♪ emily: he was the most unlikely candidate for the job. a young entrepreneur in vermont with limited investing experience. yet in 2008, sergey brin and larry page tapped him to start a capital fund. one year later, google ventures , or g-v was born. ,since then, the investment arm of awful that has become one of the most active vc firms in silicon valley, with $2.4 billion to spend and investments in over 300 companies, including

uber, nest, and slack. joining me today, bill maris, gv ceo. bill, thank you so much for being here. bill: thanks for having me. emily: you were hand-picked by sergey to start in google ventures 2008. at the time, you were a young entrepreneur, no clout in silicon valley. what were the early years like? bill: it implied a level of specialness. i was sitting at a shared office space at a desk in corporate development, sitting next to a corporate development intern, who turned out to be kevin system, who developed instagram. but at the time, we were trying to figure out what we were going to do here. i certainly was not picked for my clout or experience. i think in part my lack of experience in the venture business has led us to develop a unique model.

goes --emily: the story you were going up and down sand hill road, knocking on doors trying to get people to take you , seriously. bill: my career has been a progression of not being taken seriously and volunteering for jobs i was not qualified for. that was the story. at the time, i did go from firm to firm to say, here is what i'm thinking and we are thinking of doing. some took us very seriously and gave great advice and still do to this day and some literally , laughed at the idea. emily: who laughed? bill: i will not name names, but they know who they are. probably not laughing anymore. but i understand why they did. because i had no experience. google did not have a track record as a venture investor. so it seemed out of the ordinary to have someone like me come and say that we would start a venture fund. emily: what prepared you for that? where did you grow up? what kind of kid where you? bill: i grew up reading michael

chrichton novels, i read novels and watched "star wars" and "star trek." if it was electronic, i would disassemble it and try to put it back together. about a 50% success rate. i got really interested in computers and computer games and imagination and storytelling. all of those kinds of things coalesced into me wanting to be an animator when i was going up. because i thought you could create any kind of world you want. so i would draw a lot. i thought it would be an interesting career. emily: you majored in neuroscience. bill: i found the subject matter really interesting and pursued it and graduated and decided i did not want to become a doctor and stumbled into a bunch of things. one of which was a startup. eventually here to gv. emily: you did neuroscience research at duke. you went on to manage a biotech portfolio in an investment bank. in 1997, the person sitting next to you is anne wojcicki. bill: yes. this was before google even

existed. we were office mates and became lost friends and have been friends ever since. at the time, she told me about some friends in her sister's garage. emily: so anne wojcicki went on to marry sergey brin, cofounder of google. she is also cofounder of 23 and me. she told you about google. and you were alike -- bill: i had a search engine. and here are these two stanford dropouts starting the company. but it was not attractive, because i had a path i was on and i wanted to see where it , would lead. emily: you are in vermont. he started a web company. you sold it. bill: a lot happened in between. i slept under my desk and ate a lot of canned foods. making payroll with my credit card, and march of 2000 when the market crashed, it was not worth anything to anyone. so we had to see it through that period and ended up selling that

company in 2002, 2003, to web.com. emily: you ended back at google. bill: anne and sergey was insistent i go back to california. introduced me to -- me to david drummond. over the course of 19 interviews, they decided ok, bill, we will ask you to start looking into this. there was no checkbook given or anything. what should we do in venture? i spent six months looking at different models and looking into how it might work, and then part of my job was we hired a recruiting firm to start google ventures. it was not going to be me. but as i interviewed people for the role, i discovered the thing i discovered when i sat next to anne and we talked to people pitching us companies. nobody does anything. -- nobody knows anything.

the people i am talking to to start this fund do not know anything about google. it does not seem like they have special knowledge about these technology companies. so i just volunteered and said i would like to give it a try. emily: you rebranded from google ventures to gv. was this an attempt to distance yourself from the google name? bill: no. people called us gv anyway. it was the easiest thing. but with the alphabet structure, to call it google ventures would kind of mislead in a way that we would not call it verily ventures. it is broader than that. it is not a google service. we tried literally 1000 or so different names and we thought gv was the most obvious evolution. emily: what is the relation between gv and off of that? bill: the same as it was between gv and google before this. we have a separate entity. i am now the ceo of it gv but we , make our investments in

whatever that we like. emily: they have no access to information about start up strategies or details? bill: no, they have a similar access to information that any limited partner would get in terms of final -- of financial information, etc., but i have got no incentive to share details about what a startup is doing, as i would with intel versus google versus facebook. our job is to generate returns and help the companies grow. emily: in the world of venture, sequoia is king. those are firms that entrepreneurs lust after. do you ever still feel like you're that guy on sandhill road trying to convince people? ,bill: i still do. i think imposter syndrome is a key element of many people's personalities. i am no exception. because you are only as good as your next few investments. i think that insecurity comes up a lot. it never bothered me that people took us seriously or not.

