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.
John Doerr is a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Together with KPCB’s partners, John has backed many of America’s best entrepreneurial leaders, including: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt: Google [GOOG] Jeff Bezos: Amazon [AMZN] Scott Cook, Bill Campbell: Intuit [INTU] Andy Bechtolsheim, Scott McNealy, Bill Joy, Vinod Khosla: Sun [SUNW] And the founders of Compaq, Cypress, Macromedia and Symantec These ventures have created more than 150,000 new jobs. In 1974 John joined a small chipmaker, Intel,...
Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN), is a leading global Internet company and one of the most trafficked Internet retail destinations worldwide. Amazon is one of the first companies to sell products deep into the long tail by housing them in numerous warehouses and distributing products from many partner companies. Amazon directly sells or acts as a platform for the sale of a broad range of products. These include books, music, videos, consumer electronics, clothing and household products. The majority of Amazon’s...
Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and Google+, the company’s extension into the social space. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing...
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) is a well known Silicon Valley venture capital firm, due in large part to their past success. They were early investors in many significant companies, including Amazon, AOL, Compaq, Electronic Arts, Google, Intuit, Macromedia, Netscape, Segway, and Sun Microsystems. The name of the firm comes from the four founding partners: Eugene Kleiner, Tom Perkins, Frank J. Caufield, and Brook Byers. In March 2008, KPCB announced the iFund, a $100M investment initiative focused on ideas...
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