Letter #164: Maryanna Saenko and John Doerr (2019)
Letter #164: Maryanna Saenko and John Doerr (2019)
Cofounder of Future Ventures and Chairman of Kleiner Perkins | XPrize Visioneering Investor Panel
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Today’s letter is the transcript of Maryanna Saenko being interviewed by John Doerr for the XPRIZE Visioneering investor panel (filmed by Steve Jurvetson, no less!). In this interview, Maryanna shares with John which of her workplaces did the most breakthrough work and why Future Ventures is the obvious answer to that question, how she decided to start Future Ventures and what their differentiation is, the importance of having patient LPs, how she pitches Future Ventures to founders, how she compares Future Ventures to Luke Nosek’s Giga Fund, a venture she’s particularly excited about (nuclear fusion!) and her thesis for that venture, and how she thinks about technology and market potential vs team.
Maryanna Saenko is the co-founder of Future Ventures. Prior to founding Future Ventures, Maryanna was an investor at Khosla Ventures, DFJ, and Airbus Ventures. She started her career as a research engineer, predominantly focused on robotics, first at Carnegie Mellon’s Field Robotics Center, then Ferro Solutions, Cabot Corporation, and finally, Lux Research.
PSA: Maryanna is one of the kinder and more thoughtful investors I’ve been fortunate to spend a little time with (along with Steve). It was like stepping into the future for a day. If you’re a young, technical investor who is fascinated by the future and want to work with technologies and founders that will be written about in textbooks (if they work), they’re hiring for a Partner-track Associate. If that’s you: Run, don’t walk, and apply. These opportunities are truly few and far between.
John Doerr is the Chairman of Kleiner Perkins. His investments include: Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Compaq, Coursera, Doordash, Intuit, Netscape, Slack, Sun Microsystems, Symantec, Twitter, Uber, and Zynga. He started his career at Intel working with Andy Grove.
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did! It’s always a fun interview when you have a true practitioner (and a legendary one at that!) asking the questions.
[Transcript and any errors are mine.]
Related Resources
Future Ventures
Steve Jurvetson Biography (Highly Recommend)
Steve Jurvetson Compilation (427 pages)
Kleiner Perkins
Khosla Ventures
Lux Research
Josh Wolfe Compilation (1,202 pages)
Josh Wolfe Compilation Volume 2 (537 pages)
Transcript
John Doerr: You have a distinguished background as a research engineer and advisor at Airbus--did work there. Lux, I think, is a research group, DFJ, a famous venture fund with partners there that makes out there on the edge kinds of investments. And with my former partner, Vinod Khosla at Khosla Ventures. And now you've formed your own fund, together with Steve Jurvetson, I think, called Future Ventures. And all this in the course of a decade or less, right?
Maryanna Saenko: That's right.
John Doerr: Where's the best place of all those who do breakthrough work?
Maryanna Saenko: Future Ventures, obviously.
John Doerr: Well, maybe not obvious. Tell us why.
Maryanna Saenko: It's actually a fair question. When Steve and I reconnected about a year ago, having worked together at DFJ and gone separate ways, we really asked ourselves the question of Why start another venture fund? Is this an act of hubris? Can we do real good in the world? In some ways, there's more capital than there's sense in the market right now. So what's the justification for starting yet another early stage venture capital fund, and how do we differentiate?
John Doerr: Call it YAV - "yet another venture."
Maryanna Saenko: There you go. YAV. Good. And for us, after some real thought and consideration to start this venture and to do so mindfully, we decided that where we saw a gap in the market--and obviously, people like Luke are there already, but that--where we saw a space for a few more players is within this translation layer between the most challenging, interesting, off the edge of the map technologies, their opportunity to do great good in the world, and to be the type of investors where we can come in early, help foster those ideas, do so with high conviction, but to do so with entrepreneurs who have a plan and who have a vision for really creating positive, impactful change in the world. And to look at those entrepreneurs and say, What does your company look like not in three or five, but in 15, 20, and 50 years?
John Doerr: Will your sources of funding, your limited partners, be patient for 15 or 20 years to return?
Maryanna Saenko: That's where we've been incredibly fortunate. Our own limited partners, the people who really believed in our vision, are just a group of the most amazing, phenomenal, brilliant visionary individuals, family offices that we could hope for. And part of the course of the fund was saying that we're going to be a bit of a longer term fund than your classic. So we, from the beginning said, Fund I is a 15 year endeavor. So if you truly understand that for the types of companies we invest in, they start hitting their stride seven to nine years out from our earliest investment. And so that's when you want to be really kind of pouring in even further commitments and support, and not thinking about dialing out of your fund, and that it might have this 10 year horizon.
John Doerr: So, venture capitalists are famous for getting along, co-investing with each other. Suppose you and Luke are competing to win the opportunity. What will you say to contrast your fund with Luke's? Or are they a lot of like?
Maryanna Saenko: I've got a good right hook--no. At the end of the day, I think we have to really look at what our type of investing is, which is investing in for-profit institutions with the intention of taking a large pile of money and turning it into a larger one and--in the hope of that, doing that with companies that will change the world for the better. But the simple reality is that we're not in the most scalable business. We are individuals. It's Steve and I at Future Ventures. It's Luke and his partners at Giga Fund. And each of these funds, you have to recognize that it's not just about the overall vision, but the actual connection between the people. And so I think for us, it's less about us versus them, because this is not a zero sum game. And if we're looking at it as a zero sum game, we're approaching investing from a scarcity mindset, and that's absolutely the wrong mindset. But from an abundance mindset, you say, How are we at our best and highest use for this company? How are our capabilities, our adjacent areas of competency, our own networks most useful to the entrepreneur? And how do we get along with them? Because the right partnerships show up at the right times. And so there--hopefully there's space for many players at the table. And often there's a conversation where Luke will go very early, and we'll maybe see the same opportunities and say some of them not the right opportunity for us right now, but it might be later, and vice versa.
John Doerr: Is your fund coinvested with Luke? Do you do the same time, or before, or after?
Maryanna Saenko: We have at least two... two investments in common.
John Doerr: Out of how many investments?
Maryanna Saenko: So Future Ventures started in January 2019, officially investing out of the fund, and we have 10 investments so far.
John Doerr: Do you invest with Luke more frequently than any other firm? That's a question.
Maryanna Saenko: That might actually really be true...
Luke Nosek: We’re both so small… and we have similar issues.
John Doerr: So, Maryanna, tell us about a venture you're particularly excited about--a new project.
Maryanna Saenko: Oh, I'm so excited to share this project. So I really--I believe that so many of our world's conflicts are around this concept of energy scarcity. And we recently found a company out of MIT called Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which is a nuclear fusion company, which we have the privilege of coinvesting in with with some amazing other investors, like your former colleague and partner, Vinod Khosla. And so Commonwealth Fusion Systems is a nuclear fusion company, coming--it's the culmination of 30, 40 years of nuclear physics research out of MIT. It's fusion, not fission--so we can talk about some of the constraints around that later--but the exciting opportunity here is to look at classic nuclear physics, some very, very clever engineering around the magnets, and say that there might be, in the near future, in the tractable future, for us a way to build nuclear fusion plants that are safe, that meet regulatory standards, that actually produce more energy out than you put in, and to do so in a clean manner and hopefully solve a lot of--start kind of moving in the world of answering the world's energy crisis?
John Doerr: So this sounds really attractive. I want to ask you this question: Were you more compelled by the technology and market promise, or by the team? Which weighed more in your mind--in that case.
Maryanna Saenko: It's--so, for one, like let's set the ground basis, which is: we participated in the series A, which was a $100mn Series A. So a lot of things are interesting about this company. It's also part of a partnership with the University. And so what was interesting to us is they--
John Doerr: The project or the people?
Maryanna Saenko: It was both. It was a brilliant--I know, it's a terrible answer. But--
John Doerr: I can't get you to compare yourself to Luke, I can't get you to answer my questions. Pretty soon I'm going to turn the audience loose on you.
Maryanna Saenko: There you go. It was really--what it was, was watching this project that we know needs to exist in the world, but the people who decided to join it was the most salient matter. So really understanding that just world leading experts were leaving academic positions, jobs in brilliant companies--just really taking a risk on their lifestyles to join this company.
John Doerr: I don't mean to interrupt you--this sounds like the people.
Maryanna Saenko: Yeah.
John Doerr: Okay.
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Wrap-up
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