Venture Capitalist John Doerr: Another Fan of College Dropouts

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n
I put-up a post a few months back about the long list of successful Stanford dropouts, from Tiger Woods to the founders of Yahoo! and Google. I was reading the San Francisco Chronicle this morning, and was amused to see one of the most successful VC’s in the valley seems to actively seek dropouts, with an added twist. I quote:

Doerr likes to invest in "white male nerds who’ve dropped out of
Harvard or Stanford, and they have absolutely no social life." That’s
why he backed Netscape, Amazon, Yahoo and Google.

I do wish Doerr would have left out the "white male" part, and in fact at least one of the founders of these companies, Jerry Yang from Yahoo! is Asian; and I would add that Kleiner Perkins, Doerr’s firm, is well-ahead of other VC firms when it comes to hiring women and I understand that Doerr has been especially supportive of women in the firm with young families.

Finally, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard a famous VC make a similar argument; I once was talking with Arthur Rock, the primary VC for both Apple and Intel, and he commented that when an entrepreneur has too nice a car or looks too perfectly groomed, he takes it as a sign that the person isn’t obsessed enough with their work!

Comments

6 responses to “Venture Capitalist John Doerr: Another Fan of College Dropouts”

May 10, 2008

Robyn

Supposedly, Mark Twain said, “Don’t let school get in the way of your education.” I didn’t, but it’s hurt me. A B.A. seems to be HR’s way of whittling down that first rush of resumes. Without it, I seldom make it past the mailbox.

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May 10, 2008

Cameron S.

I also think VCs who focus on a few select schools are kind of missing the bigger picture. Not every smart person is lucky enough to go to one of the schools. There is a troubling potential for growing a monoculture. I am obviously generalizing a bit, but the point remains. Thanks for the great blog, I am a daily visitor via RSS.

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May 12, 2008

Jan

The worst part was when he called them nerds and not geeks. What an insult!

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May 12, 2008

Wally Bock

I wish Mr. Doerr had left the entire statement out. His comment is racist, sexist, and elitist.

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May 12, 2008

Tim Berry

Dropouts get better press because that’s man bites dog, which of course is more remarkable, and better news, than vice-versa. But if you want to be on the right side of the law of averages, there’s the study of successful U.S. high-tech founders that the Kauffman Center released last week that argues for college educations from good schools.
Here’s the URL:
http://www.kauffman.org/pdf/Education_Tech_Ent_042908.pdf

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May 17, 2008

h

consider:
1 dropouts may have good grades.
2 degree status may be associated with other than “intelligence”. biz success is certainly dependent upon schmooz skilz, and that may be the underlying true factor that associates a degree (or a few degrees) with “success”. there’s much politics in school, as there is elsewhere.
3 Doerr may be open to the overlooked who have real skilz. (by implication: there’s a perpetual “hidden” & hungry demand for real skilz, and real skilz often don’t sell themselves as well as the vacuous sell themselves.)

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