We may not close every deal I work on at Kleiner Perkins, but it takes one mean sonofabitch to beat us. We first started talking to Fark founder Drew Curtis about funding his little link site in 2003 after their traffic started growing like a weed. Looks like I should have been more aggressive in closing it, because Hugo Chavez Venture Partners beat us to the punch. Hugo funded FARC in a $300 million series A round (for some reason as part of the deal they changed the “k” to a “c”).
After many weeks of intense preparation that culminated in my 60 Minutes interview broadcast last night, I am back to my blog. I have received a ton of reader emails to this website ranging from admiration to requests for jobs and money.
For instance:
To: tom-perkins@newsgroper.com
Date: November 4, 2007 9:47:18 PM EST
Subject: Invention IdeaI am emailing due to an invention idea I have. I would really appreciate an opportunity to share my idea with you. I hope you can have the time to give me a chance with this lifetime opportunity. I don’t want to see my idea go with out being known, tried, and possibly brought into existance. I look forward and hope to have a chance in hearing from you.Thank you,Natasha
Holy crap! I just made the greatest VC investment of all time. Chuck Norris is going to make the returns on Google, Skype, and YouTube look like goddam bank loans. Plus, unlike Skype Chuck Norris always achieves his earn out.
The best part of this deal is that there is literally zero risk to us or any future acquirors. This is all made possible by Chuck’s unique ability to divide by zero and thereby neutralize Beta. Trust me–I’ve seen the math–it’s complicated and needs to run on a supercomputer–but it works flawlessly. If you insert almost any investment amount into the function f(x)=Chuck(Norris) you always get an enterprise value of $50 billion.
Let me tell you a little story that starts back in the day when I was one of the first employees at a little startup called Hewlett-Packard—on second thought, it’s actually a pretty long and boring story. You know what though? I’ve got a big yacht. The Maltese Falcon is just so freakin’ long, it turns me on more than Carly Fiorina at a closed door session of an HP Board Meeting.
It’s got 90’ tall masts that are stiff as a young lad at a middle school dance. Hmmm … did that sound gay? I’m thinking that may have come off as a little fruity. That’s OK. When you’re a billionaire you can do things normal people can’t, like making explicitly gay comments or looking really gay without being gay.***
I wanted to take this opportunity to announce The Kleiner Perkins Facebook Applications Fund (KPCBFBAF) which recently closed on $150 million of capital. I’ve recruited Chamath Palihapitiy, Facebook’s VP Marketing and Operations as well as Gideon Yu, Facebook’s CFO to our Investment Board. The Fund, whose primary limited partner is Harvard University, will be dedicated to investing in applications developed for Facebook. We’ll be looking to invest sizable amounts of capital into each company from $2 million to $5 million over the life of the company. You may note this fund is exceedingly larger and better funded than Jim Breyer and Accel’s recently announced Read the rest of this post »
I may be drunk on scotch but I can come up with better ideas for businesses to fund in my sleep than the TechCrunch 40. I call it the Tom Perkins Perky 10:
10) Virtual Food Stamps
An online virtual food stamps currency for poor and homeless people. It costs nothing for us to give to them and they can have all the virtual brown-bagged malt beverages they can find in virtual worlds. Question: Do we make their avatars virtually homeless?
9) Digital Cameras for Women
Sometimes you have to bet against the odds. I’m fed up with this crap about “renewable power” and “green tech.” If I read one more announcement about a new solar technology company, I think I’m going to throw up in my mouth. I didn’t make my fortune following the crowd like some mindless sheep funding business plans that contain buzz words. Ol’ Tommy P. is coming outta retirement to prove a point and this time I’m stepping up to bat as the CEO. I just founded a company that’s just coming out of stealth mode today and it’s going to totally buck conventional wisdom.
It’s called Carbon Debits, Inc. That’s right, you pay us to burn coal and raw garbage to offset the efforts of smug hippies and Democrats like Al Gore and Vinod Khosla promoting carbon credits and electric cars. For every electric car they put on the road that costs them $25,000 to manufacture with 2% gross margins, I can burn 100 acres of rain forest in Brazil or India for $4.00 at a 10,000% gross margin. Now, THAT’S a goddam business model.
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