One of the first things David Krane and I do is look at some weird sculptures.
Walking through Google’s Mountain View, Calif. campus, he joyfully shows me the famous Android lawn statues — the Android robot shaped like a Kit Kat, the Android robot stuck in a honeycomb, and an Android robot holding the largest lollipop I’ve ever seen, sculptural or otherwise.
Krane, the CEO and managing partner of Google Ventures (GV), has spent much of his life on this campus, amid the sprawling collection of statues (which are based on the dessert names of various versions of Android software). It’s a surreal sight of impossibly-sized candy and whimsical color. I didn’t ask Krane if the sculptures were edible, but I wish I had, just to see his reaction, because it’s all very Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
If the candy surroundings evoke the famous fantasyland, Google Ventures, and its only LP Alphabet, occupy a role within the startup scene that’s not so dissimilar from Willy Wonka’s factory. Many of the tech industry’s most important products were dreamed up over here. And while there’s no such thing as a golden ticket in the startup game, for founders hoping to break into the tech business, earning a spot in GV’s portfolio can feel pretty close.
Krane (who shares the same fast-paced patter and light tenor as Gene Wilder’s Wonka, though he didn’t do a somersault when I met him) has been at GV for 15 years now, building what began as an unusual project at the internet search giant. Incorporated on Sept. 1, 2009, GV was launched in the thick of the Great Financial Crisis, when the global economy was teetering, businesses were collapsing, and techies were clinging to their jobs rather than launching risky startups.
In the years since then, GV has struck deals with some of tech’s most game-changing businesses, including Uber and Stripe, and defined itself within Silicon Valley’s storied, and competitive, venture industry. From the beginning, Krane and GV have been encouraged to think in hundred-year time horizons — a blessing when compared to the finite time frames to return capital that other VCs operate under, but a framework that can impose its own burdens.
Now, as the tech industry undergoes another major shift with the advent of generative AI, GV is looking for the unconventional, long-term answers that can continue to set it apart.
“Explain something technical to me that I don’t already understand”
Krane is in some ways an unlikely leader of one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture firms. In 2000, Krane became Google employee number 84 overseeing the nascent company’s communications and public relations efforts — a job he landed thanks to some quick thinking.
During Krane’s interview, Google cofounder Sergey Brin had only one question for him: “Explain something technical to me that I don’t already understand.”
“I took a nice breath in, and I started explaining to him how to make a reed for a clarinet,” recalls Krane. “If you use these tools and actions to sand a reed, file a reed shape, and attach it to a clarinet, you can make a beautiful sound come out the end of the clarinet,” he explained.
Brin was impressed, Krane says. “I spoke about it very precisely, from a technical perspective. I spoke about it from an outcome and impact perspective. It’s not easy, so I presented a hard problem to him — not anybody could walk up off the street, do that first pass with a reed, and make a clarinet sound beautiful.”
Nearly a decade later, the birth of GV occurred in a similarly unexpected moment.
Brin and Larry Page, Google’s other cofounder, pulled Krane aside at a Silicon Valley charity event one day. The two founders were pursuing several new ideas at the time, and one of them was a relatively vague idea for a VC firm somehow linked to Google. Krane was initially a little surprised, thinking he wasn’t the on-paper obvious person to go to — but he had worked on a lot of deals.
“Larry and Sergey reminded me that I was always the champion for these founders that we had acquired — that I would come into management meetings and advocate for them,” he said. “I’d say things like: ‘Guys, these founders, we bought their company two weeks ago, they’re not being properly treated and they’re already unhappy. They’re questioning, did I make the right decision?’ So, they said that I really have an affinity for that sort of founder view. ‘We’re thinking about forming a venture entity. Would you like to help us assess that opportunity, and design it?’”
Krane was “unequivocally in,” he says 15 years later. From there, a few key decisions were made. The plan was to structure GV as an independent venture firm, rather than a strategic corporate venture arm — this would model GV like the top firms on Sand Hill Road, allowing GV to make independent decisions and focus on financial returns, rather than strategic alignment.
Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr was an early advisor, and those initial days involved asking Doerr (an early Google investor) lots of questions. But mostly, those first days of GV were a small team “loosely organized in a set of desks in just a random building on this campus a couple blocks from [where the GV office is today].” On that very first day, the new, scrappy GV team was in a cluster of desks near other Google curiosities, including what would become Google X and projects like Google Glass and Waymo.
Krishna Yeshwant, GV managing partner, was there on Day One. The thoughtful son of Chicago doctors, he’d rebelliously studied computer science and founded two tech companies, later going to medical school. Yeshwant turned up at Google in 2008 — just in time to take an almost impossible-to-explain gamble.
