Gore and Doerr in 2004+4
by John Paczkowski
Posted on November 13, 2007 at 5:42 AM PT
“Gore and Doerr in 2008” doesn’t have the same alliterative ring to it as “Gore and Doerr in 2004,” the slogan splashed across those spoof political buttons that popped up in Silicon Valley in the late ’90s.
Doesn’t make much of a presidential campaign slogan, either. But then it doesn’t need to. Because former Vice President Al Gore doesn’t expect to be a candidate for the presidency in 2008. But he is joining venture capitalist John Doerr as a partner in Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a storied venture capital firm that has backed some of the biggest names in technology.
Gore, who shared a Nobel Peace Prize this year for bringing attention to the issue of global warming, will quarterback Kleiner Perkins’s green-technology investments. “There is a flood of money coming into this area,” Gore told the Los Angeles Times. “A lot of it is undisciplined. When you open the hood and look inside, you see people shrugging their shoulders and saying, ‘We don’t know what we’re going to do.’ “
And that’s where Gore and Kleiner Perkins come in, using green–the Federal Reserve kind–to make green–the sustainable energy kind. Said Gore: “What we are going to have to put in place is a combination of the Manhattan Project, the Apollo project and the Marshall Plan, and scale it globally. It’d be promising too much to say we can do it on our own, but we intend to do our part.”
