Over the last 18 months, I have had endless conversations with Silicon Valley political operatives, mega-donors, and fundraisers who have thrown themselves full-time into climate advocacy. The time for this being merely a hobby, they tell me, is over. Some are motivated by classic tech industry optimism, others by a sense of impending cataclysm. Some watch the rise of companies like Tesla or Rivian and see money to be made. Others simply watch the weather.

John Doerr, the longtime chairman of Kleiner Perkins, sits somewhere between these camps—and in the center of the action. Doerr, after all, has an intimate understanding of the power of new technologies to terraform industries and generate massive returns. He came up at Intel under the mentorship of management guru Andy Grove before joining Kleiner, where, incredibly, he placed early bets on both Amazon (market valuation: $1.8 trillion) and Google (valued at $2 trillion, and where he remains a member of the board). Today, he is an elder statesman of Silicon Valley, alongside generational peers like Mike Moritz and Vinod Khosla.