Kleiner Perkins

This venture capital firm's cleantech disaster is a masterclass in niche mismatch—and why the firm survived anyway. In the 2000s, John Doerr declared 'Green is the new red, white and blue' and deployed $630 million across 54 cleantech companies. The thesis was elegant: climate change would force massive capital reallocation, and early movers would capture it. The biology was wrong. Cleantech companies needed 20-year runways; venture fund structures demand 10-year returns. Fisker alone became one of the largest VC losses in history. While Kleiner chased solar panels, competitors invested in Twitter and Facebook.

The firm survived because its foundations are bedrock-deep. Founded in 1972, Kleiner Perkins essentially created the modern venture capital playbook. The $100,000 investment in Genentech invented the biotech industry and returned $47 billion. The $8 million Amazon bet returned over $1 billion. The $11.8 million Google investment alongside Sequoia became the greatest VC allocation of all time. A mid-90s fund returned $32 for every dollar invested. That track record creates institutional memory—and reputation—that survives strategic errors.

The 2025 version shows adaptation working. Under Mamoon Hamid, Ilya Fushman, and Wen Hsieh, the firm pivoted to AI with the tagline 'Rise with the A.I.' The Figma IPO in August 2025 (Hamid sat on the board), Applied Intuition reaching $15 billion valuation, Hippocratic AI at $1.64 billion—these exits prove the firm can still identify category-defining companies. Fifty unicorns, 98 IPOs, 306 acquisitions across 826 portfolio companies.

The biological lesson: organisms that overspecialize in resource-poor niches die; organisms that can re-adapt when niches collapse survive. Coyotes thrive from wilderness to downtown Los Angeles because they shift food sources as environments change. Kleiner Perkins operates the same way. Cleantech venture capital failed because the niche required patient capital that VC structures couldn't provide—as Doerr himself acknowledged when he donated $1.1 billion to Stanford's sustainability school instead of deploying through Kleiner. The firm spun out G2VP in 2018 for sustainable investing, acknowledging that cleantech requires different metabolic structures than software.

Kleiner Perkins is now 50+ years old—exceptional longevity for a firm where most partners rotate every decade. The secret is the same as any long-lived organism: the ability to extract resources from whatever environment currently exists, not attachment to environments that used to exist.