You are listening to the DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, brought you weekly by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.

You can find podcasts and videos of these lectures online at eChorner.standford.edu.

Today's guest is really remarkable.

Dana Mead has been in the life science business for over 30 years.

He started out in sales and marketing at Johnson & Johnson, went on to run a very large division at Guidant, and since 2005, he's been a VC at Kleiner Perkins-Koffield Buyers. He's going to tell us all about the hidden world of venture capital,

and I'm sure you'll be as fascinated as I am.

Dana.

Thanks, Tina.

Hi.

So Tina's told me, so far this year you've had all entrepreneurs, is that correct?

So now you get to talk to someone that sits on the periphery of the ecosystem around innovation

because the entrepreneurs, in our view, certainly in our firm, sit right in the middle

and are the most important part of that ecosystem.

We sit on the outside, we're a support service, just like the accountants and the auditors and the lawyers,

and other folks that support innovation and try to support them moving forward.

So what I'm going to do, Tina said it might be helpful to just talk a little bit about venture capital,

who we are, what we do, whose money we invest, how we think about doing new ventures,

and just pass on a little bit on what we look for when an entrepreneur comes to visit us with a great idea.

So what I'm going to do is start by just talking a little bit about Kleiner Perkins.

We've been in the venture capital business now for 39 years.

In our business, as you'll notice, if you ever go on a website of venture capitalists or talk to venture capitalists, we love logos.

So you're going to see a lot of logos whenever you deal with venture capitalists.

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