i think it is more important if we take ourselves seriously , because we are trying to do something that has not been done before. emily: one of the things you are really focused on is trying to extend human life. how much progress have you actually made there? ♪

emily: one of the things you are really focused on is trying to extend human life. how much progress have you

actually made there? bill: this sounds very mad scientist. as if i have a garage and bubbling beakers. it is not so much about extending life. if you set the goal, we want to land on the moon, and you start by saying, but we can't land on the moon, you will probably never get there. the idea of extending life is more about, can we live vigorous and healthy lives, get more life out of our years and more years out of our lives. emily: in terms of actual progress, what have you made? where are you? bill: i would say i do not make progress. we invest in companies that do the work. we are able to develop diagnostics now. the human genome project took 10 years and $4 billion to sequence one genome. now you can do that in an hour on a machine that fits on this table. now we can look at the genome and find places where we see

errors. the diagnostic comes first. the therapies, after that. now we are moving to a place editas, ampany like crisper gene editing technology. it is a public company now. that may not mean something to a lot of people, but five years ago, the idea of the company was hard to fathom, that that could be a company. i think these will move very quickly now in a way that we will have treatments that seem untreatable. emily: living to 100 is possible today. what is the goal? if you will say the moon, is it 500? 200, bill: the goal i would put before that is if you look around the world, or even san francisco today, this area of the world, silicon valley, is great at deception, innovation, invention -- words that are so overused that people get tired of hearing about them.

the goal i would set out does not have to do with those words. it has to do with distribution. the fact that in this country, if you are a white male, your average life expectancy is maybe 77. if you live in western africa, your life expectancy is 45 or 50. for me, the challenge i would put out is about to shoot version of our existing technologies, which we could do today. the seven deadliest diseases, many of those, we could cure right now or treat or prevent. the fact that we are not making as much an effort to do that -- if i told you we could double lifespans in this country by snapping our fingers, you would think we should do that. we could double life span in lots of parts of the world, even in this country, just by distributing what we already have. emily: best take alzheimer's. there have been 100 attempts to develop an alzheimer's treatment since the 1970's, and all of them have failed. a successful treatment could be huge. where do you see the breakthrough happening in

age-related disease? bill: there are people spending their entire careers moving actual molecules and working in labs to develop treatments for something that has been untreatable. that will be a win for humanity when that happens. we have an understanding of how alzheimer's develops and how all neurodegenerative conditions come about, that 15 or 20 years ago, when i was a neuroscience student, it did not exist and was not even in the books. now we have tools to appear inside -- to peer inside even living brains. it was only 1930 that we had no antibiotics. you get a disease, you die. and suddenly, you get a disease and take a pill, and you live. that is kind of a miracle. emily: i want to talk about specific companies, like foundation medicine, working on a personalized cancer treatment. they have been slow to get

insurers to cover it. some say there is still no viable product. what are the chances of foundation actually finding a cure for cancer? bill: foundation's goal when we invested -- when we invested, they came in to pitch and after the pitch, we looked at each other and thought, is it even possible? will the technology get there? what they are doing now was impossible at the time. that they founded the company and were raising money. the progress they have made to date is so remarkable that it is completely underappreciated by a lot of people and maybe even the market. they created a diagnostic to genotype tumors so that they could help physicians pick the best treatment modality so we are treating your cancer. if we all live long enough, we will all get cancer. we can treat your cancer, not what was the gold standard for this generic form of what we call lung cancer because it happens to be in your lungs.

that is a huge step. will that lead to a cure? they say there is a cure for cancer, it is early detection. so it is a big step. i will tell you there are patients alive who would not be alive but for the foundation medicine test. emily: really? bill: and that is really compelling. in some cases, they did find a cure for cancer. emily: are there any areas of health where you just will not go, where technology just has not caught up to the need? bill: no. emily: how do you balance funding something that is impossible and maybe possible and really is impossible? bill: if you go into it thinking you can't lose money, need to be correct, i need to be right, than this is the wrong business for you. emily: is that the luxury of working at google? bill: no. if we all lose money, we will not have a job anymore. so we go in optimistic there is a cure for cancer, but skeptical of every approach.

