Climate Corp: $1B exit to Monsanto
Google Ventures' investment in Climate Corp — David Friedberg's company — resulted in a $1 billion exit to Monsanto.
Snapshot · All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Bill Maris: How Google Could Crush AI Competitors, Why Small Funds Win, and AI's Atari Stage
Explore episode
Jun 9, 2026
Where this was said
Why small VC funds beat big ones on average
At 12:04 · chapter starts 9:51
In 2007, Google handed Maris a challenge: build a coherent venture fund from scratch. He partnered with Rich Miner, co-founder of Android, trekked up and down Sand Hill Road, and devised a plan to collect every piece of historical venture data they could find. Then they applied machine learning — Google wouldn't allow the word 'AI,' insisting it was '100 years away' and would 'freak people out' — to design the ideal portfolio construction through millions of simulations. [1] — Bill Maris "When tasked with creating Google Ventures in 2007, Maris gathered every piece of venture data he could find and ran millions of portfolio s…" 09:30 Executives thought the plan was crazy. But between 2009 and 2018, Google Ventures is estimated to have returned approximately 4.1x, with the investments Maris personally led performing even better. His third lesson distils into one rule: don't bet against computer science applied to the right problem at the right time.
GV estimated returns: ~4.1x
Bill Maris estimated Google Ventures' returns at approximately 4.1x using publicly available data over the 2009–2018 period.
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