Google Ventures and the Search for Immortality - live to be 500?
Google Ventures and the Search for Immortality
Bill Maris has $425 million to invest this year, and the
freedom to invest it however he wants. He's looking for companies that will
slow aging, reverse disease, and extend life.
by Katrina Brooker 9:01 PM PDT March 8, 2015
“If you ask me today, is it possible to live to be 500?
The answer is yes,” Bill Maris says one January afternoon in Mountain View,
California. The president and managing partner of Google Ventures just turned
40, but he looks more like a 19-year-old college kid at midterm. He’s wearing
sneakers and a gray denim shirt over a T-shirt; it looks like he hasn’t shaved
in a few days.
Behind him, sun is streaming through a large wall of
windows. Beyond is the leafy expanse of the main Google campus. Inside his
office, there’s not much that gives any indication of the work Maris does here,
Bloomberg Markets will report in its April 2015 issue. The room is sparse—clean
white walls, a few chairs, a table. On this day, his desk has no papers, no
notepads or Post-its, not even a computer.
This story appears in the April 2015 issue of Bloomberg
Markets.
Here’s where you really figure out who Bill Maris is: on
his bookshelf. There’s a fat text called Molecular Biotechnology: Principles
and Applications of Recombinant DNA. There’s a well-read copy of Biotechnology:
Applying the Genetic Revolution. And a collection of illustrations by Fritz Kahn,
a German physician who was among the first to depict the human body as a
machine. Wedged among these is a book that particularly stands out to anyone
interested in living to 500. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend
Biology, published in 2005, is the seminal work by futurist Ray Kurzweil. He
famously predicted that in 2045, humankind will have its Terminator moment: The
rise of computers will outpace our ability to control them. To keep up, we will
radically transform our biology via nanobots and other machines that will
enhance our anatomy and our DNA, changing everything about how we live and die.
“It will liberate us from our own limitations,” says
Maris, who studied neuroscience at Middlebury College and once worked in a
biomedical lab at Duke University. Kurzweil is a friend. Google hired him to
help Maris and other Googlers understand a world in which machines surpass
human biology. This might be a terrifying, dystopian future to some. To Maris,
it’s business.
This is where he hopes to find, and fund, the next
generation of companies that will change the world, or possibly save it. “We
actually have the tools in the life sciences to achieve anything that you have
the audacity to envision,” he says. “I just hope to live long enough not to die.”
***
Maris is an unusual guy with an unusual job. Seven years
ago, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google, tapped him to start a
venture capital fund, putting him smack between those tech titans and the sea
of ambitious entrepreneurs trying to be just like them. At the time, he was a
young entrepreneur himself, with limited investing experience and no clout in
Silicon Valley. He’d sold his Vermont-based Web-hosting company and was working
at a nonprofit, developing technology for cataract blindness in India. This
made him exactly the kind of outsider Google was looking for. “Bill was ready
to come at this from an entirely new perspective,” says David Drummond, who, as
Google’s chief legal officer and senior vice president of corporate development,
oversees Google Ventures as well as the company’s other investment vehicles.
Google Ventures has close to $2 billion in assets under
management, with stakes in more than 280 startups. Each year, Google gives
Maris $300 million in new capital, and this year he’ll have an extra $125
million to invest in a new European fund. That puts Google Ventures on a
financial par with Silicon Valley’s biggest venture firms, which typically put
to work $300 million to $500 million a year. According to data compiled by CB
Insights, a research firm that tracks venture capital activity, Google Ventures
was the fourth-most-active venture firm in the U.S. last year, participating in
87 deals.
A company with $66 billion in annual revenue isn’t doing
this for the money. What Google needs is entrepreneurs. “It needs to know where
the puck is heading,” says Robert Peck, an analyst at the investment bank
SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, who published a report in February examining
Google’s outside investment units, including Google Ventures. “Look at what
happened to BlackBerry when it missed the advent of smartphones. And Yahoo!
missed Facebook.”
Google puts huge resources into looking for what’s coming
next. It spends millions on projects like Google X, the internal lab that
developed Google Glass and is working on driverless cars. In January, the
company made a $900 million investment in Elon Musk’s SpaceX. In 2014, it
started Google Capital to invest in later-stage technology companies. Maris’s
views on the intersection of technology and medicine fit in well here: Google
has spent hundreds of millions of dollars backing a research center, called
Calico, to study how to reverse aging, and Google X is working on a pill that
would insert nanoparticles into our bloodstream to detect disease and cancer
mutations.
Maris has a peculiar position in the Googlesphere. He’s a
part of it, but also free from it. Google Ventures is set up differently than
most other in-house corporate venture funds—Intel Capital, Verizon Ventures,
and the like. The firm makes its investments independent of its parent’s
corporate strategy. It can back any company it wants, whether or not it fits
with Google’s plans. The fund also can sell its stakes to whomever it wants,
including Google competitors. Facebook and Yahoo have bought startups funded by
Google Ventures.
With Google’s money and clout behind him, Maris has a
huge amount of freedom. He can, and does, go after Silicon Valley’s
most-sought-after startups. Uber, Nest, and Cloudera are among the firm’s big
wins. Maris doesn’t intend to stop pursuing these kinds of deals. But he has
other ambitions, too. “There are plenty of people, including us, that want to
invest in consumer Internet, but we can do more than that,” he says. He now has
36 percent of the fund’s assets invested in life sciences, up from 6 percent in
2013.
“There are a lot of billionaires in Silicon Valley, but
in the end, we are all heading to the same place,” Maris says. “If given the
choice between making a lot of money or finding a way to make people live
longer, what do you choose?”
***
Maris is standing at the front of Joshua Tree, Google
Ventures’ large conference room. Each room at headquarters is named after a
national park. “OK, we have a lot to get through today,” he tells his staff.
The group meets here biweekly to talk about prospects and strategy.
Maris has a team of 70, most of whom are in the room this
day or patched in by phone or video. The group includes the fund’s 17 investing
partners, who are in charge of finding startups. Among the investing partners
are Joe Kraus, co-founder of Excite; Rich Miner, co-founder of Android; and
David Krane, employee No. 84 at Google.
The mood in the room is casual. Some staffers sit
cross-legged on the floor; others curl up on soft felt couches. There are a lot
of jokes. One partner starts his presentation with a slide entitled “Secret
Project”—which most people in the room already know about—and concludes it with
a doctored-up photo of Maris’s head superimposed on the body of someone playing
tambourine. It’s a jab at the boss, who married the singer-songwriter Tristan
Prettyman last August and recently went on tour with her. Everyone laughs.
Maris smiles, but immediately he’s back to business. “Time is the one thing I
can’t get back and can’t give back to you,” he says, turning to an agenda on
the screen behind him.
“I know you’re all aware of the conference happening this
week,” Maris says. An hour away in San Francisco, JPMorgan Chase is hosting its
annual health-care confab, nicknamed the Super Bowl of Health Care. Thousands
of pharmaceutical executives and investors have gathered for what has become a
huge part of the industry’s dealmaking. Most of Google Ventures’ life sciences
startups are attending. One, Foundation Medicine, which uses genetic data to
create diagnostic oncology tools, is generating huge buzz this year. In
January, Roche Holding announced plans to take a majority stake in the company,
in a transaction valued at $1 billion. The stock more than doubled the next
day. Google Ventures has a 4 percent stake in the company.
For Maris, Foundation Medicine represents the beginning
of a revolution. “The analogy I use is this,” he says, holding up his iPhone 6.
“Even five years ago, this would have been unimaginable. Twenty years ago, you
wouldn’t have been able to talk to anyone on this.”
When Google Ventures invested in Foundation in 2011, the
company’s promise was mostly theoretical. The world was still waiting for the
breakthroughs that have seemed inevitable ever since scientists first mapped
the human genome in 2003. Foundation’s team included eminent geneticists, including
Eric Lander, one of the leaders of the Human Genome Project. Still, the company
had no viable commercial product.
Technology has made huge strides since then, allowing
Foundation to create products like its Interactive Cancer Explorer, which is a
kind of Google for oncologists, allowing them to do research and devise
treatments for their patients. “We had a lot to learn from the experts in
Silicon Valley,” says Foundation’s CEO, Dr. Michael Pellini, who sought out
Google Ventures as an investor for help with designing his company’s
technology. “Think about Google search. We never think about all the algorithms
that go behind what we see on the screen. They were able to do the same for us
with genetic information.”
