David Krane is in an enviable position. As CEO of GV, a venture firm funded by Google to the tune of $1 billion a year, his team of about 100 people gets to make a lot of bets, with a few notable limitations.
Speaking at the TechCrunch StrictlyVC event in San Francisco earlier this month, Krane said GV has invested in as many as 800 companies over the past five years and has invested more than $10 billion over its 15-year history.
No one has received as much in one go as Uber, which GV alone raised a $258 million Series C round of funding in 2013. Despite this, GV still manages to hit the mark every now and then. For example, it invested $140 million back into data infrastructure startup Cribl. It’s part of a $319 million Series E round in August.
In fact, Krane says, GV has few restrictions on how it operates because it invests purely for financial returns. To date, GV has invested mostly in the United States, with about $500 million invested in Europe, its second largest market. This means focusing half of your time on life sciences, healthcare, and biotechnology, and devoting the other half to the all-encompassing “digital” category.
This autonomy also means there is no need to navigate the red lines that separate what GV can fund from what CapitalG, Alphabet’s growth-stage arm, can fund.
When asked whether the two groups would ever do a deal or throw elbows for a larger stake in the company (both teams are investors in Stripe, Cribl and other companies), Krane poured cold water on the suggestion. “We raise funds from the same source,” he said. “There is a secret to good communication.”
In fact, one of the only things that is explicitly prohibited, beyond partnerships with organizations like OpenAI that compete directly with Google, is actively recruiting talent from within Google to start a company so that GV can be among the first to raise funds.
we asked, talking about a member of NotebookLM, Google’s AI-powered note-taking tool, who recently left the company to start his own company. This is the story TechCrunch broke on the day of the meeting with Krane. When asked aloud whether GV would provide funding, Krane said: “We definitely know some of the people on the NotebookLM team, and we were aware of this new team as well.”
He added, “Sometimes there are teams that leave Google to pursue startups, and GV will see this and participate.” “… We’re not setting up a huge suction vacuum to encourage people to leave Alphabet and pursue startups, but it happens. “There is an incredibly impressive diaspora of people who have spent time in some parts of Alphabet and are now running startups, many of whom are in our network and we have funded some of them.”
When asked what Google thinks about GV sending out big checks to people on their way out the door – it ultimately keeps them close to the mothership, but may also encourage them to try their luck – Krane went on to say: right. The goal is to stay at Google and build innovative products.” But “some people don’t stay forever,” he said. “That’s a fact of life. Some people leave. Some people pursue startups. , then we might show up in that conversation.”
To hear more, listen to the full conversation or watch it below.
