Bill Maris
Bill Maris
Bill Maris is a venture capitalist and the CEO at GV, a venture capital firm established by Maris and funded through Alphabet. With approximately $2.4 billion under management and investments in Uber and Nest, the six-year-old fund is described as one of the hottest in Silicon Valley. Maris oversees all of GV’s funding activity and has a particular interest in next generation life sciences and artificial intelligence. He was instrumental in the formation of Google’s Calico project...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBusinessman
CountryUnited States of America
Humans are terrible at predicting the future. We really overestimate what we can do in the short term and underestimate what we can do in the long term... If we can glimpse even a couple of years into the future, even that's difficult to do.
We can get much better outcomes from people if we understand the genetic basis of the exact cancer that they have, what interventions might be most effective against it, what's worked in the past and what hasn't.
If I were to leave and raise a venture fund, I would have to find 10 or 100 LPs. They would all give me a bunch of money, and I would take a percentage of that to pay myself. They would expect me to invest that over the next three years, and they want that money back in seven or eight years.
Not many venture firms have people whose job is to read academic research - on startups, ventures, and entrepreneurs - and gather knowledge from that.
If you're a technology investor, and you decide that you're also going to be a healthcare investor or a green-tech investor, that doesn't usually work out that well. There are reasons why people make their careers studying these things and becoming experts.
Government is really successful when it's willing to make big, bold objectives, like, 'We're going to get to the moon.' But without leaders with big ideas, we get stuck.
I can make it very clear: I get paid if we make good investments. And if we don't, I don't get paid. I have no incentive to sell our companies to Google; the entrepreneurs get to decide that. We are minority shareholders.
If you want to invest in early-stage technologies, putting a timeframe on it does behold you to Silicon Valley economics. You've got a certain time period where you have to make the money. And you have to invest that money whether you find good companies or not.
I'm interested in the ideas that sound a little crazy, such as radical life extension, curing cancer, being able to create a simulation of the human brain and map every neuron.