As managing partner of Google Ventures, Bill Maris has rapidly established search engine Google’s independent corporate venturing unit as an investment force, securing a mandate to deploy $300m a year, having originally been provided with $100m a year in 2009.
Only last month he could be seen appearing on CNBC, Bloomberg, and in a Wall Street Journal interview, putting forward his message that his job “is to discern the fine line between crazy and genius”.
Silicon Valley admires Maris’s resources, with Felicis Ventures’ Aydin Senkut telling the Wall Street Journal last month: “I don’t know of any other corporate venture firms that have put scores up on the board soquickly.”
Maris sits on the boards of companies such as US-based heating company Nest and US-based antibody discovery business Adimab and his other investments include energy management group Silver Spring Networks, personal genetics start-up 23andMe and weather service Climate Corporation.
The diversity and number of deals struck by Maris – and more broadly Google Ventures – in the past three years indicates why the firm is well-regarded.
The aim is to use academic insights to devise a strategy as a self-proclaimed “radically different kind of venture capital fund” and then back the vision with plenty of cash.
Google Ventures under Maris backs a large number of early-stage companies as the search engine is looking for disruptive start-ups in almost any field and then applies a corporate style of organisationin supporting them through the portfolio companies’ stages of development.
But beyond academia, Maris understands venture investing is supporting the best entrepreneurs, including Anne Wojcicki, his former colleague at Sweden-listed investment fund Investor where they both worked in New York City after graduation.
Wojcicki, who married Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, is effectively part of the Google family – her sister, Susan, is a senior vice-president at Google, and their family garage housed Brin and co-founder Larry Page when they were setting the company up as a spin-off from Stanford.
After leaving Investor, Maris founded web hosting company Burlee, reportedly when he was in his 20s, which was sold to Web.com in 2002 for an undisclosed sum.
Maris previously worked at Duke University’s neurobiology department as a researcher and graduated top of class in neuroscience from Middlebury College, California.