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
You want to work with people you are excited about and they are excited about you. It's a two-way street.
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.
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.
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.
There are a number of start-ups in Europe that are able to reach beyond their own country. Take Spotify - Spotify just in Sweden isn't that interesting compared to Spotify all over the world.
With a regular venture fund, you raise, let's say, a billion dollars, and then over the next three or four years, you've got to invest that money; otherwise, the people who invested with you will say, 'What are you doing? You're just collecting fees on our money.'
We're looking for people who are working on things that seem out of reach, uncomfortably difficult.
We make a series of investments, some will pan out and some won't.
VC firms are... responsible for the full life cycle of a company: they find it, help it grow, open up a Rolodex, and sell it.
To create exponential growth in health care, we need to put tremendous resources and focus behind the best human minds working in this field.
Time is the one thing I can't get back and can't give back to you.
The reality is regulation often lags behind innovation.
The reality is if you were going to die tomorrow, and someone offered you another 10 years, most people would take those 10 years.
Silicon Valley has been a technology capital like New York is a financial capital.