| TechCrunch.

John Doerr On Apple: “The Steve Jobs Way Of Thinking Goes On” | TechCrunch. Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, Michael Arrington sat down with Kleiner Perkins' partner John Doerr. They kicked off the talk by discussing Doerr's history. When he started at Kleiner in 1980, the personal computer revolution was just starting. Doerr noted that he dabbled with many of the early PCs, but "the Apple was way more compelling".Doerr recalled going to an early meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club on Sand Hill road. He saw a scruffy faced man guy there who showed up and held up a motherboard. It was the motherboard of the Apple I. That man was Steve Jobs.Over time, Doerr has grown to know Jobs well. "He's a good man," Doerr said of him. And he noted his remarkable story of being someone who created the personal computer industry, was kicked out of his company, then came back to not only resurrect it from near-death, but also grow it to one of the largest companies in the world. "In the last three years, they have generated $50 billion a year in new business �� and paid $4 billion to developers."But now that Jobs has stepped down as CEO of Apple, what does it mean for the company? "He's put in Apple a kind of culture �� like acurriculum for a university. The ‘Steve Jobs way of thinking' goes on," Doerr noted.Doerr then pulled out his iPad. He noted how Jobs said this device was going to be "magical" and his "best work to date". But Doerr said that now rumors have Apple thinking about re-inventing television, indicating the best may be yet to come.Doerr was quick to note that he has no inside information about that. Mike didn't believe him. "You must," Mike said, again pointing out Doerr's relationship with Jobs. "He's a very secretive guy."I wanna welcome John Doerr, partner and client of Perkins to the stage. John, you've been to, how many disrupts have you attended? Three that I remember.And you've never let me interview you. We've had Charlie Rose interview you. I think you've interviewed people, but you've never let me interview you myself so it's an honor. Well let's do it.And is it because. Why is that? You do many public interviews at all. I don't and I assume it's because that's what you wanted. You're in charge here, right? Or you've been in charge. It depends on who you ask. Yeah. All right. When did you join Kleiner Perkins. It was 1980?1980. Ancient history.I mean, you've been a venture capitalist for like 40 years. 60 years now, or 70 years maybe. They didn't even have computers back then so what - I know - I apologize. Actually it was a great time to join because 1980 was the start of this first great wave of innovation remember the ibm pc came out the apple computer was just out so we had to personal computer and the micro chip and that was huge, it generated...What was your first computer? Oh I guess, I guess it was an Apple computer.Mine was an Apple II Plus.It had a Cromemco and an MCI, but I didn't, the Apple was more compelling.I was like, "Mom, I want an Apple II Plus. I want an Apple." But she doesn't even know what I was talking about. They were like a couple thousand dollars back then. It was a major family purchase.It was.She said if you learn know how to type. So I taught myself how to type on an old electric typewriter pretty quickly like, you know, and she bought me an Apple II Plus and then four years disappeared.Did you ever mess around with programming? I did. I was a hellraiser in Basic and that was about it. But I was very good at using Locksmith and a couple of other programs to steal games. I had a shoebox full of those five and a quarter inch floppies, and I used a hole punch. Amazing.I remember my first computer industry event was something called the home...yeah, it was the Home-Brewed Computer Club. Yeah. And it was on Sand Hill Road. Sure.On Slack. And this scruffy faced guy stood up and held a motherboard For the Apple I and it was Steve Jobs and you could buy the parts for it. You had the Byte shop down in Mountainview and the whole thing's been fast forward ever since.Your good friends with Steve.A lot of people are. He's a good guy.Yeah. You think, I think about a hundred years from now what people will think about all of us including Steve and I written a little bit about that and it's hard to even understand how important he's been to our and will be and I hope to our industry. It's really extraordinary for someone to have invented the personal computer, be thrown out of their company, and then return to a company that's going out of business I swear to God, the board had picked the wrong CEO three times in a row. Yeah.Steve came back and he resurrected that company. He invented the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. And by the way, in his spare time he was co C.E.O. of Pixar.Yeah.So he transformed that industry. And think of this. This is a company that in 3 years time has generated fifty billion dollars per year of new business. It's remarkable. Four billion dollars of revenues to developers. But I think the products we all know. He's also put in Apple a kind of culture, and literally, a curriculum for a university. So that this Apple, Steve Job's way of thinking, goes on. Did you invest in Next When he launched Next?We considered it in the past. Did he, he took outside investment? I don't remember.Yes he did. It