Brian Nichols is the co-founder of Angel Squad, a community where you’ll learn how to angel invest and get a chance to invest as little as $1k into Hustle Fund's top performing early-stage startups

John Doerr joined Kleiner Perkins in 1980, arrived as a junior partner with the intention of funding his own company, and ended up spending over four decades at one of Silicon Valley's most important institutions. He is now Kleiner Perkins' chairman, though he stepped down from day-to-day leadership in 2016.

His investment record is legitimately difficult to overstate.

The Google Deal

Kleiner Perkins invested in Google in 1999 alongside Sequoia Capital, with both firms writing their largest-ever checks at the time. The founders were presenting their 17-page deck, including two pages of numbers and three cartoons, as the 18th search engine with no business model and no team. When Doerr asked how big Google would be, Page and Brin answered: "$10 billion in revenue."

Kleiner wrote the check. Google's 2004 IPO valued the company at $23 billion. The returns to Kleiner, and to Doerr personally, were generational. Doerr remains a board director of Alphabet.

He also introduced OKRs, the Objectives and Key Results goal-setting framework he learned from Intel's Andy Grove, to Google. OKRs became a foundational operating system for the company and have since spread to hundreds of major organizations globally. His 2018 book Measure What Matters, documenting the OKR system and its applications, became a New York Times bestseller.

Amazon

Kleiner's investment in Amazon came in 1996. For Angel Squad members, this is the canonical example of why domain-expert investors who take board seats and actively help recruit teams outperform passive capital at early stage. Doerr met Jeff Bezos two days after their initial introduction through mutual contacts. Beyond the capital, Kleiner helped build Amazon's early team, recruiting key engineering and operations executives. One of Kleiner's partners, Bing Gordon, later joined Amazon's board and his insight that receiving Amazon packages felt like "magic" helped inspire the concept for Amazon Prime, arguably the most successful customer loyalty program in retail history.

Doerr has spoken publicly about regretting the decision not to invest in Tesla. He described it as "the worst investment decision of all time."

The Netscape and Intuit Bets

Kleiner backed Netscape in 1994, betting that a graphical browser could unlock the commercial web for everyday users. The company's 1995 IPO at a $2.9 billion valuation was one of the defining events of the internet era. Doerr was on the board. The investment also backed Intuit, the financial software company, and helped connect its founders Scott Cook and Bill Campbell with a broader Silicon Valley network.

The Climate Chapter

After the technology portfolio generated extraordinary returns, Doerr turned his attention to climate. He started a dedicated clean technology fund at Kleiner in 2006, backed companies in solar, biofuels, and energy efficiency, and has been publicly vocal about climate change as one of the most important investment categories of the next decade.

Not all of those bets worked. The cleantech portfolio encountered sector-wide headwinds in the early 2010s as Chinese solar manufacturing undercut Western competitors and early-stage clean energy proved capital-intensive and slow. Doerr was candid about the failures.

In 2022, he and his wife Ann donated $1.1 billion to Stanford University to establish the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, the second-largest single gift to any academic institution and the largest in Stanford's history.

Shiyan Koh of Hustle Fund has written about how the most impactful investors think about capital allocation across time horizons: early-stage bets on technology categories, then philanthropic capital toward the research and institutional infrastructure that enables the next generation of those bets. Doerr's career arc from tech VC to climate philanthropy reflects exactly that pattern.

Angel Squad members building early-stage portfolios across 50-plus countries can access similar frameworks for thinking about how their investing fits into larger structural trends. The community co-invests alongside Hustle Fund GPs who bring that kind of long-horizon perspective to early-stage evaluation. See the full Angel Squad picture at hustlefund.vc/squad.

The OKR Legacy

Perhaps Doerr's most lasting contribution beyond specific investment returns is the OKR framework. If you have set quarterly goals at a company in the last decade and measured your progress against key results, you are probably using something derived from what he brought to Google in 1999. The ideas compound even when the specific investments do not.