Advice for General Powell — marshal your email carefully
John Doerr, one of the leading partners at venture firm Kleiner Perkins, told us Tuesday that former secretary of state Colin Powell “is the fastest responder on email of anyone we�ve been working with.”
They’ve been corresponding over the past few weeks, since Powell agreed to join Kleiner.
This reminded us of a recent email Kleiner Perkins mistakenly sent us, an event that summarizes the possible perils of email, and one the General might contemplate now that he’s rejoined the business world — these days abuzz with email correspondence.
Not long ago, Bill Joy, another relatively new partner at Kleiner Perkins, accidentally sent us (Matt) an email, providing us with Joy’s due diligence on a company Kleiner was looking at. He’d obviously meant to send it to Matt Murphy, a partner at the fund whose name in Joy’s contacts book is probably just below “Matt Marshall.” We at SiliconBeat welcome the dealflow. We won’t share any of the content Joy imparted, but what we can say is that Joy is at the top of his game. We were wondering how active the co-founder of Sun Microsystems would be these days, but the email — full of insightful comments, deep analysis, and written in crisp, elegant prose — made us realize Joy is going to be the real stuff for Kleiner.
Powell, too, confirmed that he’s an avid user of email. “We have wifi in the house,” he told us in the interview for this earlier story. “I live on email. Email and the Internet have essentially eliminated time and space as barriers to communication. In my days as Secretary of State, when I wanted to speak with someone in China or Europe, I always had to be sensitive to the time zone. No more!”
General, we welcome correspondence from Kleiner’s newest “strategic” limited partner. Just make sure you don’t send the info to anyone else!
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
