A Conversation with John Doerr

John Heilemann is a contributing editor at New York Magazine, where he writes The Power Grid column on national politics, business, and their intersection. He is the author of “Pride Before the Fall: The Trials of Bill Gates and End of the Microsoft Era” and a National Magazine Award finalist for his reporting on the Microsoft antitrust case. He is currently at work on a book about the 2008 presidential campaign.

A former staff writer for The Economist, The New Yorker, and Wired, his work has appeared as well in Vanity Fair, GQ, Time, and Business 2.0. He appears regularly on The Chris Matthews Show, Charlie Rose, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and other national television programs. His four-part documentary on the rise of the Web appeared last winter on the Discovery Channel.

John Doerr joined Intel in 1974 just as they invented the famous “8080” 8 bit microprocessor. At Intel he held various engineering, marketing and management assignments, and was one of their top-ranked sales executives.

In 1980 he joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and sponsored a series of investments including Compaq, Cypress, Intuit, Netscape, Lotus, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, S3, Sun Microsystems, Amazon.com, Symantec and Google. He was the founding CEO of Silicon Compilers.

He currently serves on the Board of Directors of Amazon.com, Move.com, and Google. The privately-held company boards include Zazzle, Miasole, Bloom Energy, and Spatial Photonics. He holds patents for computer memory devices he invented as a design engineer at Monsanto. John’s interests include the Internet, green/clean technology, biotechnology, genomics and improving K-12 education.

John Doerr was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He holds Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in Electrical Engineering from Rice University and an MBA from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration.