AllThingsD » Mary Meeker

Accel's Breyer Leads Forbes Midas List of Top Tech Investors Again, While Kleiner's Doerr Leads in Media Scrutiny

Kara Swisher — Wed, 08 May 2013 16:12:13 +0000

Forbes magazine put out its much-watched Midas List today, which is kind of the Oscars for venture capitalists in tech. (Caveat: Think more khakis and dudes than glitz and glamour.)

On the Top 10 list of 100 of the best-performing and most influential tech investors, Jim Breyer of Accel Partners and Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz led the list at No. 1 and No. 2, as they did last year. And several others in last year’s list remained on it: Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital, Greylock Partners’ Reid Hoffman, and also David Sze, Peter Thiel and Bessemer Venture Partners’ Jeremy Levine.

Accel scored well on the rest of the list with nine partners named; Sequoia Capital had six VCs on the list; Benchmark, Greylock and New Enterprise Associates got five slots; Bain Capital Ventures, Bessemer, Kleiner Perkins and Meritech Capital Partners had four; and Andreessen Horowitz, Institutional Venture Partners and Venrock each had three.

As usual, there were few women on the list — only three — reflecting the lack of gender equality in the top tier of the VC business, which solidly remains a boy’s club, despite a lot of noise about changing it (see the pictures here and become depressed once again). Those women who did manage to get on the Midas List were Jenny Lee at GGV Capital, who jumped from No. 94 to No. 36; Kleiner Perkins’s Mary Meeker, who dropped from No. 42 to No. 47; and Theresia Gouw of Accel at No. 82, up from No. 92.

One notable part of the massive Forbes package of VCs on parade was the intense and multipart focus on the travails of Kleiner Perkins and its longtime leader and legendary VC John Doerr. Doerr clocks in at No. 26 on the list, dropping from No. 12 last year, a significant fall.

He does address the nagging issues at the storied firm, including ill-conceived investments in clean tech, a late-to-the-game move into social media, and even its big stake in stock-declining online gaming giant Zynga, in a video (below) and in several pieces, one of which is titled ““John Doerr’s Plan To Reclaim the Venture Capital Throne.”

More like “Game of Thrones” from reading it; there is another, more critical article in the New York Times that appeared yesterday. That piece focused on Kleiner’s investment in the troubled green-car startup, Fisker Automotive, and also the firm’s ongoing sex-discrimination lawsuit with former partner Ellen Pao.

“It was a challenging year, one of my more challenging years in the venture business,” said Doerr to Forbes.

Indeed, although Forbes does hand Kleiner a hey-we-have-some-sharpie-young-folks-here-too! gimme with its focus on “new generation” partners Megan Quinn and Mike Abbott in an interesting Q&A, as well as yet another piece on Kleiner supporters — such as Google’s Eric Schmidt — touting the firm as perhaps down but definitely not out in the “mojo” department.

“John always wins eventually, and the reason he always wins eventually is because he has the processing power and human energy,” Schmidt told Forbes. “Whatever the set of challenges, he will drive the change in the firm. They’ll have a crisis meeting and another crisis meeting, but he will do it. It may be messy but he will get them there.”

Presumably, if Doerr and team can get some mileage out of its Twitter investment next year and somehow turn around Zynga’s moribund stock. (Kleiner has held on to a pile of it, which is why Doerr recently joined the board that already had Kleiner’s Bing Gordon on it.)

On problem for Kleiner, and boon to others like Accel and Greylock, was that the firm was not early in Facebook, whose IPO — as rocky as it was — gave many VCs making the top of the Midas List the needed turbocharge in terms of performance. Other key companies to help VCs look good this year, according to the Forbes report: Workday, LinkedIn and Skype.

Here’s Doerr, who is indeed a legend, even if more bruised and battered this year, talking about it all to Forbes’s Connie Guglielmo, in the video interview:

Speaking of media attention, here’s a more provocative video interview by Forbes with Sequoia’s Doug Leone (No. 4, up from No. 18 last year), in which he takes aim at VC firms that do too much self-promotion — three guesses which pioneering browser inventor he is referring to here, and the first two don’t count. He called it an “embarrassment,” although Sequoia did hire an excellent PR person from Google this year — nonetheless making the point that the focus should be on entrepreneurs and not investors.

Except, of course, when it comes to scoring high on the Midas List.

Let the D11 Speakers Begin: Sandberg, Silbermann, Costolo, Woodside, Immelt and More!

Kara Swisher — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 13:08:32 +0000

One of the best parts of planning the next D: All Things Digital conference — which is in its 11th iteration this year — is trying to figure out what group of top tech and media players will make the very best combination to bring real insight, news and forward thinking to our amazing audience, at the event and also online.

Some interviews one knows with certainty are going to be epic — such as our joint one with Apple’s Steve Jobs and Microsoft’s Bill Gates at D5 in 2007. Others, like our terrific session with Oracle’s Larry Ellison last year at D10, gave the attendees a new look at someone they thought they already knew well. Some are just plain funny — such as former Groupon CEO Andrew Mason’s famous “death stare” in 2011 at D9.

What’s most clear throughout them all is that Walt Mossberg and I have been lucky in getting high-caliber and engaging speakers who are willing and able to sit in our signature red Steelcase chairs and answer our sometimes thorny questions.

This year’s D11 is no exception. While there are many more speakers we can’t announce quite yet, here’s the start of the list for the 2013 conference, which has been sold out since last fall:

As we did last year, we’ll be having Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker walk the audience through her famous annual Internet report, giving both her observations and prognostications about where the digital space has been and where it is headed next. Meeker’s slides come fast and furious, and often set some of the themes that will doubtless be raised by other speakers.

One speaker who has dominated many key memes this year has been Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, whom we last had at D6 in 2008, when she appeared with CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. Since then, a lot has happened at the social networking giant — including a tumultuous IPO and a need to quickly develop its mobile business — so there’s plenty to discuss related to Facebook. Of course, there is also a lot to talk about related to her recent book on women in the workplace, titled “Lean In,” which has garnered just a little bit of attention of late.

Another very voluble speaker will surely be Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. We felt it was important to bring him back onstage, given all the change at the social communications company over the last year, from its aggressive efforts to build out its advertising business to its tangles with Facebook to its expected IPO in 2014. Twitter has emerged as a key company on the global stage — and it is Costolo’s job to keep it there.

One of the most explosive startups on the scene recently has, of course, been scrapbooking phenom Pinterest, whose steady CEO and co-founder Ben Silbermann will appear at our conference for the first time. Unlike many attention-seeking entrepreneurs, Silbermann has quietly pushed the young company to the forefront of e-commerce and other key digital arenas by creating a unique and elegant way for people to share interests of all kinds. Despite its recent huge valuation, Pinterest has an unusual heft and influence in tech and beyond that few other such companies can claim.

Also of interest is the new leader of Motorola Mobility, the smartphone maker that is owned by Google but is being run separately by CEO Dennis Woodside. A longtime exec at the search giant, Woodside is charged with creating world-class hardware for the Android platform that can attract consumers and compete with a spate of rivals — while still maintaining a certain distance from the mothership.

Such an effort will require a lot of innovation, which is why Woodside is bringing along someone well known to D — Regina Dugan. The charismatic exec first appeared at D9 when she was director of the federal government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and she riveted the crowd with stories of Mach 10 airplanes and other cloak-and-dagger tech. Now she’s an SVP at Motorola Mobility, where she leads the Advanced Technology & Projects group.

How big companies are reacting to the Internet revolution has always been an important topic at our conference over the years, and there is no bigger conglomerate to ask about it than GE and its chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt. While the company operates across many segments, from energy to technology infrastructure to capital finance, the changes and impact of digital have been paramount for GE. In fact, Immelt recently wrote a provocative editorial on the “Industrial Internet” and the rise of intelligent machines about leveraging “the power of the cloud to connect machines embedded with sensors and sophisticated software to other machines (and to us) so we can extract data, make sense of it and find meaning where it did not exist before.” Heavier stuff than your basic jet engine (which GE makes, by the way).

Change has not been easy for Web-centric companies, either, including Cisco, whose CEO John Chambers has led the networking giant through the growth of the Internet since the very beginning. Still, Cisco has struggled with a number of recent consumer efforts, even as it has been aggressively shifting its focus to the cloud to continue to dominate in the network space and to push the idea of the “Internet of Everything,” where it plays a central role.

To ratchet up the conversation, we decided to pair Chambers with one of the enterprise’s most clever and fast-moving entrepreneurs, Aaron Levie of Box. The cloud services company just raised a mega round of funding and is headed for an IPO next year, but we also invited Levie because he is very, very funny and manages to explain the massive changes moving through the sector in a very, very funny way. We look forward to his take on how smaller upstarts like Box, Dropbox and many others are managing to best the big companies with innovation and chutzpah.

Speaking of that, there is no better tell-it-like-it-is exec in digital media than Barry Diller of IAC. We have had the razor-sharp Diller onstage at D before, but we thought it was time to bring him back because of his aggressive investment in Aereo, the Web TV service that mainstream TV networks abhor. Diller, who has run such a media operation before, is perhaps the perfect person to be disrupting them now, and to talk about the state of the media industry today. He’s also still owner of a lot of key Internet franchises that have had to react to the shift in consumer tastes and desires.

In another pairing, Jeff Zucker will join Diller onstage to debate how media is faring. It’s an important issue for him, since he was just hired by Time Warner to reinvigorate its CNN cable news brand in a fast-changing environment. Zucker has worked everywhere in the TV sector, but rethinking how it creates and delivers its offering in the future — while making more than digital dimes — is a massive task.

Also huge is the uphill battle new Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai faces in turning around the fortunes of the Japanese consumer electronics giant. As he overhauls the once-dominant company, he also must push forward on a number of fronts that include mobile, digital imaging, videogames and network services. There is also the upcoming debut of the PlayStation 4 console, which has yet to be unveiled, all of which has added pressure to Hirai’s quick-moving efforts at turnaround at Sony.

Hirai will be appearing with Jed York, CEO of the San Francisco 49ers, who is in the midst of building a digitally tricked-out new stadium for the storied football franchise, which is being described as a “large data center.” And more — including addressing the importance of technology in delivering the modern sports entertainment experience. The issue is one that every sports owner on the planet thinks about these days, as fans expect more and more ways to share, communicate and interact.

Using a sports metaphor, it’s a pretty good line-up so far, but the D11 speaker list is far from complete, with more very big names to be announced in the coming weeks. And, especially since we have no more tickets to sell, it’s important to remember that we will be using AllThingsD to bring you the news, videos and more that will allow everyone to experience it all, no matter where they are.

What if Mobile Ads Don't Catch Up?

Peter Kafka — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 15:44:50 +0000

The mobile Web is booming. But the mobile ad market is pretty small.

Short-term, that means ads that run on phones are much cheaper than ads that run on PCs — often by as much as 80 percent.

That’s a well-documented challenge for the likes of Facebook and Zynga and even Google; the problem is just as real, if less-publicized, for other Web publishers.

If you are an Internet optimist, you have a ready answer for this problem: Advertisers will eventually catch up to their audience. If people are spending lots of time on their phones, marketers will follow the eyeballs.

That’s the gist of the argument Kleiner Perkins’ Mary Meeker made at our D10 conference earlier this year, when she unveiled her annual Internet Trends report.

Meeker updated her slides for a new presentation last night, but the key ad chart remains unchanged — she figures that between the desktop and mobile Web, there’s at least $20 billion in ad spending ready to move away from old media:

That’s a popular argument in the Internet world, for obvious reasons. But here’s the counter-argument, via a note Bernstein Research’s Todd Juenger published last month. The title spells it out quite clearly: “The Share of Time Versus Share of Ad Spend Fallacy.”

Juenger’s argument boils down to this: Yes, lots of people are spending lots of time on the Web, and now on their phones. But that doesn’t increase marketers’ desire to spend more money there — it just creates more advertising inventory, which might actually end up decreasing the total amount spent on those ads.

The money paragraph, such as it is:

We could actually make the argument that, because usage of Internet (especially mobile) continues to quickly grow, Internet ad spending (on an absolute level) should actually fall. If marketers are mainly are concerned with delivering a certain number of impressions, rather than a certain amount of spend, then everything else being equal, it would cost less to deliver the same number impressions next year than it did this year. Because in that scenario, supply is growing but demand is not. Or, perhaps marketers would look at the falling CPM’s and determine their preferred course might be to spend the same amount on Internet as last year, which would deliver X% more impressions. Getting, in that case, a lot more impressions for the same amount of dollars. The only way Internet ad spend grows is if marketers determine they want a lot more Internet impressions, causing them to spend more absolute dollars, at a lower/higher CPM (depending on which grows faster, demand or supply).

The easiest way to shrug off Juenger’s argument is to say that mobile Web ads are so nascent right now that no one has any idea what the market will look like, except that it has to get bigger, period. That’s probably right.

But we’ve seen plenty of evidence of Juenger’s argument in the desktop Web world. People keep spending more time there, but publishers have to keep slashing their rates to attract ad dollars. If the same scenario plays out on mobile, that gap might remain there for a long time.

(Photo courtesy of Shutterstock/Dominik Michalek)

E-Commerce Will Grow Again This Holiday, but Don't Thank Mobile or Social

Tricia Duryee — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 14:30:17 +0000

Online shopping should be a bright spot during the holidays this year, with sales expected to grow by 20 percent compared to 2011.

But it’s not what you may think. Sales are forecast to increase because there are two additional days between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year, giving consumers more time to shop than they had last year.

That was the conclusion of a 15-page report written by analysts at Citi Research.

What’s more, the report said that retailers will see very little impact from people making purchases on mobile devices like phones and tablets, or on social media sites like Facebook or Pinterest, even though there’s a lot of hype surrounding those two areas. “While mobile and social will likely grab headlines this season, retailers should concentrate on their ‘core technologies,’ namely e-commerce nuts and bolts, and strategies that integrate their traditional stores [with online ordering and in-store pick-up],” concludes the report.

The document, which was distributed to Wall Street investors, includes data from several key industry sources, including Shop.org’s holiday outlook, ChannelAdvisor’s holiday outlook and information from Retail Systems Research.

Overall, it finds that online spending is expected to increase by 20 percent this year, which is slightly less than what the industry experienced in 2011 when it reported growth of 23 percent. In general, e-commerce continues to see significant gains as spending shifts from offline to online. Mary Meeker, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, noted in a report last year that e-commerce in the U.S. was making up only 8 percent of overall retail.

While it indeed takes a lot for companies such as Amazon, eBay and Walmart to see an impact from changes, consumers are shifting their behavior to mobile and social, although probably not as fast as investors would like to see.

EBay is one of the most vocal companies in breaking out the impact of mobile. It told AllThingsD recently that its mobile applications have now been downloaded 100 million times. Furthermore, it is projecting sales on mobile devices to hit $10 billion, which is double what it did last year. That roughly pencils out to 16 percent of the company’s revenue, if you base the calculation off of last year’s gross merchandise volume.

In contrast, Citi cites data from Forrester Research that says smartphones will account for 3 percent of e-commerce this year, increasing to 7 percent in 2016.

Social commerce is less mature, although that’s starting to change, too. According to research conducted by Monetate, which helps Best Buy, Urban Outfitters and other clients market their Web sites, Pinterest came out of nowhere over the past year to become one of the most significant drivers of social traffic to e-commerce. In the first quarter of 2012, Facebook made up 60 percent of the social traffic to retailers, while Pinterest made up 26 percent; by the holidays, it could surpass both Facebook and Twitter.

Citi’s report quoted specific data from Booz & Co. that suggests that revenue from physical goods sold on social networks will grow by 93 percent per year in the U.S., reaching $14 billion by 2015.

Citi’s biggest piece of advice for retailers is to provide as many choices to consumers as possible. For instance, users should be able to order online and pick up items in the store; retailers should have their databases synced so that they see the same prices in the store as they do online. Perhaps one of the most surprising nuggets was that brick-and-mortar retailers shouldn’t necessarily be losing out this holiday — after all, 90 percent or more of sales still occur offline.

Tech Scores on Forbes' 100 Most Powerful Women List: Gates, Sandberg, Mayer and More

Kara Swisher — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 22:00:47 +0000

Women in tech had a good showing on Forbes magazine’s 2012 “The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women” list, which came out this past week.

Like the higher-profile tally from Fortune, it features the female movers and shakers from a variety of arenas.

No. 1 on the list is German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has certainly had her hands full with the economic crisis in Europe this past year.

But women related to tech also were numerous in the group, so here’s the rundown:

No. 4: Melinda Gates, co-chair, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

No. 10: Sheryl Sandberg, COO, Facebook

No. 15: Virginia Rometty, president and CEO, IBM

No. 17: Ursula Burns, president and CEO, Xerox

No. 18: Meg Whitman, CEO, Hewlett-Packard

No. 21: Marissa Mayer, CEO, Yahoo

No. 25: Susan Wojcicki, SVP, Google

No. 29: Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief, Huffington Post Media Group, AOL

No. 48: Safra Katz, president and CFO, Oracle

No. 49: Laurene Powell Jobs, founder and chair, Emerson Collective

No. 58: Padmasree Warrior, CTO and chief strategy officer, Cisco

No. 70: Sue Gardner, executive director, WikiMedia Foundation

No. 84: Mary Meeker, general partner, Kleiner Perkins

Video Exclusive: Here's Groupon's Andrew Mason Talking About Daily Deals Site's Stock Smack, Future Plans and IPO Regrets (Or Lack Thereof)

Kara Swisher — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 14:14:50 +0000

It’s not well known, but last year, before it went public, Groupon almost didn’t.

With pressure from former board member Howard Schultz, and also doubts about timing expressed to CEO Andrew Mason by outside investors such as Silicon Valley luminaries Marc Andreessen and Mary Meeker, the Chicago-based daily deals site pressed forward, anyway.

Since then, it has been a tough ride for Groupon and, perhaps most of all, for Mason.

Yesterday afternoon, I got on Skype to do a video interview with him about the continued swirl — much of it very negative — around the company he co-founded and leads.

“I love Groupon,” he said. “Groupon is my life.”

Not so much everyone else these days — who are starting to compare the company to Web 1.0 flameout Webvan and even, in the ultimate digital insult, Pets.com.

That’s a false comparison — those were both never profitable, and had negative cash flow, unlike the much larger Groupon.

Still, Groupon’s stock has been under pressure pretty much since the time of its IPO last year, with critics hammering on everything from whether its business plan is fundamentally flawed to its controversial accounting to the goofy nature of Mason himself.

He even got dinged for drinking a beer at a Groupon all-hands employee meeting. (I’m fine with that one, by the way.)

Groupon shares hit a new low last week, after it reported second-quarter earnings that showed better profits, but a revenue miss. Growth prospects in its core coupon business, or lack thereof, was pointed to by Wall Street investors for the continued sell-off.

One bright spot was its nine-month-old Groupon Goods, which sells a variety of products and which has grown to $200 million in annualized revenue. But the lower-margin offering makes up a smaller part of the company’s overall results, as does its impressive improvements in mobile commerce.

These two positive developments have failed to impress, though, with the stock at even lower lows today — at $4.74 a share. That’s down 82 percent since Groupon went public, making the company worth $3 billion, or about half of what Google had once offered to buy it, and a little more than double its cash on hand.

In other words, it is crunch time for Mason, who must answer to shareholders, employees and his board, and must somehow get Groupon to a better place, and fast.

Among the myriad of risks for him as he does: Everything from new management to the sale of Groupon.

That is not in the cards right now, of course. And, as usual, the affable exec talks with confidence about the company.

To his credit, in this long interview, he is also pretty candid about the struggle.

It’s well worth a watch (except for me looking like I just got off a red-eye flight, which I did).

Here’s Mason:

[ See post to watch video ]

MIT Emotion-Sensing Start-Up Affectiva Backed by Kleiner Perkins and Horizon Ventures

Liz Gannes — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 11:30:27 +0000

Affectiva, a start-up that develops products that detect people’s emotional states, has raised $12 million in Series C funding from Li Ka-shing’s Horizon Ventures and Mary Meeker at Kleiner Perkins.

The company spun out of MIT and develops products such as a Webcam-based facial-coding tool and a wristband biometric sensor. The big idea here is that by measuring things like tiny movements in a person’s facial muscles, it’s possible to detect how they actually feel about something, rather than asking them to try to describe it.

Affectiva might have big-time backers now, but its technology was originally developed by MIT professor Rosalind W. Picard and research scientist Rana el Kaliouby to help children with autism understand facial expressions. Now it is primarily used for market research by brands with partners like WPP Millward Brown (WPP is also a backer) and the IPG Media Lab.

The company is broadening its application to any sort of video content — for instance, measuring audience reaction to movie trailers and TV shows — and adding mobile and social support.

CEO Dave Berman said Affectiva has also set up a charitable trust with a big chunk of company stock for the benefit of people who have difficulty regulating their emotions, and that autism spectrum research continues through MIT.

As Affectiva has gathered more data, it has become more adept at detecting subtle expressions, like a smirk, and can now mine data to understand the contrasts in emotion between people of different genders and countries, among other things.

“We have the largest repository of facial responses ever collected in the world,” contended el Kaliouby.

Affectiva customers can see a moment-to-moment score of each participant’s emotion while experiencing their content. (You can try how “Affdex” works by watching Super Bowl ads with your Webcam turned on in a demo on Affectiva’s Web site.)

El Kaliouby said Affectiva tries to be highly conscious about user privacy, and may actually retain less data over time. “We’re less ‘big brother’ than helping people,” she said.

Currently based in Waltham, Mass., Affectiva is also planning to open a San Francisco Bay Area office with the new funding. It had previously raised $7.7 million from WPP, Myrian Capital and the Peder Wallenberg Charitable Trust, and won grants from the National Science Foundation.

Lightbulb Moment

Voices — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 10:45:11 +0000

It was one of those moments. I picked up the paper and said, “That’s it.”

– Mary Meeker, on picking up the New York Times on May 7, 1994, and reading a story about a new start-up called Mosaic Communications (which later became Netscape)

Mary Meeker Explains Internet 2012 in 17 Minutes: The Full D10 Interview (Video)

Kara Swisher — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 12:55:19 +0000

Walt Mossberg and I have a longstanding rule against PowerPoint presentations at the D: All Things Digital conference — mostly because they usually bore the bejesus out of us and the audience.

So, letting longtime Wall Street analyst turned venture capitalist Mary Meeker loose onstage with a clicker and a mess of slides with to debut her annual Internet Trends report means that we think what she had to say was pretty entertaining and very informative.

And, indeed it was, with a lot of focus on important trends in social, commerce, media and, most especially, mobile monetization — or lack thereof.

But there’s more than that, as well as a quick interview we did with the Kleiner Perkins VC about where the digital industry has been in the last decade, and where is it going.

Here’s Meeker at D10, as well as the slides to follow along:

[ See post to watch video ]

Day Two at D10 in Tweets and Pictures

Eric Johnson — Thu, 31 May 2012 10:00:14 +0000

Mary Meeker's Legendary Internet Slide Deck: The D10 Highlights (Video)

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 30 May 2012 18:07:07 +0000

Most people dread presentations with PowerPoint slides, but Mary Meeker’s presentations on the future of the Internet have become legendary. Today, the former Morgan Stanley analyst turned Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers venture capitalist brought her latest observations — and a 125-slide deck — to D: All Things Digital.

Among the many topics Meeker addressed: The challenge of monetizing mobile content, how the Internet and digital technology are changing, well, everything, and how those changes are affecting the next generation in interesting ways.

She also made news by revealing that Kleiner has done no deals as of the end of the quarter ended in March, because valuations in the private markets are too high; she also reflected on the troubles surrounding the Facebook IPO. Highlights from the video are below:

[ See post to watch video ]

Mary Meeker on a Five-Year-Old's Favorite Apps (Video)

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 30 May 2012 16:10:26 +0000

What were you doing when you were five years old? Consider the experience of Mary Meeker’s niece.

Asked during a question-and-answer session following her onstage presentation at D: All Things Digital about why — with all the changes being wrought by the Internet and digital technologies — we don’t seem to be getting any smarter.

Meeker answered by describing how she asked her 5-year-old niece about her favorite mobile apps. At first it seemed ridiculous to ask that question, but the answer was not ridiculous. The youngster rattled off five apps without missing a breath.

“For a new generation of kids, this will be really exciting,” Meeker said. “You or I may not get any smarter, but the new generation may.”

[ See post to watch video ]

Mary Meeker Explains The Internet – Without Slides (Video)

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 30 May 2012 16:07:56 +0000

We all hear it every day: The Internet and digital technologies are changing everything. It’s become one of those big pronouncements that tends to end a bad conversation or start a good one.

But few people have thought about the subject as clearly and completely as Mary Meeker, the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers venture capitalist and former Wall Street analyst, who in a presentation at D: All Things Digital illustrated those changes in their historical context.

We’re pretty familiar with the well-worn tales of how the Internet is disrupting the 305-year-old newspaper business, and how mobile phones are messing up the 125-year-old landline telephone business. But Meeker’s presentation goes a lot deeper than that.

The Internet is also disrupting the creation of art, how people document and record the histories of their life, how they take notes, how they borrow money. Roughly a third of Meeker’s 125 slides are devoted to this theme of change and disruption, and when taken as a whole, it’s startling. “A lot of it is stuff you know, but when packaged in a way that you see it all together, I’m overwhelmed,” she said.

“People used to put pictures on their walls, and now they have Facebook,” Meeker said.

Other examples: Groupon and clipping old coupons. Also, going to school. “Education and learning will become as fun as video games,” Meeker said.

Something else that’s changed: How people cope with traffic. During a follow-up interview with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, Meeker talked about Waze, a navigation and traffic app for the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. She described how, when she saw a burning semi truck pulled over on the side of the road, she reported it first to Waze before calling 911.

[ See post to watch video ]

Mary Meeker's Internet Trends, Live at D10 (Slides)

Liz Gannes — Wed, 30 May 2012 15:33:39 +0000

This year, Mary Meeker brings her famous annual Internet Trends report to D10, where she just appeared onstage.

Meeker, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and former financial analyst, is describing what she calls “the re-imagination of nearly everything” powered by mobile and social, with a torrent of slides tracing what was then and what is now. For example: News outlets are reimagined on Twitter, note-taking is reimagined on Evernote, scrapbooking is reimagined on Pinterest.

Meeker also traces out the story of the mismatch between mobile growth and mobile monetization, pulling together numbers and analysis of one of the biggest weaknesses in today’s Internet industry.

And she gives some context to the state of the global economy and that in the U.S., in particular today’s bubblicious climate.

Here’s the full slide presentation:

Mary Meeker Explains the Mobile Monetization Challenge

Liz Gannes — Wed, 30 May 2012 15:32:34 +0000

Looming over the Internet industry is the mismatch between the growth in mobile usage and mobile monetization.

Most recently, it was the risk factor that helped take down Facebook’s ill-fated IPO roadshow, when the company warned at the last minute publicly (and perhaps more emphatically privately) that mobile monetization really wasn’t keeping pace.

So it’s quite topical that today at D10, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers venture capitalist and former Wall Street analyst Mary Meeker is delivering one of her famed Internet trends presentations by depicting the opportunity for mobile advertising.

Here’s how Meeker describes it; there are a lot of stats in here, but they actually tell a rather smooth narrative:

There are 1.1 billion global mobile 3G subscribers, which is 37 percent growth but just 18 percent penetration. That’s compared to 2.3 billion global Internet users, with growth of just 8 percent from last year.

Adoption of new smart devices is happening faster than ever — the iPad and Android growth curves are way steeper than that for iPhone. But there’s still a long way to go; there are only 953 million smartphone subscriptions of the world’s 6.1 billion mobile subscriptions.

In May of this year, mobile usage hit 10 percent of total global Internet traffic, up from about 5 percent at the same time last year.

Okay, now over to the monetization side: Right now, it’s not just ads. Mobile e-commerce is 8 percent of the total e-commerce market in the U.S. Today, payments for and within applications account for 71 percent of revenue versus 29 percent for mobile advertising.

Meeker concludes there’s a “material upside” for advertising in mobile because it’s currently out of whack with the percent of total media consumption.

And that’s a pressing issue, because mobile Internet usage is replacing desktop Internet usage. In India this month, total mobile Internet was bigger than desktop Internet for the very first time.

There are lots of places to find evidence of the mobile monetization gap. Effective desktop CPMs are five times the price of mobile Internet CPMs in the U.S.: $3.50 versus $0.75. And companies like Pandora, Tencent and Zynga currently report that average revenue per user is as much as five times lower on mobile. Google’s and Facebook’s financials show mobile is constraining revenue growth.

Meeker doesn’t provide solutions to those problems, but she does surface some light at the end of the tunnel. For instance, in the more mature Japanese market, mobile game maker GREE has seen rapid growth in average revenue per user, up to $24 per user per year at the beginning of 2012. Another player, CyberAgent, has seen a similar curve, and is now up to $418 average revenue per paying user on mobile, more than what it sees on the desktop.

Using pattern recognition from the Japanese market, Meeker predicts that mobile monetization levels in the U.S. could surpass those on the desktop within one to three years. She says she thinks this pattern of dollars following eyeballs is inevitable, but “it just takes time.”

#ATD10 Kicks Off With Apple's Tim Cook -- Also Adding Online Education to Mix With Khan and Hennessy

Kara Swisher — Tue, 29 May 2012 18:24:04 +0000

The All Things Digital team is all set down in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., under sunny skies and with a lineup of tech and media speakers that are even more stunning than the spectacular view here.

We begin tonight with the first major interview that Apple CEO Tim Cook has given since he took over at the iconic tech powerhouse last year.

There will be lots to talk to him about in the session of more than an hour onstage in front of a long-sold-out crowd — from Apple’s next products to the situation in China to patent wars to his take on what it is like to run the world’s most valuable and influential tech company.

Before taking over from the late and very great Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, Cook ran vast and critical swaths of the company already, so it will be interesting to hear about the state of the company under his leadership.

Along with Cook, other speakers over the three-day event include Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Zynga’s founder and CEO Mark Pincus, Kleiner Perkins Mary Meeker, Hollywood phenom Aaron Sorkin and many more. We also have many killer demos of new products.

Plus, we just added what Walt Mossberg and I consider a critical session on online education, with Stanford President John Hennessy and the Khan Academy’s founder and executive director Salman Khan.

In addition to running one of the most influential educational institutions around and a Silicon Valley powerhouse, Hennessy wrote the book on computer architecture design.

Literally. First as a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford and later as an administrator, Hennessy has brought Silicon Valley and the university closer than ever. Even as president of Stanford, his research continues to push out the boundaries around the architecture of high performance computers.

“Each one, teach one” is a laudable goal, but it led Khan to tutor his young cousin in math, even though the two of them were not in the same town. So, he devised video tutorials that went viral on YouTube, and now Khan’s eponymous Khan Academy has each one teaching thousands every day.

Since launching three years ago, the Khan Academy has provided 150 million lessons over the Internet and is the most-used library of videos on the Web. According to its Web site, the lessons are open to all, even “a friendly alien just trying to get a leg up in earthly biology.”

We have one more big speaker to add for our primo second night slot, so watch this space.

Full D10 Conference Coverage

More D10 Speakers: Ellison, Meeker, Myhrvold, Along With Pixar and Visa!

Kara Swisher — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 21:49:26 +0000

A month ago, I posted an initial list of speakers for the 10th D: All Things Digital conference.

After a decade, the event — which is held in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., just south of Los Angeles, at the end of May — has attracted another amazing group of speakers, including: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; serial entrepreneur Sean Parker, who will appear with Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek; Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus; Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz; LinkedIn Chairman and VC Reid Hoffman, who will appear with the social business site’s CEO Jeff Weiner; and Skype CEO Tony Bates.

Now, here’s another group of stellar speakers we’ve added to the programming lineup (and there are still even more big names to come in the weeks ahead): Oracle CEO Larry Ellison; former tech analyst superstar and now VC Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins; Intellectual Ventures’ Nathan Myhrvold; Pixar co-founder and Disney animation head Dr. Ed Catmull; and Visa President John Partridge.

Larry Ellison, CEO and founder of the enterprise giant Oracle, needs little introduction, as one of tech’s highest profile figures and a true Silicon Valley icon. Frankly, I think the short bio that’s on Oracle’s Web site says it all: “Larry Ellison has been CEO of Oracle Corporation since he founded the company in 1977. He also races sailboats, flies planes, and plays tennis and guitar.” There will be a lot to talk about with the voluble and always entertaining exec — who appeared at the D conference once before many years ago — from the current state of the tech industry to insights to where it’s all going. (In addition, Ellison has agreed to appear on a panel we are doing as a tribute to his close friend, Apple’s former CEO Steve Jobs.)

Another well-known tech figure is Meeker, who is now a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, having joined the storied venture capital firm in early 2011. She focuses there on investments in its digital practice and via KP’s Digital Growth Fund, working with companies such as Spotify, Jawbone and One King’s Lane. But Meeker is perhaps best known for her long stint — 1991 to 2010 — as a star Internet research analyst at Morgan Stanley, where she brought many of the Internet’s great companies to the attention of Wall Street and beyond. She also wrote a series of groundbreaking reports on the landscape. That includes her annual “State of the Internet,” which Meeker will debut this year at the conference in an extended demo of her always riveting Internet trends presentation.

Nathan Myhrvold is also a tech legend, having worked for 14 years as chief strategist and CTO of Microsoft. But, instead of retiring, the avid inventor decided to focus on patents, founding and leading a controversial company called Intellectual Ventures, which buys them up and licenses them out (or sues if it doesn’t sell). With all the mishegas around patents right now, it’s a good time to have Myhrvold back to explain it all and perhaps to take some of the blame for the explosion in intellectual property lawsuits. (Myhrvold also co-authored a cookbook, “Modernist Cuisine,” so we hope we will also get some sort of futuristic cooking demo. Perhaps, Patently Delicious Flan?)

Speaking of tasty, the animation from Pixar over the years has been just that and it’s been one of Disney’s greatest acquisitions. Given how much Pixar has contributed to animation technology, we are glad to finally get Dr. Ed Catmull onstage. As co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios and president of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, he will discuss where entertainment and technology are intersecting and where they are not. Catmull is a geek’s geek in the industry — having also founded the computer graphics laboratory at the New York Institute of Technology, the computer division of Lucasfilm, as well as Pixar, which he did with chief creative officer John Lasseter. Get ready to talk about image compositing, motion blur, subdivision surfaces, cloth simulation and rendering techniques, texture mapping and the z-buffer. Also, Catmull’s five Academy Awards.

Lastly, it is perfect timing for bringing on John Partridge, president of Visa. With swirling issues around online identity theft, digital privacy, the future of money and the rise of upstart competitors such as Square, Partridge has his hands full at the credit card giant. One of the most neglected arenas in tech, the way we manage payments is perhaps the biggest story of the next era, especially as it relates to mobile and the rise of smartphones as all-purpose devices.

Jawbone Gets $40 Million From Deutsche Telekom, Kleiner Perkins

Lauren Goode — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 21:25:55 +0000

Jawbone, maker of nifty audio devices and the recently maligned UP fitness wristband, has raised $40 million from Deutsche Telekom, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Yuri Milner and investors advised by J.P. Morgan Asset Management. The new capital brings Jawbone’s funding to date close to $210 million. CEO Hosain Rahman has said that the company plans to introduce more products in the healthcare and audio markets, according to GigaOM.

Former Palm and Twitter Techie Mike Abbott Jumps From EIR at Benchmark to Kleiner Partner

Kara Swisher — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 19:00:03 +0000

Kleiner Perkins has nabbed former Twitter engineering head Mike Abbott, who left the social communications company less than two months ago to be an entrepreneur in residence at Benchmark Capital.

(Well, that didn’t last long, Mike, but maybe the food was better at 2750 Sand Hill Road than at 2480 Sand Hill Road.)

In an interview this morning, Abbott said that he hopes to stay a VC for 20 years (yipes!), since it allows him to work closely with a wide range of entrepreneurs and also get a broad view across a spectrum of businesses.

“I am really energized about what’s been happening in a lot of places like software,” he said. “From my experience, I think I bring a lot of differentiation for the companies Kleiner is invested in.”

And tech cred too. “We think engineers will be thrilled to have access to Mike and he’s a magnet for talent,” said Kleiner partner Ted Schlein, who compared him to all the comic-book heroes, The Avengers, in one person. “Mike is multi-faceted.”

Abbott was indeed a high-profile hire for Twitter a little over a year ago from Palm, where he served as head of its software and services, in charge of its webOS mobile platform.

He was brought in to provide a level of discipline and reliability to the Twitter communications platform and service, which had been plagued by persistent outages that made the Fail Whale infamous.

Abbott will focus on social, mobile and cloud investments at the well-known Silicon Valley venture firm while working on a team that includes high-profile players Mary Meeker and Bing Gordon.

Here’s the official press release:

Michael Abbott Joins Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as Partner

Engineering Leader to Help Social, Mobile and Cloud Entrepreneurs Build Teams and Ventures

MENLO PARK, Calif., December 1, 2011 – Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) today announced that Mike Abbott, former vice president of engineering at Twitter, has joined the firm as a partner on its digital team. Abbott led the building of innovative, high-performance applications and services at Twitter, Palm and Microsoft. With a deep background in social and mobile applications and infrastructure, Mike is also an expert in enterprise infrastructure and cloud computing and “big data” businesses, having founded Composite Software, and advised Cloudera and Jawbone.

“I’m excited to join KPCB’s partners to build new ventures faster,” said Abbott. “The partner mix of founders, operators and investors is ideal for entrepreneurs racing to scale at this disruptive time.”

“Mike is an exceptional and well-respected leader with an outstanding track record shipping great products,” said Ted Schlein, partner, KPCB. “Mike’s deep expertise from Palm and Twitter will help social, mobile and cloud entrepreneurs win.”

Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter, said, “Mike is a huge engineering talent and will be a terrific asset to Kleiner’s technology companies. He was instrumental in helping us scale Twitter’s architecture to support incredible growth ̶ from 100 million daily Tweets in January 2011 to about 250 million daily tweets today.”

In less than a year and a half, Abbott grew the Twitter engineering team from 80 to more than 350 engineers in an intensely competitive recruiting market. Abbott’s team rebuilt and solidified Twitter’s infrastructure. Prior to joining Twitter in 2010, Abbott led the software development team at Palm that created HP/Palm’s next-generation webOS platform. Abbott was previously the general manager at Microsoft for .NET online services, which became Azure. Prior to that, he co-founded Passenger Inc. and founded Composite Software. Abbott has advised and invested in numerous software companies such as Cloudera, Hearsay Labs, Saynow and Jawbone.

Mike Abbott is just the third senior KPCB partner added in three years, joining Bing Gordon and Mary Meeker, each with exceptional records serving mobile, social and cloud entrepreneurs. KPCB’s digital team also bolstered its infrastructure expertise with the recent addition of Ray Bradford from Amazon Web Services, where he helped grow the company’s cloud database business.

OpenSky Raises $30 Million for Twitter-Inspired Shopping Site

Tricia Duryee — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 12:59:19 +0000

The founder and CEO of OpenSky, John Caplan, says the curated shopping site has more in common with Twitter than with eBay or Amazon.

On the site, shoppers add — or “follow” — celebrities and experts who share similar interests, to receive recommendations on the latest food, fashion, design and style.

In that way, OpenSky pushes product ideas to shoppers, somewhat in the way Twitter lets people discover information versus having to search for an answer on Google.

Caplan told me OpenSky has raised $30 million in fresh capital to continue building out the business.

The New York-based company, with offices in Los Angeles and Nashville, is only six months old and previously raised $19 million in two prior rounds.

New investor Providence Equity Partners led the financing. Existing investors Highland Capital Partners, Canaan Partners and the Raine Group also participated.

Some of the company’s talent includes celebrity chefs such as Bobby Flay and Italian food expert Lidia Bastianich, and pop culture figures like actress and reality TV star Kristin Cavallari, who will advise customers on the latest fashions.

In a recent offering, Flay, who has 164,626 followers, advised shoppers to purchase a spice bundle for $23. Fitness guru and motivation speaker Gabrielle Bernstein recommended a collapsible Hula-Hoop that’s easy to travel with.

Caplan said it’s an approach that’s really resonating with shoppers, particularly women in their 30s.

He said the company will break $1 million in sales this month and is on track for a $10 million run rate. Both order volume and revenues are growing 50 percent month over month.

The company already has 600,000 members signed up; they are now connecting to millions of shopping “experts.” It took the first 14 weeks for OpenSky to hit one million connections, 10 weeks to get its second million and three weeks to reach its third million. Customers are spending $50 on the average transaction, which is more than double Amazon’s average order of $22, Caplan said.

“This feels like such a modern way to shop, compared to the search box,” Caplan said. “There’s not a lot of soul in online shopping. We are putting the soul back into shopping.”

He added that walking into actual stores is engaging and entertaining. “I think Amazon is a fantastic company, and they have a lot of things they do really brilliantly, but I don’t think it’s the best way to shop.”

Many companies right now are challenging the original e-commerce model, and for good reason. Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker noted in a report last week that e-commerce makes up 8 percent of overall commerce in the U.S. today, and continues to climb.

Caplan said the capital will be used to add more shopping verticals and experts to the site. Today, it has 75, with hundreds more coming.

As the former president of About.com, which relied on a distributed workforce to contribute answers to the site, Caplan believes he knows exactly how to get the business to click.

To make money, OpenSky is splitting the gross profit from the items sold with the experts on the site. It’s free to join as a member, and there’s a 90-day money-back guarantee. So far, it has experienced a 1 percent return rate.

“I personally love businesses where you partner with talent and create talent,” he said.

Mary Meeker: 81 Percent of Users of Top Web Sites Are Outside the U.S.

Liz Gannes — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 21:40:10 +0000

Mary Meeker’s periodic rapid-fire macro-views of the tech industry are closely watched. We got our hands on the Kleiner Perkins partner’s latest slide deck prior to her presenting it at the Web 2.0 Summit today and have extracted some of the main points.

International: 81 percent of users of top global Internet properties come from outside the United States, Meeker said, citing comScore data. In three years, China added more Internet users than exist in the U.S.

Still, American companies like Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook have “unprecedented” intensity, focus and innovation and lead the world, Meeker said. But popular applications like Shazam, Spotify, Waze and SoundCloud originated outside of the U.S. before coming stateside.

Mobile: Meeker is bullish on the growth of smartphones, and highlighted their growing contributions to app usage, search and advertising, though she said it’s still “early innings.”

Sound: As for transformative interfaces, “the next big thing(s),” Meeker proposed, are “those two big things on the side of your head.” That is: Your ears. Meeker called out headsets, voice recognition and music sharing as examples.

Commerce: Meeker highlighted growth in e-commerce, especially mobile commerce, which has created a local renaissance. She said eBay, PayPal, Target, Amazon and Square all will have more than $1 billion in gross mobile sales in 2011.

Empowerment: “The mega-trend of the 21st century is empowerment of people via connected mobile devices,” Meeker said, using the examples of Japanese earthquake tweeting and mobile farming subsidies in India. Wireless signals now have greater global reach than the electrical grid — 85 percent versus 80 percent, she said, citing the United Nations.

Of course, you can find a lot more detail and analysis packed into the full presentation, which is here:

KPCB Internet Trends (2011)

Look at All Those Zeros: Square Raises $100 Million at $1 Billion Valuation

Tricia Duryee — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 04:42:15 +0000

That’s a lot of zeros.

Square, the mobile payments provider that is trying to redefine the way consumers spend money and the way merchants charge for it, has secured $100 million in a third round of funding, led by new Square investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers with participation from Tiger Global Management.

The extraordinarily large round comes at a $1 billion valuation, the WSJ reports.

I guess it’s fitting that a company whose primary business is accepting credit cards can practically print cash.

Only seven months ago, Square raised $27.5 million round in a second round of funding. Now that looks like pocket change.

Since then, the San Francisco-based company has expanded significantly.

It has quickly evolved beyond its original model, which consisted of handing out magnetic swipe readers that allowed users to accept payments via their mobile phones. That business was met with warm reception by small business owners, ranging from individuals at a garage sale to musicians selling CDs at a concert.

Last month, it continued its vision by rolling out an iPad-based solution for small retailers and merchants who were looking for a way to replace the clunky register on their counter, and also a new way to track inventory and manage a menu.

An accompanying mobile app enables individuals to open a tab at their favorite local merchants, store digital receipts and browse nearby directory and menu listings.

The words that Square’s CEO Jack Dorsey, who is also the head of product at Twitter, said earlier this month at D9 ring more true now than ever.

While on stage, All Things D’s Kara Swisher asked Dorsey: “Want to tell me about your IPO?”

Dorsey answered: “Which one?”

Square might still need every dime it can get to fend off the competition, which includes Google among many others.

As part of the financing, Mary Meeker, a partner at KPCB, will join the company’s board.

Meg Whitman Joins Kleiner Perkins to Try Hand at Advising Start-Ups

Tricia Duryee — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 20:06:37 +0000

Former eBay CEO and California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman is joining the Silicon Valley venture capital giant Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Her part-time role will include acting as a strategic adviser to start-ups and evaluating investment opportunities, reports Fortune. Whitman’s hiring closely follows that of Mary Meeker, who left her job at Morgan Stanley to join Kleiner Perkins in November.

Mary Meeker Is Not Bullish on USA Inc.

Peter Kafka — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 13:35:12 +0000

Mary Meeker isn’t just a famed Internet analyst turned venture capitalist–she’s now doing public policy. Or at least it appears that way, based on a new, 266-page report she’s published for Kleiner Perkins on “USA Inc.” The conceit is that she’s analyzing the federal government as if it were a business, and the conclusion is not uplifting: “By the standards of any public corporation, USA Inc.’s financials are discouraging.”

Index Ventures' Danny Rimer and Mike Volpi to Open Silicon Valley Office

Kara Swisher — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 11:13:29 +0000

Two of Index Ventures’ high-profile partners–Danny Rimer and Mike Volpi–are opening a new Silicon Valley office for the Europe-based venture firm in September.

The move is actually more of a return home for both men, now located in London, who had lived and worked at tech epicenter for much of their careers.

Among other things, before their stints at Index, Rimer was an Internet analyst at Hambrecht & Quist and also at the now-defunct Barksdale Group, while Volpi was an exec at Cisco.

BoomTown had been hearing about the possibility of the move for months, but Rimer and Volpi finally confirmed it in an interview yesterday.

“We thought we would be better positioned to support our entrepreneurs by being in Silicon Valley,” said Volpi (pictured here), who left the area when he became CEO of the then-hyped Joost premium online video service. “Having two solid investors from Index on the West Coast was important, as opposed to a chipshot.”

Volpi noted that of Index’s $1.3 billion in investments in 173 companies, $400 million was in 58 U.S.-based start-ups. In addition, the firm had helped another 35 move here.

There are currently nine investing partners at Index, which is actually headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.

Rimer noted that initially it will just be him and Volpi here, as well as some support staff. But it was likely they would expand their office, which will be located in either San Francisco or around Palo Alto, Calif.

“It has been a challenge to be a European firm and also be present in the Valley and be considered an insider here,” said Rimer (pictured here), who often traveled to California. “There is a lot to have an immediate ability to be face-to-face with our companies.”

Recent investments by Index in California include Flipboard, Swipely, Boku and Factual.

Rimer and Volpi said the move did not mean deals were only to be found in Silicon Valley, as Index is not focused on geographical investing.

In addition, the pair will continue their focus on cloud computing, infrastructure and social, wherever the investments were to be found.

“We’re not coming to the U.S. to do only U.S. deals,” said Volpi. “But there is a lot to be said for being part of the daily mix in Silicon Valley.”

In other words: Party at Mary Meeker’s house!

(The well-known Morgan Stanley analyst has also recently moved to the West Coast from New York to join Kleiner Perkins.)