was Ross Perot. Do you remember?It was Ross Perot? No, I don't remember.That's right.No, I don't remember.Wild and crazy Texan. We're going to jack up the car and pull out the engine.Alright. It originally was computer, then they moved to software. It was like a $4,000.000 or $5,000.00 computer, right It was a Sun competitor for universities.Yeah. But it was just a, it was, he was looking ahead even then, like, and if it didn't work out with the hardware so much, a little bit ahead of it's time.Right. But he built the right software to get his self back into Apple, so. The thing that's on my mind right now is when he introduced this Ipad he said it was going to be magical. And he also said, in some other forms, that this would be the best work of his life or it was the best work to date.Yeah.And you know now there's some rumors that Apple is gonna invent or re-invent television and Apple TV. I don't know if those are true or not.I bet you do know.I can't wait to see. He's a very secretive guy. It would be fun to watch. Actually, I think some news is going out right now about a company that you're personally backing; you're on the board. You don't put a whole lot of attention into every startup here but obviously Kleiner's a huge organization. This one you're on the board of. It's called Early. And it's the C.T.O of Hulu, Eric Feng, is the founder. Keith tell us just a little bit about it, because I don't know much about it.Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm very excited about it. And it's being launched today, so with apologies to your audience this is the one kind of commercial I'm going to run for Early. Social media of course is very important.Yeah.And we've seen Facebook do phenomenal things. Establishing the friend graph.Yeah.The social graph. Twitter has an information graph. And so Early has a big idea and an important one and that's to create and enable a different kind of social interaction. for an experience graph. So hold that thought. The research shows us that people understand their world primarily through other people or through experiences. The difference between those two is that if you and I were at the Giants came on friday, we might have gone with a group of our friends and we could organize our thinking and share photographs and so forth from the people point of view.Yeah.Or we could say, we were at the Giants game. That was the experience. And then organize, think about it around that and pulled in photographs and video and media and links. And so, experiences extend over time. There's the past, there's the present in the moment in the future. And Early is very early. This is their first product, but the first product called Collections focuses on the past.Yeah.So, what you can do, you can get on the service right now is, we can collectively build a shared set of experiences: photo albums, videos, texts, comments...Yeah....around the Giants game, and I can invite other people who were at that game. and to contribute or to bring me their photo of this. And so I think it's the way photo albums were meant to be or how we can reinvent and re-imagine them. So they're collaborative, they're the best of the photos. Anybody can edit, nobody can delete. Yeah.And one of the things that I'm really excited about is, Eric Fang, the CEO himself. He's the man who put together Hulu.Hulu acquired his company, and basically that became...He ran a company in China.Yeah. That they bought.You know, he's American. I think he grew up in like East Bay or something. Right?Yeah. He's a terrific guy.But he ran in a company in Hong Kong or Shanghai? And he has a lot of the same old band together. Some technical folks from Hulu.Yeah.And they built this first product in 53 days. So, you talk about the lean start up. More important than being lean is being fast. And so I think we'll see them fast-generating in this new field.There's press out about early now, right? There's sort of this collections?Yeah.I was hearing yes.Is this it?It just went out. So alright, who's back to the company besides Kleiner Perkins?Just Kleiner Perkins for the moment. But I think Crunch fund should... I was gonna say, like, I feel a little bit, like, slighted that...But how much have you put it?We're not saying. What's the valuation? I need to know some of the details before I can commit.No, we're not saying that.You're not? You're not? You know, I have no chance of getting this information out of you. And there's guys, it's their first time as a CEO and they sort of can fall under the spell that you...there's no chance. You've been doing this a lot longer then I have, so...But I would like to just know, like, you know, in 53 days, lean start-up, real quick, are we talking about four or five guys here? And that's, you know, just...are we talking...you said the core team. It's a core team. It's a little more than four or five. Is it more than...like, are we talking like 10, I mean...?It's a little less than 50.Well, congratulations on Early. Yeah. Thank you.And even though I don't know the valuation, how much it's raised, or anything else about the company, I'm in. You know the founders. You know the CEO. Yeah.Yeah. Well, you know, that is actually...I would invest in Eric in anything he does. You know, I've been pretty impressed with him for a number of years now. So what else are you excited about right now? In terms of specific