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.
Silicon Valley admires Maris’s resources, with Felicis Ventures’ Aydin Senkut telling the Wall Street Journal: “I do not know of any other corporate venture firms that have put scores up on the board so quickly.”
Maris has sat 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 four years indicates why the firm is well-regarded.
The firm is also beginning to make larger investments, backing US-based on-demand car service Uber last year in a $258m deal.
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 organisation in supporting them through the portfolio companies’ stages of development.
Maris worked at Sweden-listed investment fund Investor. 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.