John Doerr on clean energy investing
From Campus Lecture: John Doerr and Ryan Panchadsaram · · EPFL Events
“We learned lots of expensive lessons. Over three funds we invested about a billion dollars in 70 different green companies, most of which failed. But several of which did not. We continued to support them, we stubbornly backed them, and in the end that billion dollars that we invested was worth three billion dollars today as returned to our limited partners. But our goal was more than to make money, it was to make an impact through innovation on this stubborn problem of carbon emissions.”
On , John Doerr, Early investor in Google and Amazon at Kleiner Perkins, spoke about clean energy investing during Campus Lecture: John Doerr and Ryan Panchadsaram on EPFL Events.
About John Doerr
John Doerr, the venture capitalist and early investor in Google and Amazon, discussed the distinction between "missionaries" and "mercenaries" in company building during a talk archived by Kleiner Perkins. He described missionaries as strategic, long-term focused, and customer-obsessed, while mercenaries were characterized as opportunistic, short-term oriented, and focused on competition. Doerr attributed the "missionaries vs. mercenaries" framework to his partner Randy Komisar's book "The Monk and the Riddle" and cited Intel's Andy Grove as the originator of the phrase "only the paranoid survive," though Doerr said he would "argue with Andy" about paranoia being a "disease state" and suggested passion as a more durable motivator. In April 2026, Doerr and co-author Ryan Panchadsaram presented a five-year update to their climate plan "Speed & Scale" at a Climate One event. Doerr said the plan's distinguishing feature is its use of measurable, timebound key results (OKRs) for each of six objectives, adding that he believed Andy Grove "would be smiling at the rigor" in the plan. He stated that progress has been made but the world is "not on track yet" to solve climate change, citing three disruptive forces: unanticipated soaring demand for electrical power, geopolitics involving Iran and Russia, and the need to erase the "green premium" to drive dependence on renewables. Doerr also noted that Dr. Oz, the Trump administration's head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, had contacted him to request a course in OKRs for the agency.