John Doerr was born on June 29, 1951. He obtained B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Rice University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. John began his technology career in 1974 at Intel, just as the company was inventing the groundbreaking 8080 microprocessor.
During his Intel years, he held various positions in engineering, marketing, management and sales. While at Intel he also learned from Intel co-founder Andy Grove about operating excellence. He continues to share this insight with entrepreneurs today.
John would eventually found Silicon Compilers, a VLSI CAD software company. He also co-founded @Home, the nationwide broadband cable Internet service. John joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 1980 since then he has backed a number of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs. This includes the likes of Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt of Google; Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, and Scott Cook and Bill Campbell of Intuit.
John’s interest is aiding entrepreneurs create the “Next Big Thing” in mobile and social networks, greentech innovation, education and economic development. The ventures that John has sponsored have added more than 200,000 new jobs.
Twitter (IPO 2013) is the latest to join the ranks of successful companies backed by John. Its market cap today is 7 times what it was worth when KPCB invested. Other upcoming companies which look like solid winners are Square and Flipboard. Nextdoor and Coursera are also a new batch of potential winners. Fuel cell maker Bloom Energy, one of his clean-tech companies should prove another big winner in the future with investors poised for an eventual IPO.
John sits on the boards of Amyris, Google, and Zynga and several other private technology ventures. In the case of Zynga he played an active role in its rebuild as it struggled on the public market.
John supports entrepreneurs focused on the environment, public education and alleviating global poverty. These include NewSchools.org, TechNet.org, and the Climate Reality Project.
Business Executives 
Posted on September 23, 2014
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