Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner John Doerr, perhaps the most celebrated venture capitalist and certainly one of the most successful, will leave the Amazon board of directors this year.
Venture capitalists often try to stay on public company boards well after their investments have run their course. It’s a status thing, but it also puts them in a terrific position to help their younger portfolio companies. There’s no reason for Doerr to step down from the Amazon board of directors based on time commitments, which is what Amazon is saying. There’s just too much upside to being on the Amazon board of directors. And Doerr remains on other boards, including Google.
So what is the reason?
Our guess is that Doerr is leaving the Amazon board for the same reason Google CEO Eric Schmidt left the Apple board of directors in 2009.
Competition and conflicts of interest.
Google is increasingly competitive with Apple. But the company also competes with Amazon in a number of areas, particularly web services and big data. And down the road, Google may compete directly in other ways as well. Froogle was a flop, but don’t think Google doesn’t want a bigger chunk of ecommerce revenue from people who begin their product searches on their search engine. We’re betting Doerr had to choose between the two companies.
Or maybe Doerr just got sick of flying up to Seattle for the board meetings.
What other boards is he a director on? I saw him on 60 minutes about Bloom Energy and it seems greentech is where his passion is. Amazon is an amazing company but pretty mature.
Also, there’s only so much time in a day, particularly when you’ve got a big boat and summer is not so far away.
Sorry, regarding the boat, I was thinking of Perkins.
Nah, I don’t think that’s the reason. You said “And down the road, Google may compete directly in other ways as well’. So maybe “down the road” Doerr may leave for conflict of interest reasons. There is just too much upside to wait it out.
I could buy the it if you said that they are on collision course because of their movie streaming businesses, but I just don’t see that happening at the moment
Am I missing something? You are not stating in which relation he is to Google.
I had the same question.
He’s on the Google board too:
http://investor.google.com/board.html
And I doubt he got sick of flying to Seattle in a private jet.
Chegg, the silly textbook rental company that has raised $140m, led by Kleiner, is NOT the reason. Amazon will never rent textbooks because it would given them assets in 50 states and thus taxable nexus. No conflict.
Doerr Probably calculated that his board service was not worth the carbon. He may have been right, although he played a huge role getting AMZN up and going.
Pretty fair chance that GOOG and AMZN are both chasing after the iPad market. They should do it together — meaning that the Kindle should become an Android device. Doerr’s resignation suggests that won’t happen.
Areas of conflict:
Cloud computing (mentioned in the article).
Book reader (this is getting crazy competitive)
iTunes-like stores (books, music, movies, …)
I’m thinking this last will turn out to be the most important.
Why, he’s buying an iPad!
lol, sounds more plausible than the reasons stated in the article! At least he’s making a clear choice though, I hear Microsoft employees have to hide their iPhones!
Not sure why this states Froogle was a flop. Google simply renamed it [poorly, IMO] to Google Product Search, and it is a great price comparison site, just as Froogle was. In fact those that upload product feeds to Google Product Search can still use their froogle FTP account!
But neither Froogle or Product Search have been able to gain the type of market share of sites like Pricerunner. It’s not that Google’s e-commerce search is completely unused, it’s just very far from being the top site.
This sounds like Tarot card reading: trying to make sense of random patterns. Doerr doesn’t exactly need contacts. He could invest $1 in something and it’d quickly open any doors the business might want. Maybe he really does just want to spend the time focused on start-ups.
hey now.. no need to hate on seattle ;)