companies that you like whether you are in investor or not. Well early is an example of early stage investing that we are doing, we have a lot of that going well. Yeah.Clout, for example, is a venture that is growing fantastically. Just a year ago, FlipBoard rolled out their first product. And then That year they became iPad app of the year.Do you use FlipBoard?All the time. Everyday. It's on my iPad. It's one of the places I start.Yeah.And they have fantastic things coming. But in addition to all those early stage investments since you and I spoke last, Mary Meeker joined our partnership, and we announced that she's leading a digital growth fund. They've made later stage investments in companies like Spotify, Square, Twitter, Facebook and GroupOn. That is just a great group of companies to own. Some of those companies are also outside of silicone valley. There is a company called TrendY'all that is in commerce. In Turkey, for example. And we hope soon to announce a big investment in China. So that full range of innovation, I find very exciting. And I continue to do work, I wanna say in the area of the green technologies. I'm working in digital and in green. And having a good time.Speaking of green, Solyndra has had this massive failure. F.B.I. probe. Congress is looking at it. 500 million dollars US Government guarantee. You're not involved in Solyndra, right? No. I've always looked at green tech as it's so dependent on government money, that it's not really sort of start up stuff. Am I wrong? Where is that going?Well, I think you're part right, but mostly wrong. The energy markets world wide are huge . They are regulated, so government is involved in that but it's strictly capitalism having to do with, are you going to buy that bio fuel or that chemical, batteries, innovation in batteries or electric vehicles. There's small parts of the market for good social reasons that are highly regulated like in very few places do we have competing providers of electricity, power. And the solar market is certainly very, very competitive. I think the Solyndra story is One of...that's actually a familiar story. When the personal computer was rolled out, I think there were 53 makers of personal computers. We ended up with three of consequence. When the disk drive industry was started, you know there were dozen and dozens of them. We ended up with two. With respect to solar, the prize is huge, you know, to make electricity directly from the sun. And at one point there were 83 different solar ventures around the world, new ones. They're not all going to make it. There's a related question, which is, Should the US government be providing loan guarantees to these start-ups? Can I just stop? That is my question. And also, you know, venture capital is supposed to supply the capital needed for companies that go in business. But it seems like these companies need so much capital... They do....that the VC industry can't completely serve them. Not on its own. But we have this myth that the IT industry got started on its own as well, but that's just not true. There was deep government involvement in the Internet, the Internet protocols, Darper grants to BBN. The whole field of computer science was invented by Darpa. So federal funding has been an...don't kid ourselves about the lone entrepreneur in the garage creating a new industry. That's very rare. But back to green for a moment. Yeah. Solyndra got 3% of federal loan guarantees. When the loan guarantee program was put in place, there were requirements that said there had to be at least that much private capital. There was $1.2 billion of smart venture capital and private capital equity that failed, together with those loans. And there were a whole host of other technical requirements. So...I'm not an investor in Solyndra. I don't want to defend Solyndra as a company, but I do want to defend that program. Because we really have a choice. We can decide that we want to outsource our energy future to the rest of the world, or as China has done, get control over some part of our energy future. And I want America to do the latter. You invest in new energy start-ups.Yeah. Yeah, I and my partners do. I...Let's say you, the larger you. The royal you. But the obvious, you clearly believe it's the right thing for the world to do that. Does that influence your profit making decisions? Do you also believe it is absolutely? No. There's lots of right things to do for the world that not what the Kleiner Perkins business is about.Yeah.Our job is to help entrepreneurs build world-class durable companies.Yeah.And make a lot of money doing that. And we give that money back to the Stanford Endowment or to the Hewlett Foundation for example and they do good and noble things with that. You mentioned Mary Meeker, she has done this USA Inc representation and I think she really nailed it the last time she did this, the video with the slide show.Yeah.Can we talk a little bit about that? And also, you know, jobs growth and how Silicon Valley place into that.Yeah.How you see that?Great. Great topics. And I'm going to do a shout out of that. If you haven't seen Mary's video or report, it's available free on the Kleiner Perkins website. KPC.com/usa, or Google it. what Mary did is while she was at Morgan Stanly for an entire year she did a new piece of research. She's a veracious learner and she said, "I've got to figure