YouSaid · the spoken record

John Doerr

lines on the record: 117
first: 2018-05-14
most recent: 2018-05-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Mark Bark and Clark actually. Mark Andreas and Jim Barksdale and the founder Jim Clark, who was a real force. To be recognized”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the internet had been around for a while. But the idea that you could use a browser in images. Pictures and links to click to get wherever you wanted, open the internet up for everyone to use. And that happened really with the mosaic browser at the University of Illinois. Mark?”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, at one point, Anne and I decided that we really wanted to have a family, and if we were going to be serious about that, I couldn't both do sun microsystems and do Kleiner Perkins part-time, so I had to choose.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've always been way more interested in the building of businesses than the money or the investing in them. And Kleiner let me take some other sabbaticals for another spell in my career. I left Kleiner and worked at Sun Microsystems when we were launching the Spark station. And that was because... Figured, how can I advise people, entrepreneurs, who've got a thousand-person organization, if I've never managed one on my own? So I went there and was terrified, but I used OKRs as a way to set goals and empower our team. And stretch and fail and do some amazing things.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had an advantage. Well, you don't have to spell that well. Someone else could spell it for you. So you did this, but you stuck with venture capital and didn't stick with creating companies. I mean, although you are creating companies as a venture capitalist, but you see my point.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's incredibly exciting because right around the 1980s, that was the beginning of the microprocessor personal computer wave. And so we were able to invest in Lotus software and in compact computers. Other software companies intuit that preceded the internet. And I could spell microprocessors. So I had an advantage.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we made software that produced the first Ethernet chip. First raster ops graphic chip for Sun Microsystems computers. And I was the founding CEO, ran it for maybe a couple of years until I hired somebody way better than me. To run the business”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was an engineer and then I worked in marketing and sales. I loved all the jobs that I had. And one day someone called and said Hey, there's this outfit, Kleiner Perkins, Caulfield, and Buyers, and they'd like to hire a gopher, a junior associate who would look at business plans and do whatever needed to be done. And I left it the opportunity because they promised me they'd back me starting my own company. That was really my objective.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And some of them embraced them, and they were transformational Others of them struggled with them. They didn't work, and some didn't even try.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The truth of the matter is, I think many of us set goals the wrong way. And most of us aren't even setting goals at all So, Andy Grove had this system, which I then took to almost 100 organizations, kind of like Willie Lohman with my slide set.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, and from conventional MBOs, which Hewlett Packard and Peter Drucker and everyone had invested, those were centrally planned top-down objectives that you paid bonuses against. And OKRs are exactly the different, the opposite. They're distributed. You don't use them for bonuses.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so Andy invented a superb system for execution. which he called IMBOs. But this is really crucial, Kara, because you know in the semiconductor industry, thousands of people have got to get lines just a millionth of a meter wide right where nothing works at all. And I took Andy Gross lesson when I left Intel.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Put that together. And then I also got to work with Andy Grove, who's been called the greatest manager of his or any other era. And he told me something that I've never forgotten. He said, coming from Fairchild, the great research lab, he said, John, it almost doesn't matter what you know at Intel. Execution, that's everything.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the amazing thing about that summer, there were really two things. My ex girlfriend had a job down the hall. She was not amused when I showed up.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Although Dick Cramlich was very kind, he was with Arthur Rock, and he said, We just funded a company in Santa Clara by the name of Intel. Why don't you go talk to them? So I called my way into the highest person I could find. Bill Davidow. And at the end of the day, I had a summer job. Working in Andy Grosch organization, what did he do? I wrote benchmarks to show that Intel's chips were faster than Motorolas.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. So I'm an electrical engineer from a middle class family in Missouri who came to Silicon Valley trying to find my ex-girlfriend and to get a job somewhere in the computer industry Actually, my overarching goal was to start a company. I heard VCs had something to do with that, so I figured I'd apprentice myself to one of them, and naturally they all turned me down. Right.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Good. So, John, we have lots to talk about. And again, we were talking about how long we've known each other. I'm going to force you to talk a little bit about your background because not everybody knows who the great John Dore is. So why don't we just sort of do a very quick how you got here because it's a lot about your book is a lot about how you got where you got, especially your time at Intel and things like that.”
2018-05-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Doerr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT