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
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I used to be a health-care investor a long time ago in the public markets. One thing I learned that we tried to apply here is that investing in small molecules, trying to invest in the next treatment, there's an element of gambling to that.
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When you build relationships with entrepreneurs, they're not trying to optimize on price.
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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.
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Not many venture firms have people whose job is to read academic research - on startups, ventures, and entrepreneurs - and gather knowledge from that.
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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.
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As computer intelligence gets better, what will be possible when we interface our brains with computers? It might sound scary, but early evidence suggests otherwise: interfacing brains with machines can be helpful in treating traumatic brain injury, repairing spinal cord damage, and countless other applications.
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Back in the late 1990s, venture capitalists got very excited about the Internet. A whole lot of money was poured into some companies that failed rather spectacularly, and a lot of people lost a lot of money.
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As life expectancy extends beyond 80 years in some parts of the world, more people are struggling with brain diseases. For older people, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and other conditions become a major impediment to quality of life.
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Say you have cancer - you have this broad thing we call cancer; we're going to irradiate you and pump this poisonous material into you and hope more of the bad stuff dies than the good. That is going to seem so medieval when we can fix it on a genetic level, and Foundation Medicine is the first step to diagnosing it on a genetic level.
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People talk about the redistribution of wealth a lot, which is a very valid topic. But what about the redistribution of health? That's even more concentrated at the top.
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I would draw a really big distinction between competition, or potential competition, and a conflict of interest. A conflict of interest implies wrongdoing, whereas competition is really healthy.
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When you apply computer science and machine learning to areas that haven't had any innovation in 50 years, you can make rapid advances that seem really incredible.
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Venture funds get beaten up for not investing in important things. Okay, if you want venture funds to invest in important things, then don't penalize or make fun of them when those important things don't work.
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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.