GV, a Google-backed VC team, has vast powers but cannot do anything

David Krane is in an enviable position. As CEO of GV, a venture firm funded entirely by Google to the tune of $1 billion a year, his team of about 100 can make a lot of bets, with few noticeable limitations.

During the TechCrunch StrictlyVC event Earlier this month in San Francisco, Krane said GV has invested in a staggering 800 companies in the past five years and has invested more than $10 billion in its 15-year history.

None have achieved as much in one shot as Uber 258 million dollars Series C was funded exclusively through GV in 2013. Even so, GV still occasionally goes big, such as injecting $140 million into data infrastructure startup Cribl in August. 319 million dollars Series E tour.

In fact, because GV invests purely for financial returns, Krane says, there are few limits to how it can operate. To date, this has meant that GV has invested mainly in the US, with around half a billion invested in Europe, its second largest market. This meant dividing half his time between life sciences, healthcare and biotechnology, and the other half into the all-encompassing “digital” category.

That degree of autonomy also meant not moving around the red line separating what GV could fund from what CapitalG, Alphabet’s growth-stage outfit, could fund.

When asked if the two groups were jockeying for a deal or a larger stake in the company — both teams are investors in Stripe, Cribl and some other outfits — Krane downplayed the proposal, saying, “We’re funded by the same source,” saying, “Well there is a secret to communicating.”

Indeed, aside from partnering with something like OpenAI, which directly competes with Google, one of the only obvious ones is to actively entice talent within Google to start a company so that GV can be the first to fund it.

Speaking of members of NotebookLM, Google’s AI-driven note-taking tool, we asked who recently left to start his own company — a story TechCrunch broke the day we sat down with Krane. When we asked out loud if GV could fund them, Krane said, “We definitely know some of the people on the NotebookLM team, and we knew about this team that was spinning.”

“Sometimes there are teams that leave Google that go on to start a startup, and GV will see that and GV will step in,” he said. “… We haven’t created a huge vacuum to encourage people to leave Alphabet and pursue startups, but it’s happening. “Alphabet now has a very impressive diaspora of people who have spent time in the startup parts, and many of them are in our networks, and we’ve funded some of them.”

When asked how Google feels about GV writing a big check to people coming out the door — it keeps them close to the mothership, but also might encourage them to try their luck — Krane continued: “Yeah, I think it’s exactly that. right. The goal, if you’re at Google, is to stay at Google and create transformational products.” But “some people don’t last forever,” he said. “Some people go after startups, and then we can show up in that conversation.”

To learn more, you can listen watch the full conversation or below.