's board. Can you say
keiretsu? BEST LINE "E-commerce has been underhyped." FORWARD TILT Doerr has shown an interest lately in luxury goods, joining the
board of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. Another pet favorite: the Google
search engine, which ranks results based on how often sites link to other sites.
