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SAN FRANCISCO – The "Queen of the Internet" will soon have its own investment company.
Mary Meeker, a venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins, plans to leave the firm this year to create a new investment fund. This is a significant loss for Kleiner, who hired Ms. Meeker, a former Wall Street analyst known as the Queen of the Internet for her bullish internet shares coverage, in 2010.
Ms. Meeker leaves Kleiner while the venture capital firm has declined. It plans to invest in more mature and larger private companies, referred to as last-minute investments, in a separate entity. Three other investors at Kleiner – Mood Rowghani, Noah Knauf and Juliet de Baubigny – will join this new venture with Ms Meeker, who has not yet taken a name, she said in an interview.
Ms. Meeker, 58, made her name in the late 1990s as an analyst at Morgan Stanley. Since joining Kleiner, she has led her investments in more mature start-ups and has achieved several successful bets by investing in Facebook, Twitter, Spotify and Snap as companies have progressed. It also provides an annual report on Internet trends, often considered a compulsory reading in the technology sector.
Its release is the latest reorganization of Kleiner, a 46-year-old venture that has helped capitalize venture capital and successful companies such as Netscape, Sun Microsystems, Google and Amazon. In recent years, the company has struggled to produce the same successes. After the collapse of the dot-com, Kleiner missed the initial wave of social networking start-ups and focused on setting up technologies that would help the environment, which would 39 is turned into a costly detour. Over time, other venture capital companies have grown and attracted more buzz.
In 2016, Kleiner put an end to an investment program called Edge, designed to invest money in very young companies. Several venture capitalists have left the company, with John Doerr, the firm's longtime leader, away from daily responsibilities in 2016. Last year, Kleiner also created its own technology investment service within a separate entity called G2VP.
Kleiner's image was also undermined by a gender-based lawsuit filed by one of her former investors, Ellen Pao, and a 2015 lawsuit on the issue. The firm won the lawsuit, but Ms. Pao's allegations and treatment in the lawsuit received renewed attention last year with the publication of "Reset," her revealing book on her experience.
With the new firm, Ms. Meeker said, she and her partners are considering investing in mature technology start-ups, with the potential to pursue other contracts outside the United States. The split offers her and her partners more flexibility and concentration, she added.
"We believe that concentration, concentration, concentration and specialization will help us," she said.
It and its partners will also continue to invest money from the $ 1 billion KPCB Digital Growth Fund III, Kleiner said. More than half of the fund's funds have been deployed in start-ups.
Ted Schlein, Kleiner's long-time partner, will lead the firm's investment practice alongside Mamoon Hamid, who joined another venture capital firm, Social Capital, last year. Other partners include Eric Feng and Wen Hsieh.
Mr Schlein said that changes in the investment landscape, The influx of capital into private technology start-ups has been a determining factor in the practice of investing in older companies. He added that Kleiner would focus on investing in more nascent start-ups.
"We would prefer to be much more specialized and win and dominate the sectors we focus on," he said.
The company is trying to stabilize with a new generation of investors before raising capital for its next fund. In addition to hiring Mr. Hamid, known for his support of Slack, Box and Yammer, the company recently turned to Ilya Fushman, a former investor at Index Ventures.
Follow Erin Griffith on Twitter: @eringriffith.
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