John Doerr's Realpolitik, Lucasfilm Bedlam, and the Fall of Davos
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John Doerr, the legendary venture capitalist turned climate evangelist, defends Big Tech, Jeff Bezos, and Joe Manchin as part of his realpolitik climate change vision. 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.
Doerr is also one of the few Silicon Valley titans to engage seriously, and visibly, in politics. Like Eric Schmidt, Doerr served as an early, unofficial ringleader for the generation of tech executives who eventually reached the apex of their Washington influence during the Obama years. In the late 1990’s, he launched the political lobbying operation TechNet, an early industry advocacy effort that helped to boost Al Gore’s presidential campaign. The group’s “Goretech” dinners inspired Silicon Valley insiders to joke about “Gore and Doerr 2004.”
A ticket it was not, but the Gore-Doerr friendship did turn out to be quite meaningful. After his excruciating election loss, Gore turned his attention to climate advocacy, producing and starring in the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth. The movie crystallized the stakes for Doerr, who has pledged to give away the bulk of his $15 billion fortune. In Doerr’s new book, Speed and Scale, his anger at the world for not doing more in the intervening 15 years leaps off the page...
FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT 
Kathleen Kennedy is one of the most prolific producers in Hollywood. But it's time for someone else to manage the franchise. MATTHEW BELLONI 
Time will tell whether the University of Austin becomes the next Hillsdale, the next Yale... or a brick-and-mortar Substack. TINA NGUYEN 
Can Mike Bloomberg remake the global hobnobbing and policy circuit in his image? Seems like it. DYLAN BYERS 
Twenty years after stepping down as the leader of GE, Jack Welch’s baby is about to become three companies. What went wrong? WILLIAM D. COHAN 
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