David Krane is in an enviable position. As the CEO of GV, the venture firm that is funded entirely by Google to the tune of $1 billion a year, his team of roughly 100 gets to make a lot of bets — with just a couple of notable restrictions.
During a TechCrunch StrictlyVC event in San Francisco earlier this month, Krane said GV has invested in a stunning 800 companies across the last five years and invested more than $10 billion across its 15-year history.
None has received as much in one shot as Uber, whose $258 million Series C round was funded solely by GV way back in 2013. Still, GV still goes big at times, for example, plugging $140 million into the data infrastructure startup Cribl back in August as part of a $319 million Series E round.
In fact, because GV invests purely for financial returns, Krane says, there are few limitations on how it can operate. To date, that has meant that GV has mostly invested in the U.S., with roughly half a billion invested in its second-biggest market, Europe. That has meant splitting half its time focused on life sciences, health care, and biotech, and the other half on an all-encompassing “digital” category.
That degree of autonomy has also meant not having to navigate around a red line that separates what GV can fund from what Alphabet’s growth stage outfit, CapitalG, can fund.
Asked if the two groups ever throw elbows to get into a deal or a bigger share of a company — both teams are investors in Stripe, Cribl, and some other outfits — Krane poured cold water on the suggestion, saying that because “we’re funded by the same source,” the “secret there is to communicate well.”
Indeed, one of the only apparent no-nos — beyond partnering with an outfit like OpenAI that competes directly with Google — is actively enticing talent inside of Google to start a company so that GV can …