What the hell happened to Kleiner Perkins? | Hacker News Reader

What the hell happened to Kleiner Perkins?

venturebeat.com

23 pointsajbatac14 comments

Makes sense to me. Internet companies are getting by on ever-decreasing amounts of funding, while huge firms like KP have an ever-increasing amount of money they need to invest. Internet companies and KP aren't interested in talking about the same sorts of money any more. It makes sense that their attention should be shifted to big expensive projects like biotech and fuel cells. Whether that will pay off for them remains to be seen, but from a technology point of view I hope that it will.

To me, this seemed like the major logical disconnect in the article. There's obviously still money in web companies, but the "next Google" is much more likely to be acquired by the current Google than ever realizing that potential, which means the next big Google-sized investment is pretty much guaranteed to be anything but a web company.

The people acting like KP is insulting their mother by ignoring Web 2.0 companies are playing around with a lot less money (I'd guess by at least an order of magnitude), and the author is doing a disservice to the readers by conflating them.

"Amost a decade later, still without [another IPO], the number of skeptics are growing."

This is bad writing. To claim that Google's IPO was KP's last great deal, and that they haven't done anything for a decade since is ludicrous. Google's IPO was in 2004. It's been 4 years. For all we know, KP has invested in the next Google, and 5 years from now, they too will IPO, coming in under this imaginary decade long deadline.

The author of this piece is going to feel pretty stupid when congress passes a cap-and-trade bill next year and KP rakes in a few billion overnight.

Moving $1oo million to iPhone apps in addition to other mobile tech investments (which the article doesn't mention) is an internet play.

Agreed. The real article(this is a link to a blog review of it), says:

Web surfing on cell phones - now, that's different. That's why Kleiner recently created a $100 million "iFund" for backing startups building products for Apple's iPhone and other mobile devices.

"Mobile is an enormously important new opportunity," says Doerr. "We think it's the next computing platform and will rival the personal computer."

Which is great, because everything I do is for the mobile.

Ya I think it's common courtesy to link to the actual article instead of some blog.

http://money.cnn.com/2008/07/08/technology/Kleiner_bets_the_...

This is sad. Back in school we had to read "The Goal", about how a new manager is able to turn around a dying manufacturing plant and save it from closure, by focusing on "the goal", namely profit.

Sorry darlings but saving the planet is not "the goal". Profit, and only profit is. KP is going to have to learn this the hard way evidently.

i'm pretty sure KP know the goal is profit. they're VC's, by definition the only criteria for success they have is making money.

Their recent actions and results indicate otherwise.

The cleantech play is hardly altruistic. Rather it's a bet on ability to extract government subsidies to make profits, and to time the market for a successful exit. Note the lobbying cleantech VCs are doing in Washington DC, and consider Al Gore hire in terms of its lobbying power, especially if Democrats come to power. While making money by transferring wealth from taxpayers to institutional investors is arguably unethical, you can't fault its business viability.

I always thought Drucker had a better philosophy: "A company's primary responsibility is to serve its customers. Profit is not the primary goal, but rather an essential condition for the company's continued existence."

You can find plenty of examples of companies that have crashed and burned because they believed profit and only profit was the goal, eg. Enron.

Enron was more about maximizing the share price, not profit. Exagerrating profit was a part of this, but not as much as bamboozling people about the company's future prospects (e.g. Enron Broadband).

This is still a problem in our economy. There's too much pressure to "beat the Street". I worry what effect this will have on Google over the next 5-20 years.

That may be the best quote I've read in awhile. I've convinced that profit is a function of creating happiness, both with your customers and within your company.

Thanks for sharing that.

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