that is just science. we have bioengineers and positions, etc., on the team who spend their careers on this kind of thing. so we're ok being wrong sometimes. we are even ok being wrong most of the times. emily: by the way google gives , you as much money as you want. bill: they do not give me -- emily: g-v. bill: i would not put it in those terms are we all try to be rational. how much money can we reasonably invest and expect a good return. emily: and you do not have to fund raise, which is kind of a luxury? to fund do not have raise. it saves probably about one third of our time, which we can spend with the companies and other things, which is a great benefit for us. emily: you once likened the fundraising are secret, which is now defunct to a bank heist. ,bill: you're taking all of my best quotes. emily: at the time, it was taken as an unfriendly comment but

since then, the market has changed. i wonder if you think the reaction would have been the same if you said it today? bill: i think it was an entrepreneur unfriendly comment. it was probably not the nice thing to say. if you do not have something nice to say, you probably should not say anything at all. but i know the founders and that was a unique situation. i think they learned something from it. the investment did not work out, but they were onto something for a short time that burned brightly. at the same time, they were not dealing with sick patients. the kinds of chances we take and that entrepreneurs are willing to take in the tech world do not and should not work on the life science side. you have to be a lot more careful. emily: the market is in the middle of a major reset. how do you think this plays out? ♪

emily: the market is in the middle of a major reset. how do you think this plays out? bill: there is not a lot of upside in predicting the market, but since we are part of it, we have to understand what is happening. we try to avoid investment opportunities that are overheated and try to work with founders that are making reasonable deals. and find good investors. someone once told me you can pick your investor or you can pick your price. but you can't pick both. it is better to pick your investor in all scenarios because you want them to be there when things go wrong, and they always go wrong. emily: you invested in uber

added $3 billion valuation? bill: somewhere around that. emily: now it is valued at $6.2 billion. is uber overheated? someone suggested to me that uber is next in store for us. a right down. bill: of course i am completely , biased. ne watching will say he is completely biased. but you have a transformational company. when we invested, there were a lot of people that questioned, what are they doing? we pushed all in. it is our largest investment. we have over $300 million invested in the company, which is the size of our entire fund at the time. at every stageng of this company and every company like this, people question, is it overpriced, is it overpriced? they are doing something far more remarkable than we thought when we invested. so i do not underestimate that team or the people that work there at all. emily: that said, things with uber did get a little

complicated because google is , interested in maps, uber is interested in maps. uber does self driving cars, now google is doing socgen in cars. bill: we are an investor in uber. our responsibility is to try to help them build big, successful, an important and useful a company as possible. emily: but now you compete. bill: we do not compete. we are the investors. tesla and apple, everyone wants to be in cars and maps. travis said before it was really the hip thing to be in. any time you get companies that are the size of uber and the importance of apple, etc., they are going to bump into one another. emily: the last time you were on the show, you pledged to hire a woman general partner. that would be your next partner. what kind of progress have you made their? all: we are not hiring partner right now, a general partner. but when we go to do that, we need to make a deliberate effort to do it. i wish there were something i

mild drop in water, makes -- x, and solve the diversity problem. but there are other elements to it. most boards are made up of white men. most boards that get invested by venture funds are made up of white men. most teams like ours are made up of white men. those are problems on several different fronts. so we decided to employ roughly $5 million into something we had never done before, to invest in other venture funds. we invested in four venture funds that are not our own, and these are funds that are founded by people who are not white men. who see entrepreneurs that we would not see otherwise. be in favor ofu -- i do not want to call it affirmative action, but maybe it is affirmative action -- hiring a woman who checks maybe not all of the boxes that needed to be checked, but check some other boxes? taking a risk on someone? bill: we do have a female general partner. emily: which is a huge step

further than most vc's. bill: i do not like to point these things out. i have seen other people in other situations say let me give you the numbers on our team. there is a de-individuation that goes along with that that then and-so,hat person the so- rather than they are also a technologist and an entrepreneur. emily: you have the power to change things. bill: we are trying to do that. what we are doing is looking at ourselves and saying what can we do differently. i had my entire team undergo unconscious bias training. because all of these have these biases. i'm guilty of it, too. we are all guilty of that. to try and correct those things and to start those ways and, , like i said, invest in other funds and try to meet with entrepreneurs that would not come on our radar, necessarily. so yes, we do have the power to change it. many of us have failed. we have just done a bad job of it. which is ok. it is ok to say that.

i would like to do better. emily: what is your long-term vision for gv? five years, where do you want gv to be? bill: the first thing that comes to mind is what i said earlier. if we invest and the companies that have the most positive impact for the largest number of patients, that would make me really happy. emily: how about 50 years? bill: 50 years, i hope i am still around. you know, it is hard to think that far out. anytime i have thought, "where will i be in three or five years," i have been so wrong. emily: are you still going to be doing this? bill: i hope i am around to find out. but i am having a ton of fun. it is mostly because of the people i get to work with. as long as that is the case, i think the answer is yes. emily: all right. bill maris, gv president and ceo. thank you. ♪