Greetings from San Francisco.

Today, I'm sharing my conversation with John Doerr, the legendary investor who has been at the vanguard of Silicon Valley’s political awakening for 25 years. Doerr tells me below that he doesn’t regret his donation to coal-loving Joe Manchin, that the climate critics of Jeff Bezos have got it all wrong, and that he hasn’t noticed Silicon Valley’s strange new respect for Charles Koch.

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A Google God Defends the Bezosification of the World

John Doerr, the legendary venture capitalist turned climate evangelist, defends Big Tech, Jeff Bezos, and Joe Manchin as part of his realpolitik climate change vision.

Over the last 18 months, I have had endless conversations with Silicon Valley political operatives, mega-donors, and fundraisers who have thrown themselves full-time into climate advocacy. The time for this being merely a hobby, they tell me, is over. Some are motivated by classic tech industry optimism, others by a sense of impending cataclysm. Some watch the rise of companies like Tesla or Rivian and see money to be made. Others simply watch the weather.

John Doerr, the longtime chairman of Kleiner Perkins, sits somewhere between these camps—and in the center of the action. Doerr, after all, has an intimate understanding of the power of new technologies to terraform industries and generate massive returns. He came up at Intel under the mentorship of management guru Andy Grove before joining Kleiner, where, incredibly, he placed early bets on both Amazon (market valuation: $1.8 trillion) and Google (valued at $2 trillion, and where he remains a member of the board). Today, he is an elder statesman of Silicon Valley, alongside generational peers like Mike Moritz and Vinod Khosla.

Doerr is also one of the few Silicon Valley titans to engage seriously, and visibly, in politics. Like Eric Schmidt, Doerr served as an early, unofficial ringleader for the generation of tech executives who eventually reached the apex of their Washington influence during the Obama years. In the late 1990’s, he launched the political lobbying operation TechNet, an early industry advocacy effort that helped to boost Al Gore’s presidential campaign. The group’s “Goretech” dinners inspired Silicon Valley insiders to joke about “Gore and Doerr 2004.”

A ticket it was not, but the Gore-Doerr friendship did turn out to be quite meaningful. After his excruciating election loss, Gore turned his attention to climate advocacy, producing and starring in the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth. The movie crystallized the stakes for Doerr, who has pledged to give away the bulk of his $15 billion fortune. In Doerr’s new book, Speed and Scale, his anger at the world for not doing more in the intervening 15 years leaps off the page.

Unlike the typically insufferable change-the-world, thought leadership tome, Doerr’s book offers a real policy roadmap...

FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT