John Doerr, Menlo Park venture capitalist who backed Google and Amazon, still counts family dinners as his biggest goal

John Doerr helped bankroll the companies behind much of everyday digital life:  Google, Amazon, Intuit, Netscape, Sun Microsystems and Slack, among others. By 2015, ventures he backed had created more than 200,000 jobs. He taught Google’s young founders the goal-setting system Googlers have used every quarter since, and in 2022 he and his wife, Ann, gave $1.1 billion to create the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, Stanford’s first new school in 70 years and the largest gift in the university’s history.

Yet the Menlo Park venture capitalist, chairman of Kleiner Perkins, has called himself something humbler:  “the luckiest engineer from St. Louis, Missouri.” And when he tells his own life story, the best parts are about love, family dinners and a broken public address system.

Five kids and one gift

Doerr was born in St. Louis on June 29, 1951, one of five children. His parents raised the family on a middle-class income and saved to send all five through college. “They always made us feel we came first,” he told Rice University graduates in 2007, with his parents in the audience.

His father, an engineer, sales leader and entrepreneur who started companies with partners, is his hero. “In many ways my career choices are reflections of his choices and his great advice,” Doerr told podcaster Tim Ferriss in 2021. He has never forgotten what his father told him:  “John, Mom and I are going to give you one gift which no one can ever take away, a good education but it’s up to you to decide what to do with it.”

He and his mother talked every week, and he urged the Rice graduates to do the same. “Nothing will make Mom happier than picking up the phone and calling once a week,” he said.

The broken public address system

At Rice University in Houston, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering, Doerr was, in his words, “a scrawny, nerdy electrical engineer” who had one thing in common with most of his classmates:  he couldn’t get a date. His professor and friend Ken Kennedy pushed him to meet an engineering student named Ann Howland. For months, Doerr wrote her name and phone number over and over on the side of his legal pad and never worked up the courage to call.

So Kennedy worked some magic. He had Ann ask John to help fix the broken public address system at Jones College. “I may have been shy but I wasn’t stupid,” Doerr said. He looked it over and “quickly concluded that it was broken, very broken and it was going to take a long time to fix it.”

That night they went to a play rehearsal and a party, walked hand in hand around the stadium and watched the sun rise. For many Friday nights after that, they “fine dined” on Jack in the Box burgers. Countless times, Ann helped him find his car, patiently searching the campus because he forgot where he had parked it. He helped her buy her first car, a yellow Volkswagen Beetle they named Woodstock. Its reverse gear didn’t work.

The romance hit one famous bump. After Ann “dumped me,” as Doerr tells it, she took a summer job at Intel in California. He landed an Intel internship without knowing where she worked. On his first day, guess whose office was down the hall? “She was not pleased to see me,” he said. It took most of the summer to win her back. They married in 1978. “She taught me that I was loveable and loved,” he said. “She settled that question for me forever.”

Fifty dollars and no job

Doerr arrived in Silicon Valley in 1974 with $50, no job and no place to live. He interviewed with all the venture capitalists for a summer internship. “You guessed it:  They all turned me down — wisely,” he joked when the National Venture Capital Association gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019. But Brook Byers agreed to meet him on a run around Stanford’s track and told him to “get a real job at a tech company, like Intel.”

He did. In a 2018 TED talk, he showed a photo of himself from 1975. “Yep, this is me,” he said. “I’ve got a lot to learn, I’m a computer engineer, I’ve got long hair.” At Intel he learned management from the legendary Andy Grove and was named a co-inventor on patents for magnetic bubble memory circuits. A mentor, Jim Lally, then pushed him out of the office to carry a sales quota in Chicago. Helping customers use Intel’s new microprocessors became “one of the most gratifying times of my career.”

When Doerr told Grove in 1980 that he was leaving for a venture firm, Grove fired back:  “John, venture capital, that’s not a real job. It’s like being a real estate agent.” Doerr went anyway. He admits Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers “sounded to me like a law firm,” and the partners told him they wanted someone “willing to be kind of a gopher.” He agreed on one condition:  that they back him in starting his own company. They did.

