John Doerr Early Apple Apple 2.0

John Doerr is a former Intel salesman who became a venture capitalist in 1980, when he joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He is one of Silicon Valley's most famous VC, having invested in Netscape, Amazon, and Google, among others. Doerr has watched the career of Steve Jobs from the early days. Jobs came to KPCB while he wanted to raise capital for NeXT in 1986, but Doerr turned him down. He eventually became one of Steve's closest friends. Doerr can also be credited for convincing Steve of creating the iPhone App Store, which he backed with $200 million of equity financing for app developers (iFund).