Kleiner bigwig feels heat over tape

SAN FRANCISCO — Kleiner Perkins' famed venture capitalist John Doerr spent Tuesday talking about how he strives to include women on boards, find them as entrepreneurs and hire them into engineering roles at tech companies he funds.

But a tape of Doerr speaking at a conference of venture capitalists in 2008 was played in court that struck a different tone from his statements on the stand.

The founders of Amazon, Netscape, Yahoo and Google, "all seem to be white, male, nerds who've dropped out of Harvard or Stanford and they absolutely have no social life, so when I see that pattern coming in — it was true of Google — it was very easy to decide to invest," Doerr said.

Doerr was on the stand for a second day Wednesday as Kleiner is being sued by former junior partner Ellen Pao for $16 million for gender discrimination and retaliation. Pao, who was hired in 2005 to be Doerr's chief of staff, left in 2012.

She is now interim CEO at Reddit, a popular news aggregation site.

Much of the testimony in day seven of the high-profile trial centered around whether or not one of the most powerful venture capital firms in Silicon Valley was positively or negatively inclined towards women.

Despite his comments on the tape, when Kleiner's lawyer, Lynne Hermle, later asked Doerr to clarify exactly how many of the 80 or so companies he'd invested in were led by white men who had technical degrees and dropped out of Harvard or Stanford, he answered "two."

"Sun Microsystems and the Google company," he said.

Pao's contention is that she was barred from becoming a senior partner at the firm because of discrimination against her gender. Doerr countered that it's very rare for any junior partners to be raised to senior partner.

"My estimate is that we've had two dozen junior partners over the course of the firm's history," he said on the stand. "What's truly unusual is for a partner to be promoted. It happened only five times in the first 30 years of the history of the firm."

The other junior partners were transitioned out.

"They were not promoted; they were asked to move on in the way Ms. Pao was asked to move on," he said. Of those, he estimated that three-quarters were men.

The judge in the case, Harold Kahn, has made the rare decision to allow the jury to submit written clarification questions to witnesses. These come at the end of testimony after both lawyers are done.

In Wednesday's jury questioning, one question was why Doerr thought so few venture capitalists were women, a topic he dove into with gusto.

His long and somewhat rambling answer was something of a chicken and the egg problem. Good venture capitalists, he said, are first good entrepreneurs who've had considerable experience starting and operating companies.

Getting more women into that pool of experienced entrepreneurs requires funding more women but "for a variety of reasons" there are too few of them in business, and it's too hard for them to get funded.

"I don't advocate for women out of a sense of social justice, though that's important. I believe that diverse groups make better decisions when they are diverse in terms of age, gender and ethnicity," he said.

He didn't offer a solution beyond saying that the venture capital world needs to "look for and attract women" and prioritize having a "diverse pool of applicants."

You do whatever I want

Doerr is one of the best-known venture capitalists in the world, with an estimated net worth of $3.5 billion, according to Forbes. His testimony has attracted interest in the trial, and a gaggle of photographers and TV cameramen have been lying in wait outside the courthouse to catch an image of the billionaire coming and going each day.

On the stand he discussed how important he feels his time is, and the level of support he gets to make the most of it. Talking about his staff on the stand, he said, "you do whatever I ask, without complaining."

Pao's job as Doerr's chief of staff involved writing documents for him, making arrangements and generally "leveraging" his time so he could more efficiently do his job and focus on making money for the firm's limited partners.

A somewhat heated exchange between Pao's lawyer, Alan Exelrod, and Doerr came when Doerr was asked whether the jobs Pao was asked to do were inappropriate given her electrical engineering degree from Princeton and her law and MBA degrees from Harvard.

"I don't think you understand. This job is a demanding job for very talented people," Doerr said in one of the few moments when his tone veered from sounding calm and considered.

The needs of the firm were paramount, and everyone was expected to pitch in. Sometimes Pao was looking out too much for herself and not enough for the firm, he said.

He cited junior, and now senior, partner Wen Hsieh, as an example of someone who "bleeds Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers," and was willing to carry papers and buy gas for his boss when that was what was needed.

The sacrifices could be both large and small, Doerr said.

"I once needed to do a photo shoot, and (Hsieh) took the shirt off his back and gave it to me," said Doerr to laughter in the courtroom. "I gave it right back to him."

In another instance, "he moved his family to China to help strengthen our business there. They didn't want to go," Doerr said. But "Wen picked them up and moved them for two or three years. Wen's a superstar."

Report not read

One surprising omission came early in Doerr's testimony, when he said he had not read a report about whether women at Kleiner had been harassed. The report was written by an external investigator, Stephen Hirschfeld, hired by the firm to investigate the charges.

Instead, Doerr relied on a report about the matter from Kleiner's chief operating officer at the time, Eric Keller.

Exelrod pushed Doerr on why he hadn't read the original report. He was interrupted by Kleiner lawyer Hermle, who said, "Excuse me, Mr. Doerr, you shouldn't talk about what you discussed with your lawyers."