David Krane is in an enviable position. As the CEO of GV, the venture firm that is funded entirely by Google to the tune of $1 billion a year, his team of roughly 100 gets to make a lot of bets — with just a couple of notable restrictions.
During a TechCrunch StrictlyVC event in San Francisco earlier this month, Krane said GV has invested in a stunning 800 companies across the last five years and invested more than $10 billion across its 15-year history.
None has received as much in one shot as Uber, whose $258 million Series C round was funded solely by GV way back in 2013. Still, GV still goes big at times, for example, plugging $140 million into the data infrastructure startup Cribl back in August as part of a $319 million Series E round.
In fact, because GV invests purely for financial returns, Krane says, there are few limitations on how it can operate. To date, that has meant that GV has mostly invested in the U.S., with roughly half a billion invested in its second-biggest market, Europe. That has meant splitting half its time focused on life sciences, health care, and biotech, and the other half on an all-encompassing “digital” category.
That degree of autonomy has also meant not having to navigate around a red line that separates what GV can fund from what Alphabet’s growth stage outfit, CapitalG, can fund.
Asked if the two groups ever throw elbows to get into a deal or a bigger share of a company — both teams are investors in Stripe, Cribl, and some other outfits — Krane poured cold water on the suggestion, saying that because “we’re funded by the same source,” the “secret there is to communicate well.”
Indeed, one of the only apparent no-nos — beyond partnering with an outfit like OpenAI that competes directly with Google — is actively enticing talent inside of Google to start a company so that GV can be the first to fund it.
We asked while talking about members of Google’s AI-driven note-taking tool NotebookLM, who recently left to start their own company — a story that TechCrunch broke on the day of our sit-down with Krane. When we wondered aloud whether GV might fund them, Krane said: “We know some of the people on the NotebookLM team, for sure, and we did know about this team that was spinning out.”
“Occasionally, there are teams that will leave Google, that will pursue a startup, and GV will see it, and GV will get involved,” he added. “… We haven’t set up a giant sucking vacuum to encourage people to leave Alphabet and pursue startups, but it does happen. There’s a massively impressive diaspora of people that have spent time in parts of Alphabet that are now doing startups, and many of them are in our networks and we funded some of them.”
Asked how Google feels about GV writing a big check to people on their way out the door — it keeps them close to the mothership, after all, but can also encourage them to try their luck — Krane continued: “Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. The goal is to stay at Google if you’re at Google and build transformational products.” But “some people don’t stay forever,“ he said. “That’s a fact of life. Some people leave. Some people pursue startups, and then we may show up in that conversation.”
To learn more, you can listen to that full conversation or watch it below.