Earnest, hard driving and highly motivated, the rising young stars of venture capitalism aim for big personal and financial rewards. A look at four achievers:
John Doerr. On a clear day, Doerr can look down from his 35th-floor corner office in Embarcadero Center on the sailboats plying San Francisco Bay. Taking in the view may be the only truly restful thing that Doerr, 34, normally ever does. He has been a relentless overachiever since he joined the blue-chip San Francisco venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 1980. Three years later Doerr became one of five general partners (there are seven today). Among the companies that he has spotted for investment are Cypress Semiconductor, Sun Microsystems and Businessland, all Silicon Valley firms involved in various aspects of the computer field. Doerr's choices have earned an estimated $260 million in venture profits. Nonetheless, Doerr insists, "money is not a goal. I enjoy building things with other people."
Doerr has shown talent at that ever since his days at Rice University in Houston, where he earned a master's degree in electrical engineering. He started a computer-software company during his sophomore year. While picking up an M.B.A. at Harvard, Doerr worked 20 hours a week at Intel, the & semiconductor firm. When he has time, Doerr relaxes with his wife Ann in their fashionable Pacific Heights home, and he declares himself "more interested in making new technology successful than in the technology itself."
Jennifer Lobo. By all rights, Lobo should be a microbiologist. "I fell in love with the field in high school," she says, after reading The Double Helix by Nobel Laureate James Watson. Lobo majored in microbiology at the University of California, Berkeley, and took advanced courses in bacteriology and immunology. Says she: "I was really quite a good laboratory scientist." The experience stands her in good stead as she crisscrosses the continent, working 14-to-18-hour days. Lobo, 31, keeps tabs on a handful of health-care firms for Domain Associates, the Princeton, N.J., venture capital firm that she helped found in 1985.
Lobo was working at a biomedical laboratory in her native Maryland when she decided in 1976 that she could make more money by using her scientific background in a business career. After earning an M.B.A. at the University of Chicago, she was recruited by Ohio's Standard Oil to help found Vista Ventures, a venture capital firm with headquarters in New Canaan, Conn. She helped finance the Liposome Co., an enterprise specializing in the production of small membranes used to assist in administering medications and one of the biotechnology industry's hottest success stories. One of Lobo's current favored companies is Biomagnetic Technologies in San Diego, which has developed diagnostic imaging equipment to read brain functions. Nonetheless, she predicts that "it will probably be another three to five years before I can say this or that company was a big hit."