“In 2009, it really didn’t feel like it was going to work,” said Yeshwant, who I met in GV’s secret-door conference room. “My parents back then were definitely like, what? You did all this medicine?… I think they thought it seemed like a good side project. It wasn’t obvious and felt like a real risk in 2009, 10 and 11. It wasn’t clear whether this was going to go well or not.”
So, everyone hunkered in and tried to do some deals, and Krane thought about the conversation he had with Brin back when he was joining Google: “There wasn’t a company in the Valley that was thinking about a 300-year arc before you can measure: Are we even any good at what we’re doing?”
Alphabet and independence
That 300-year time horizon is an important touchpoint for understanding GV, which isn’t immune to the normal ten-year venture cycle — but isn’t beholden to it either. GV isn’t a corporate venture firm, or CVC, in that it doesn’t invest off the balance sheet. And while Google wants to see capital returned, it’s flexible on the time frame. Though a GV portfolio company has occasionally been acquired by Google, that’s a rare occurrence, and not part of the mission of GV’s investments.
While GV is physically close to Google, it operates independently from the internet search company and is classified as one of Alphabet’s “Other Bets.”
There’s no red phone Krane picks up, where someone on the other end says, “Office of the LP!”
The firm has doubled the amount of capital it manages — GV had $5 billion in assets under management in 2019, and has more than $10 billion today. During the pandemic, GV expanded its team by 20%, over 15 new investment hires since 2019. It began expanding beyond early-stage to include more growth-stage deals. GV has announced an average of 50 new portfolio companies every year since 2020 and has so far revealed more than 30 new companies in 2024. GV deploys about $1 billion annually in new and follow-on investments.
As one source familiar with the mechanics explained to me: There’s a committee, which includes seasoned VCs like Doerr, that has visibility into GV’s capital plans, holdings, and key metrics. While there’s an Alphabet board committee that keeps an eye on GV, the committee is ready to jump into any discussions when needed. Once a year, GV gives the board a heads-up on its capital deployment forecast for the upcoming year.
Cathy Friedman, who headed the biotech practice at Morgan Stanley for years and served as a director on several public company boards, says the unusual relationship with Google was hard to wrap her head around at first when she joined GV in 2021.
“I honestly did not know what it would be like, because I kept thinking about Cisco and Intel, and that was kind of the model I had seen of corporate venture capital — and that’s definitely not this,” said Friedman.
Signing (and driving) Travis Kalanick
One of GV’s early wins came in 2011 with Nest, investing tens of millions in the smart home product pioneer. The deal proved to be a “breakout moment,” and not just because the outcome was a 2014 $3.2 billion sale to Google. It was early evidence that GV could attract non-Google talent. (Nest cofounder Matt Rogers later founded the waste prevention startup Mill, which GV also backs today.)
“The founders of Nest came from Apple,” said Krane. “There was absolutely no reason why a team from Apple should embrace anybody from Google.”
But it was Uber that perhaps became the firm’s most colorful early success. After chasing Uber CEO and cofounder Travis Kalanick for two years, Krane finally pinned him down to talk about the rideshare company’s Series C — and Kalanick quickly threw a curveball.
“I knew he was going to raise a lot of money in that round,” said Krane. “What I didn’t know initially and what he had decided, probably based on interest, was that he was going to raise that from a single entity — not from a syndicate of investors.”
This presented some good news, namely that the potential upside was even higher than Krane could have ever guessed. But it was mostly neutral-to-bad news: To make Uber happen GV would have to “scare up more capital” (as Krane put it) and would have to win a game of winner-take-all, soundly beating out far more established players. So, GV and Krane asked: What can we do that no one else can?
The answer was cinematic enough to make it into Mike Isaac’s 2019 book Super Pumped: The Battle of Uber. As they were trying to close the deal, GV put Kalanick up in the Four Seasons Hotel in Palo Alto. The morning of the meeting, as Kalanick waited in front of the hotel for a car, Krane also showed up.
“I saw him make a connection with his Uber black car that he had ordered,” said Krane. “He opened the door, threw his backpack in the back, and then I popped up and said: ‘Hey Travis!’ He was surprised, ‘What are you doing here?’ I said, ‘Yeah, you’re not going to the meeting in that car. You’re going to go in this car.’ And I had a Waymo autonomous car waiting with a driver…. I didn’t even ride with him. I just put him in the car, got out of the way.”
Well, how did he react?
“I mean, head-explodes-off-shoulder,” Krane laughs.
