Bill Maris
Bill Maris
Bill Maris is a venture capitalist and the CEO at GV, a venture capital firm established by Maris and funded through Alphabet. With approximately $2.4 billion under management and investments in Uber and Nest, the six-year-old fund is described as one of the hottest in Silicon Valley. Maris oversees all of GV’s funding activity and has a particular interest in next generation life sciences and artificial intelligence. He was instrumental in the formation of Google’s Calico project...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBusinessman
CountryUnited States of America
During the 2000 bubble, many companies rushed to go public before they had any revenue.
CEOs who can hire properly, that's the most important part of the job. The CEO's job is really to hire the right team and execute the vision second.
Antibiotics are so pervasive that they are often prescribed preemptively, as soon as patients report symptoms, before a diagnosis is made.
All the information in the world has been pretty dispersed, but Google's mission has been to organize it and make it universally accessible.
When you build relationships with entrepreneurs, they're not trying to optimize on price.
In genomics, there's a massive amount of information in which you can look for patterns and develop insights.
Big ideas we tend to like are the ones that seem impossible or crazy.
You want to work with people you are excited about and they are excited about you. It's a two-way street.
With a regular venture fund, you raise, let's say, a billion dollars, and then over the next three or four years, you've got to invest that money; otherwise, the people who invested with you will say, 'What are you doing? You're just collecting fees on our money.'
There are a number of start-ups in Europe that are able to reach beyond their own country. Take Spotify - Spotify just in Sweden isn't that interesting compared to Spotify all over the world.
We have this powerful lever at Google Ventures, which is to invest $200 million a year. This is a huge lever. It's not all going into one place; it's going into lots of start ups and founders and entrepreneurs, all of which are levers to try and change the world in one way or another.
You make a great investment in the consumer Internet, maybe you make a lot of money and create something useful, interesting, or fun. But in life sciences, you have a chance to be part of something that lets people live longer and healthier and not lose the people they care about. That is really profound.
When you apply computer science and machine learning to areas that haven't had any innovation in 50 years, you can make rapid advances that seem really incredible.
We actually have the tools in the life sciences to achieve anything that you have the audacity to envision. I just hope to live long enough not to die.