Top VC firm Kleiner Perkins adds Jessica Owns
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| Jessica Owns |
Living up to that label, we point out the firm has just added Jessica Owens to its team, to work on investments in pandemic preparedness and bio-defense.
Jessica did research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which resulted in the discovery of genetic shift among "Hantavirus" strains. She also worked at Genentech, did corporate finance on the life science team at investment bank Robertson Stephens and diagnostic research at Thomas Weisel Partners.
She has an MBA from Harvard Business School, an MS from the Department of Cancer Biology at Stanford University.
Personnel moves like this are significant because it shows where the high-profile firm (it backed Google, Amazon, Netscape, Sun, to name just a few) is going. John Doerr, the firm's leader, says he's spending half his time on clean-tech, and half on investments in the pandemic/health area. The firm has made a series of hires in this health area, and Owens is just the latest example.
We're wondering, if Larry and Sergey of Google were looking for cash now, instead of in 1999, whether they'd approach Kleiner. The firm has been relatively quiet on the whole Web 2.0 phenom.
http://www.siliconbeat.com/cgi-bin/mt331/mt-tb.cgi/1867
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Tracked: August 9, 2006 6:40 AM
"The firm has been relatively quiet on the whole Web 2.0 phenom."
Your choice of words, imho, answers your question - 'phenom'. From reading your blog regularly, it seems to me that Kleiner Perkins has shifted to a far longer term view of the world and thus, where technologies are going. 'Phenom's are, by virtue of their nature, short lived, whereas the pattern shown by clean-tech, green-tech, healthcare, particularly pandemics, point towards a more sustainable direction, or, in the worst case case scenario, utter disaster. Either way, KP will be ready and prepared.
niti bhan on August 8, 2006 11:39 PMComment link
that's fair. that wasn't intended to be critical. just an observation. you see sequoia investing in companies like YouTube, Meebo, and you're just not seeing Kliener as active.
Matt Marshall on August 8, 2006 11:44 PMComment link
too much time spent talking about kleiner perkins. remember go, onsale, @home, excite, and friendster? all kleiner perkins. not perfect batters by any means.
Peter Mills on August 9, 2006 12:54 AMComment link
I think "Jessica will be a great pandemic" ....
Now if someone could tell me about the results from recent less publicized results of recent CDC testing indicating that cross fertilizing of the dangerous H5N1 with mammalian viruses resulted in NO human transmissible variants ( ie H5N1 passive genetic mutation did not result in the predicted scary pandemic virus variant ... YET ).
OK it still is possible, but it looks far less likely than the fearmongers indicate...
ie more mutations are needed than trivially attainable in a short time.
Comment link
Did you mean to write "Jessica Owens" in the title of the post? ... or perhaps you meant "Jessica Pwns"?
Omar on August 9, 2006 1:53 PMComment link