out how this federal government budget works". And so she decided to take a look at the United States government as if it was a business, with product lines with revenues with income statements with costs, with a balance sheet. And she wrote this book, its a 454 page book, in PowerPoint. There's that many slides. And those of you who know Mary and love Mary and she very data driven and that is her style. No surprise what this book concluded is we are bankrupt and more then concluding we're bankrupt. It said why. The health-care, entitlements, social security, the stuff we're not talking about right now in Washington DC is the biggest part of our liabilities and obligations. And then as a final step she said, now how would a turn around expert approach this business? The United States of America so she doesn't prescribe policy but she says well this is what I might do or that you might do. The really important conclusion that is being lost in today's debate, in conversation is, the only way we're going to get out of where we are is through growth. We can cut this, we can attack those entitlements, but if we don't get our economy growing, nothing else matters. Which is why the kinds of plans put people back to work that wouldn't be working, or the kinds of plans that invest in innovation, or that clear out red tape and regulation. These are what we've got to do. We've got to put this partisan bullshit behind us. Can we? How? A leadership and public pressure. It will not happen with business as usual. If we have strong clear leadership and I'm a big supporter of this. You're talking about at the government level?Well, more than that. Governmental leaders, entrepreneurs business leaders, non profit leaders and then a ground swell of public opinion, that says were mad as hell and were not going to take this any more. You guys put the country ahead of your political parties. And I will tell you, check the videos. I'm a big fan of this job act that Obama has put forward. It doesn't add to the deficit. It's been raided by independent economists as being great generate 1.8 million to 2 million more jobs, it's a good mix of tax cuts incremental expenditures. You're a fan.I'm a big fan. Makes sense.It's funny to talk how bad the economy is in some ways but then you look at job growth but you look at Silicon Valley and you know, things are an a sense booming like they haven't in quite a while. You know, all of us are always afraid of 2000 again. Do you see that? Are we in a boom are we in a bubble? What's going on. That's a great question. Did I start my time at exactly the wrong moment? I don't think you did, I think you started at a great time andI wanna make two big points about now and 2000. The difference between now and 2000, in 2000 there was one big thing happening, the internet. Fairly very big. In fact, it was about to crest. And the internet then had a couple hundred million users right, right?Right.Today it's not just the Internet. As I said in a conversation with you once before, we have social, local and mobile, all three tectonic kinds of changes, earthquakes that are combining to create a tsunami of opportunity of change and disruption. So social, local, mobile. I call this so-lo-mo. And we are doing it in a world where there's 5 billion devices that can talk on the internet. We're almost to a billion people on Facebook so the markets are enormously larger.Yeah. There is an argument, and a lot of people are making emotional claims of bubble, bust, boom. If you go to the data in 2000, there were 8 thousand roughly. new ventures funded and watched with 99 billion dollars of venture capital.In 2000.In 2000.Yeah.8,000 and a 100 billion. If you go to last year. The number is, I think I've got this right, around 3000 new ventures.Yeah. Well that's at Y-combinator alone, I think right? Sorry.I forgot to add them in. With $23 billion of capital.OK.So we're anywhere, just in numbers a third to a fourth of what it was at the height of that bubble. Now, I prefer to think of these periods of time as booms instead of bubbles because booms are really good. Booms they may lead to over investment they lead to full employment. They need to lots of innovation. There's going to be lots of failure and that's OK. What matters is that out of this over-investment we create, you know, lots of innovation in great big durable companies, and that's also a difference between now and then. Zinga, GroupOn, Facebook, LinkedIn. These companies They have real revenues, real growth, real happy customers and then in some cases, real profits. That's what makes me excited about today.So, we're good? We're good.Yeah.There are evaluations that are crazy.Right.We've got business ideas that our products masquerading is companies. Like what? Well that is always going on. Like I said your too good to fall for that one. I want to end on something that I found is personally inspirational, and also funny. When I came to talk to the client at Perkins about investing in crunch fund, you and I had lunch. And we sat out outside your office and had a wide ranging conversation and at one point you said "Mike" you said you know, "What are you doing to help the world?" and I said, oh, well, you know, I donate to the local, and then try to, you know, to give some time to the high school. And you kinda, you were very polite. You didn't cut me off. You listened Yeah I