Venture capitalist John Doerr has been on a tear recently to reassert his dominance in the tech industry — perhaps in part to make up for passing on Twitter, which he recently admitted to regretting. Doerr, whose firm, Kleiner Perkins Cauflied & Byers, was synonymous with the nineties dot-com boom, recently poached Morgan Stanley’s “Queen of the Net,” Mary Meeker. And in the bubble versus boom debate, he’s been near-euphoric about the potential he sees in the current wave of entrepreneurs. At the Web 2.0 conference, when Union Square Ventures’s Fred Wilson, who saw this whole social-smartphone intersection coming, said KPCB wasn’t “late to the market … they just decided to double down in a very big way.” Nowhere is that more in evidence than in the recent bidding war over Twitter. After a Russian firm, DST, which also owns 10 percent of Facebook, made an offer that valued the company at more than $3 billion, “alpha investor” Doerr has led the charge, driving up the price to $4 billion. An inside source on the negotiations told TechCrunch, “Doerr wants to own part of Twitter, and Doerr generally gets what he wants” Hey, what’s a little a ton of extra cash to get people to stop calling you the Guy Who Said No to Twitter?
Bidding War For Twitter Raises Valuation To Nearly $4 Billion. Kleiner Perkins Currently In Pole Position [TechCrunch via VentureBeat]