The Johnny Appleseed of goals

From Grove he took a simple system, Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs:  what you want to achieve, and how you will measure getting there. “I was the Johnny Appleseed of the good gospel of Andy Grove,” he said.

In 1999 he made Kleiner’s biggest bet yet, at the highest price it had ever paid, on two 24-year-old Stanford dropouts with no business model. When he asked Larry Page how big Google would be, Page said $10 billion. “I about fell out of my chair,” Doerr said. He assumed Page meant market value. Page meant sales.

Doerr then presented Grove’s OKR slides to Page and Sergey Brin. He would like you to believe Brin answered with enthusiasm. “Actually, the truth isn’t quite that,” Doerr said. Brin’s reply:  “Well, we don’t have any better way to manage this company, so we’ll give that a try.” Doerr took it as “a kind of ringing endorsement.” He still has the slides. He later turned the lessons into a bestselling book, Measure What Matters.

Home by 6

Doerr uses OKRs on himself. His objective as the father of two daughters, Mary and Esther:  a healthy family life. The key result:  home for dinner 20 nights a month by 6 p.m., fully present, no screens. “That was definitely a stretch goal, and I’d say I made it only about 70 percent of the time,” he said.

He learned that lesson the hard way. In the 1990s, he admitted, he traveled too much, and one day he realized his younger daughter was walking and his older one was in kindergarten. After a serious illness in the family, “Everything changed. I changed.” The Doerrs declared 6 to 10 p.m. an “email free family time zone.” He once flew to China for just 18 hours so he could be home after one night in Beijing. “When I screw up as a venture capitalist I may lose some money and a bit of pride,” he said, “but if I fail as a parent I’d lose love and lives that can never be regained.”

His one regret:  starting a family at about 40 instead of 30. “I think we could have raised one more amazing daughter or son if we’d started at it sooner,” he said. He is, in his words, “an introverted engineer, but also an avid networker.”

“Your generation created this problem”

In 2006, after Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, the Doerrs had friends over for dinner. When the talk turned to global warming, his 15-year-old daughter, Mary, spoke up:  “Dad, I’m scared and I’m angry. Your generation created this problem; you better fix it.” The room went silent. “All the eyes turned to me,” he said at the 2007 TED conference, to laughter. “I didn’t know what to say.”

He has spent the two decades since investing in zero-emission technology and wrote a climate action plan, Speed & Scale. When he and Ann made their Stanford gift, they said:  “This is the decisive decade, and we must act with full speed and scale.”

“You have to back your brother”

Family also pulled him into health care. His brother Tom, a primary care doctor in St. Louis, once asked John to back a patient-focused health plan started by physicians. John said no. He knew nothing about the industry, and it was heavily regulated. Then he slept on it and called back the next morning. “No, I’m going to back you because you have to back your brother,” he said. The plan grew to serve 66,000 seniors. Tom, who gave all his patients his cell phone number, has since died.

In July, Doerr’s family office and Kleiner Perkins joined UCSF Health to launch UCSF Health Converge, which places a few artificial intelligence startups inside the hospital system each year. “Healthcare is one of the most important arenas where AI can improve lives,” he said.

The Doerrs have given generously to their alma mater, including $50 million in 2015 for the Doerr Institute for New Leaders, then the largest gift in Rice’s history. They signed the Giving Pledge in 2010. He co-founded NewSchools Venture Fund to improve public education, and in February he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He also calls himself “a red-blooded American capitalist.”

His advice to young investors is about people, not money. “Don’t lose your soul in the chase for ‘deals,’” he said, because “those ‘deals’ are in fact the hopes and dreams of the founders who will change the world.” His motto is short:  “Ideas are easy, execution is everything. And it takes a team to win.”

Source:  Kleiner Perkins, John Doerr and NVCA Lifetime Achievement Award remarks, 2019; Rice University 2007 commencement coverage and speech text, 2015 gift and 2026 NAE election; The Tim Ferriss Show transcript, 2021; TED talks, 2007 and 2018; Stanford Report, May 4, 2022; UCSF, July 15, 2026; Worthy podcast, June 2026; The Giving Pledge; Library of Congress; Wikipedia.