am not really talking about that, I am talking about the kind of things that scale that can really change the world. You gave me some examples. I would love for you talk about what you think all of our obligation is to help and what we should be thinking about.Well, that's a great topic you know. We are living in this bubble of prosperity and success and money that's really disconnected from the rest of the country. And our country today still, 3 years after the start of the great recession, we have 8 million more americans who are unemployed who want jobs, on top of a base normal level of unemployment of 6 or 7 million. These are people who have been unemployed for a very long time. If you don't have a job for a long time it is terrible. It deals with your self esteem, your family, your health, your kids don't go to college. And all this for let's say construction who lost their job through no fault of their own. There were some people who were selling loans to folks who didn't know what they were buying, and even if they knew what they were buying, they couldn't afford it. And we've got a responsibility for that. I think the most important thing we can do about that is help create economic growth and create jobs. But particularly people like you, or like Reed Hoffman, or Pinkus, or some of the people in the audience who know how to do things at scale, who know how to use these technologies to reach large audiences. I think we should think in scale about change and about giving back. For me, the one thing I know how to do is with entrepreneurs. So I look for social entrepreneurs who have got big ideas to change the world and then I try to back them with resources going on their board. There is really two, alright three areas that I am focused on. One is public education like charter public schools through the New Schools Venture Fund, which has helped education entrepreneurs start 45 different chains of charter public schools, with about 254 schools and so that's about two hundered thousand kids just taking a decade who go to school everyday in some dirt bag crummy neighborhood at a competitive school where they can actually get ahead. Yeah there's people doing things with educational technology. I didn't get to hear the whole pitch.Yeah, it's cool. Sal Khan is an example of another education entrepreneur.Yeah, you're talking about what Geoff Ralston is doing with K-12 the white combination for education.Yeah, Geoff's doing great stuff; he's the perfect example.It's amazing.Sal Kahn is this former hedge street analyst who dropped out of Wall Street and said he was gonna do video lessons on YouTube for his nephew Yeah.in New Orleans. And Khan Academy, if you haven't been there, go there. He's delivered over a hundred million lessons to people all around the world to move education forward. The other things that I care deeply about is global poverty. and I think the tragedy on the continent of Africa is a question of morality, it's a moral emergency what's going on there, education, the environment is my third, climate. Today in fact Al Gore is launching a round the world tour. He's going to try to do something really important and really simple. He's going to try and re-establish that the science behind global warming is valid and as important. I think what scares me the most about America at the moment is that the science deniers, the anti science movement is gaining ground and if we don't have presidents, if we don't have an informed electorate that can make decisions based on science diablo 3 gold, I really worry we are going to make bad decisions. You know from my point of view on that it always seems like does it really matter if it's right or not? It seems like there is really no way to stop it we are going to burn every ounce of fossil fuels there are, weather we do it, China or someone else. Seems to me we need to be prepared for it no matter what. It that just a terrible way to look at it? Well, it...Buying, a beach front property in Arizona type thing. So...I think we can do more.Yeah.I think we can do better in innovation can get us there. One more plug if I can? Yeah.This question of where the country is going to go. I think that every body has probably read Tom Freedmon's' Hot Flat and Crowded the World is Flat? This is a book I have been reading that I think is good. It's called that used to be us by Tom Freedmon. How America fell behind in the world, it invented and how we can come back. You've read this, and you think it's a great book. Alright, well there it is everyone. You can buy it on Amazon. You're a shared board member with Amazon right? No, I left the board of Amazon.You're no longer a board member at Amazon, okay where ever you want then. So, yeah. Well. Thank you. After you.I got a hug from John Doerr. Crunchbase APPLE Company: Apple Website: apple.com Launch Date: January 4, 1976 IPO: October 1, 1980 diablo 3 power leveling, NASDAQ:AAPL Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple, Inc. in January 2007.Among the key offerings from Apple's product line are: Pro line laptops (MacBook Pro) and desktops (Mac Pro), consumer line laptops (MacBook) and desktops (iMac), servers (Xserve), Apple TV, the Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server operating systems, the iPod (offered with... Learn more. John Doerr On Apple: “The Steve Jobs Way Of Thinking Goes On” | TechCrunch.