“Twenty years ago, without genomics, you could only treat
cancer with a poison,” Maris says. “That’s really different from, ‘We can cure
your cancer by reverse-engineering a stem cell.’ You can now legitimately
invest in a company that could cure cancer.”
Identifying promising life sciences companies isn’t like
hunting around Silicon Valley for coders with a cool app. Biotech companies are
built around complicated science. They require millions of dollars in
investments, partnerships with big pharma companies, and lengthy clinical
trials. To help with his hunt, Maris has brought in scientists as partners.
One, Dr. Krishna Yeshwant, a Harvard- and Stanford-trained doctor, still works
in a clinic twice a week in Boston, where he is based. Last year, he led the
firm’s biggest bet in life sciences, an investment in Flatiron Health, which is
building a cloud platform to analyze cancer data.
This is just the beginning. “In 20 years,” Maris says,
“chemo will seem so primitive it will be like using a telegraph.”
***
At the age of 22, just out of college, Maris met the
friend who would lead him to Google. It was 1997: Yahoo was search, AOL was
e-mail, Google was called BackRub. Maris was in New York, working at Investor
AB, a Swedish investing firm. He didn’t care for Wall Street, but he did like
the smart Yale grad sitting next to him. She told him about a company that was
going to change the world. “I remember telling him about this new search engine
my sister was working on, and he said, ‘Oh, Yahoo is good enough,’” recalls
Anne Wojcicki, who would become the wife of Sergey Brin. Her sister Susan, one
of Google’s earliest employees, is now CEO of YouTube. Anne Wojcicki went on to
co-found 23andMe, a genetics testing company that is part of Google Ventures’
portfolio.
Maris quit Investor AB after six months and went to
Burlington, Vermont, to start a Web-hosting company. He was so green that he
read Netscape and the World Wide Web for Dummies. He funded his company,
Burlee, with his credit cards and by convincing the operators of the Lake
Champlain ferry to invest. Maris sold Burlee to a company that became Web.com
for an undisclosed sum in 2002. It wasn’t Google-level money, but it was enough
for him to live on in Vermont with no job.
He would have stayed there except that his old friend,
Wojcicki, kept calling him West. Maris started visiting her and Brin, staying
at their home in California. He increasingly became drawn into their sphere.
“He and Larry and Sergey would be at dinner and start talking about, I don’t know,
flying cars,” recalls Wojcicki.
In 2008, Google’s chiefs tapped Maris to start a venture
fund, an idea they’d been kicking around for a while. They gave him a desk at
Google and instructions to figure out how he would invest Google’s money. In an
only-at-Google twist, his neighbor was Kevin Systrom, who was working on a
photo app called Burbn, later Instagram. (“Everyone I sit next to ends up
becoming a billionaire,’’ Maris jokes.)
Maris spent six months researching venture capital around
Silicon Valley. He traveled up and down Sand Hill Road, home to many of the
Valley’s most prestigious VC firms, asking top investors for advice. At first,
he had a hard time getting anyone to take him seriously. During one meeting, a
VC started laughing at his idea for Google Ventures.
Maris was told his fund would never work: VCs wouldn’t
want Google looking over their shoulders. “There were some in the venture world
who weren’t particularly welcoming to Bill or Google Ventures,” recalls John
Doerr, a legendary partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of the
most important first-generation California VC firms. Doerr, who sits on
Google’s corporate board, advised Maris on setting up the venture fund.
Around Silicon Valley, corporate venture funds have a bad
reputation. “There is an inherent paradox to the notion of corporate venture,”
says Bill Gurley, a general partner at the VC firm Benchmark Capital. The
conflict is, do the fund’s loyalties lie with the startup or with the parent?
Just about every independent venture capitalist in tech has stories of being
burned by corporate funds. Either the company uses its venture investments to
gather intelligence and ends up competing with the companies it funds or
company management loses interest at some point and pulls out.
Entrepreneurs were skeptical, too. “I told him, this is
never going to work,” says Joe Kraus, who, in addition to co-founding Excite,
co-founded a wiki software company called JotSpot, which was sold to Google.
Maris asked him early on to join as a partner in Google Ventures. “From the
entrepreneur’s perspective, the idea of tying myself to Google would have been
scary.” Kraus says. “The fear would be, if you raised money from Google, would
Apple hate you?”
Entrepreneurs who can get comfortable with Google
Ventures gain access to resources no amount of money can buy.
To win over other VCs and entrepreneurs, Maris and his
bosses at Google established the terms under which the fund still operates.
Google has no access to details about the startups’ strategy or technology.
That way, entrepreneurs can pitch without worrying about their ideas being
stolen. “We had to convince entrepreneurs they could work with us,” says David
Drummond.
Those who can get comfortable with Google Ventures gain
access to resources no amount of money can buy. The firm can, and does,
introduce its startup founders to anyone at Google—experts on rankings on
Google search, for example, or user experience designers or Android mobile-app
builders. One startup was offered 1 million hours of core processing time on
the Google cloud for free.
A big edge for Google Ventures is its design team. Maris
drew top tech talent out of Google and made them partners in the fund. One
worked on Gmail; another helped redesign YouTube. They form a sort of SWAT team
for startups. In what’s known as a design sprint, they can troubleshoot
whatever is ailing a startup—a flailing app, slow Web traffic, an uninspiring
home page. (See “On the Clock,” above.)
“We didn’t need the money,” says Ryan Caldbeck, co-founder
of the crowdfunding startup CircleUp. He picked Google Ventures as one of his
backers in part to gain access to its design talent. Twitter co-founder Ev
Williams used the design team for his new publishing platform, Medium. Stewart
Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr, used the team for his new startup, Slack.
Still, navigating the line between startups and Google
can get complicated. Last year, Google wanted to buy Nest, whose signature
product is a WiFi-connected, learning home thermostat. Google Ventures recused
itself from the negotiations, allowing the other VC firms invested in Nest to
broker a price of $3.2 billion. (It was the fourth-largest venture exit of
2014.) In February, Bloomberg reported that Google was planning a ride-sharing
app that would be a direct competitor to Uber. Google Ventures has had a stake
in Uber since 2013. If Google and Uber go to war, Maris will be right in the
middle of it.
“Google Ventures has a direct financial incentive to
ensure the companies we invest in succeed,” Maris said in an e-mail responding
to questions about potential conflicts. “Our investment decisions are made
independent of Google’s product road map.” He and the other partners are paid
carried interest based on the performance of portfolio companies. In theory, if
Google’s car app kills Uber, Google Ventures loses money.
***
One evening in San Francisco, a group of young scientists
and doctors are sitting down to dinner. “I remember when Max was living with me
and I opened up my fridge and saw this stuff he put in there. I was thinking,
Is this safe?” muses Blake Byers, a 30-year-old with a Ph.D. in bioengineering
from Stanford and a partner at Google Ventures. He casts a sideways glance at
Max Hodak, a 25-year-old Duke biomedical engineering grad sitting next to him.
Three years ago, Hodak started working in Byers’s garage to build a
robot-enabled laboratory. Once he stored chemicals in Byers’s freezer. (“Blake
gets a little carried away with that story,’’ says Hodak. “There was never any
danger.”)
Hodak now runs Transcriptic, a company that builds and
operates robot-run labs in shipping container–sized boxes. It packs them with
enough computing power to run multiple experiments from anywhere in the world.
Theoretically, a scientist in Monrovia, Liberia, with access to a laptop or a
mobile phone could use a Transcriptic lab to test strains of Ebola. Byers, who
is the son of Brook Byers of Kleiner Perkins, has helped Hodak raise $12.5
million from Google Ventures and others.
“We are just on the verge of what science and technology
can do,’’ says David Shaywitz, chief medical officer of DNAnexus, who’s seated
across from Byers and Hodak. His company, also backed by Google Ventures, is
building a global bank of genomic information using cloud computing.
Listening to the scientists gathered around the table,
it’s hard not to get caught up in the world they see coming. In this vision of
our future, science will be able to fix the damage that the sun or smoking or
too much wine inflicts on our DNA. Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other scourges
of aging will be repaired at the molecular level and eradicated. In the minds
of this next generation of entrepreneurs, the possibilities are bizarre and
hopeful and endless. We probably won’t live forever, but we could live much longer,
and better.
These are the bets Google Ventures is hoping will
ultimately be its biggest wins. “We aren’t trying to gain a few yards,” Maris
says. “We are trying to win the game. And part of it is that it is better to
live than to die.”
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