GV, the Google-backed venture capital team, has broad powers, but it can’t do one thing
David Crane is in an enviable position. As CEO of GV, the investment firm that Google funds entirely to the tune of $1 billion a year, his team of roughly 100 can make a lot of bets — with only a few notable limitations.
During the TechCrunch StrictlyVC event In San Francisco earlier this month, Crane said GV has invested in an astonishing 800 companies over the past five years and has invested more than $10 billion over its 15-year history.
No one has earned the same amount in one shot as Uber, which… $258 million The Series C round was only funded by GV in 2013. However, GV still has great success on occasion, for example, pumping $140 million into data infrastructure startup Cribl in August as part of a $319 million E Series Tour.
In fact, because GV invests solely for financial returns, Crane says, there are few restrictions on how it operates. So far, this means its total investment is in the US, with nearly half a billion dollars invested in its second-largest market, Europe. This means dividing half of her time to focus on life sciences, healthcare, and biotech, and the other half on the overall “digital” category.
This degree of independence also means not having to navigate around the red line that separates what Universal Value can fund and what Alphabet’s growth-stage CapitalG can fund.
When asked if the two groups were neck-and-neck for a deal or a bigger stake in the company — both groups are investors in Stripe, Cribl and some other companies — Crane poured cold water on the proposal, saying, “Because we’re funded by the same source,” he said, “The secret there is good communication.” “.
In fact, one of the only clear no-nos — besides partnering with a company like OpenAI that competes directly with Google — is luring talent within Google to start a company so GV can be the first to fund it.
As we talked about the members of Google’s AI note-taking tool NotebookLM, we asked, Who recently left to start their own company —TechCrunch story published on the day we sat down with Krane. When we wondered aloud if GV might fund them, Crane said: “We knew some of the people on the NotebookLM team for sure, and we knew about this team that was growing up.”
“Sometimes, there are teams that will leave Google, and they will pursue a startup, and GV will see that, and GV will get involved,” he added. “… We haven’t created a huge vacuum to encourage people to leave Alphabet and pursue startups, but it’s already happening. There are a lot of people in the diaspora who spent time in parts of Alphabet that are now creating startups, and many of them are in Our networks and we have funded some of them.
When asked how Google felt about Global Voices writing people a big check on their way out the door — it keeps them close to the mothership, after all, but could also encourage them to try their luck — Crane continued: “Yes, I think that’s exactly what Right. The goal is to stay at Google if you’re at Google and create transformative products.” “But some people don’t stay forever,” he said. “It’s a fact of life. Some people leave. Some people pursue startups, and then we might pop up in that conversation.”
To learn more, you can He listens Join that full conversation or watch it below.
