Deborah Hopkins moved Kleiner Perkins' corporate venturing from New York to Silicon Valley in 2009 after meeting entrepreneur Cyriac Roding of Shopkick. She argues that corporate-startup partnerships work when the corporation uses its scale and channels to help startups grow, not when lawyers bog deals down. In one early deal, lawyers treated a multimillion-dollar investment like a multibillion-dollar one until Hopkins forced them to streamline.
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I was at Kleiner Perkins one day in 2009 and I had just met an entrepreneur, Cyriac Roding, who runs Shopkick right here in Palo Alto. And I was just so blown away by this young man. And I thought, what are we doing here in New York? I mean, there's no way you're going to get a sense of what is happening here by being the big guy from New York flying in. So I went back and said, I think we need to go to Silicon Valley. And the boss said, go. So off we went. And then we really did most of that recruiting here. But when we got here, we recognized very quickly because as Tina mentioned, we are also investing in startups. We recognized very quickly that success was absolutely counted on us being able to demonstrate that we can be great partners. Because when you're a startup or a vc, really corporate venturing is something that's like, oh yeah, we've seen this before. They come for two years, they go away. You know, aye, you're really renting a house, right? I said, no, I sold everything. Really? Honestly, he sent you here? Yes. And so there was a somewhat disbelief that we were truly seriously dedicated to all this. But it was really being able to demonstrate that obviously, as a company with our rich history and our incredible channels and our volumes, if we can help a startup really scale, if we can teach them how to scale, it's a gold mine for them, right? But on the other hand, it can be a nightmare if you absolutely bury them in legal baloney and procurement issues and all sorts of challenges. And I have to say, the very first one we did, thank God Cyriac, I will tell you, he would stand here right now and say, we're wonderful. But in the process, the first one we did, our lawyers and the procurement guys all thought that us making a couple million dollar investment in the startup was absolutely like making a three billion dollar investment in something else. And so we had to go through this whole process and I remember him calling me one day saying, if you don't get these guys off my neck, I'm jumping out of the bus. And so we did and we figured that out. And now last year we met with over 600 startup companies and we invested in eight of those. And we're really, really excited about that. And being here in the Valley has really been a core component of that for us. Very exciting.
