Science fiction to become science fact?
Published: 01 Apr 2005 12:55 BST
You recognised the browser would be a hot area back in the early 1990s. Do you find your talent is in picking hot investment categories, but that you have more trouble identifying a specific company worth investing in from that category?
I think I have an idea of certain things that are likely to happen, but you can't say when they will happen. For example, the idea of a Web had been implemented in different systems 20 years before Tim Berners-Lee did the Web as we know it. So you knew something was likely to happen, but you didn't know when or exactly what the details would be.
What allowed it to happen was an environmental change. All of a sudden, a lot of computers were interconnected at a decent speed in an ecosystem that had been created by the existence of those networks. Then this idea, which had been around for a long time but had never been fully flushed out, certainly became possible.
In the same way, our ability in science to design new materials into biology — and simulate that inside of computers and understand what's going on at the atomic scale — allows us to engineer new materials and create new drugs, and do all sorts of things that we couldn't do before. So that tells you that certain things which have been roughly science fiction are now going to be possible.
Exactly when they're possible — well, there's a kind of a frontier. So if you have a general perspective on where we are, you can make some predictions about what kinds of things you should be expecting.
Why did you decide to go into venture capital?
At Sun, I enjoyed working with entrepreneurs and people with a passion for doing something new. As a partner at Kleiner, I get to see the best entrepreneurs come through the door and help them to realise their dreams.
Are there certain investment areas you're going to be focusing on?
I'm interested in energy... It's great that it's so socially relevant, but it's also an area of huge opportunity to create new more efficient forms of energy and apply that to the economy. There are a lot of factors coming together which are likely to make this a very big area for change in the economy in the next 10 to 20 years.
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