Whatever happened next, this much seems to be true: For Kalanick, it was pure imagination. He signed on the dotted line.
Kalanick, who resigned from Uber amid controversies over the company’s culture, is a slightly touchy subject these days, and Krane is careful in how he talks about him. Krane still has an ice-blue statue depicting Uber’s fastest-growing markets in his office that Kalanick gave him and other board members, though I expect it’s not so much about Kalanick, but what Uber ultimately meant for GV.
In 2013, Krane told me that GV invested $335 million in Uber. In 2019, when the company went public, GV’s stake was worth over $2 billion, according to the rideshare company’s IPO filing. (GV sold its shares post-IPO.)
It was then — and still is — GV’s largest-ever investment. (GV’s second-largest-ever investment is Cribl, for which the firm led the startup’s Series E this summer. You can read more about here.)
AI, healthcare, and the long game
As GV looks for the next Ubers, the changing tech landscape is top of mind. And that’s putting more focus on the fundamental questions about GV.
Dave Munichiello and Tom Hulme co-lead the firm’s digital investing team. I asked them both: Is GV contrarian? Munichiello doesn’t see GV as expressly contrarian, while Hulme does. But they each go on to describe a future of GV that is in some ways unexpected.
“We’re not investing in foundation models,” said Munichiello. “There will be other chapters of AI, but this isn’t the one we’re going to jump into. We’re going to stay at the application layer and at infrastructure.” (GV, as you may expect, has long invested in AI and its portfolio currently includes Snorkel, SambaNova, and Modular.)
Google, of course, has its own very capable AI home-grown foundation models, and the company has invested $2 billion in LLM-maker Anthropic. But GV isn’t attached to Google’s plans, the firm says.
“It sounds really grandiose, but one of the things I love about our role is we’re not limited by sector,” said Hulme. “We have the ability to invest in anything… and we have the structure that enables us to adapt.”
GV also sees its future in its life sciences practice, a sector in which the firm rang up another big early win with Flatiron Health, the oncology data startup acquired by Roche for $1.9 billion in 2018. Flatiron’s cofounders didn’t come from medicine, but were able to develop effective startups in the space with tech know-how.
“Flatiron was an inspiration for that type,” said Yeshwant. “It was kind of a novel way to succeed.”
In GV’s next 15 years, Yeshwant wants to really emphasize moving the line on what success can mean, beyond financial returns. He’s thinking about it in terms of improving care delivery, and using diseases cured as a metric.
“It happens so rarely, but when you can cure disease, it may be the only really transformative thing that happens in healthcare,” said Yeshwant.
Is a more flexible time horizon essential for these kinds of pursuits?
“There’s no question,” said David Schenkein, GV general partner, a hematologist, medical oncologist and former CEO of Agios Pharmaceuticals. “I feel it all the time. The kind of companies I’m interested in are going to take longer to mature than many venture funds can tolerate.”
Pure imagination
Krane played both the clarinet and the saxophone as a kid (he actually sat next to Larry Page in bandcamp). As we jaywalked on the Googleplex, I asked what his favorite song to play on the sax was.
“My favorite song to play, ‘In the Mood,’ is a very simple standard,” he said. “What it opened for me was an opportunity to improvise and just have no limits.”
That’s more or less what’s happened with GV these last 15 years. It started with the idea of a corporate VC firm that wasn’t and ended up with something that exists on its own wavelength.
Venture at its best is able to support founders in making the impossible possible. But that means you have to believe in the impossible in the first place, in pure imagination. And for all the ways in which GV is independent of Google, that ethos is something that’s in GV’s DNA.
Krane told me that in Google’s early days, Brin and Page were obsessed with the idea of building a space elevator that could move people from Earth to the moon, and back again. They even taped on an office wall a crowd-sourcing call to Googlers.
“It had an incomplete, crude start of a schematic about how one might go about building a space elevator,” said Krane. “Then, it had a companion call-out on this big piece of butcher paper that said: ‘Finish this.’” Of course, that’s crazy – but it’s the kind of moonshot faith that empowers GV to this day. It’s what allows GV to, in a phrase that Krane taught me, “press the believe button.”
In the last scene of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Wonka asks Charlie to start the glass elevator.
“There it goes,” Wilder says. “Hold on tight. I’m not exactly sure what’s going to happen. Faster, faster . . . If we don’t pick up enough speed, we’ll never get through.”
There’s a moment before the elevator makes impact with the ceiling, where it’s unclear what’s going to happen. Whether they will crash to their deaths, or whether Wonka, Charlie, and Grandpa Joe will rise to heights that were previously unimaginable.
For those who can find glee in this, the possibilities are endless.