Google Ventures founders: Why startups?

ORIGINAL: Google Ventures

Google Ventures is a radically different kind of venture-capital fund. Meet a few of the startup founders who have chosen to work with us.http://www.googleventures.com

Google Ventures Into New Technology - CNBC video.cnbc.comWilliam Maris, Google Ventures managing partner, reveals Google's plans to invest $1billion in new biotech start-ups.

If you are a disruptor in the world of technology and looking for funding, google's investment arm is planning to invest $1 billion in startups in the next five years. joining us is Bill Maris, googleventures managing partner. we happened to be talking yesterday with cramer and he talked about one of the brightest spots in the country is biotech and biotech investing and immediately when we hear google and google ventures 

I'm thinking i don't know, maybe i'm sick of social media but every idea someone has when they come in here is something that prevents me from actually socializing with anyone. i'm just going to be in my basement, like i don't know what you do on that stuff, but aren't there things other than just the digital age? sounds like you need to talk to different people. yeah. there's a whole world of innovation outside of social media, a huge growth area but we're investing a lot of money. any in biotech? sciences to are sure. what are the most exciting areas in. there are two areas. one i'm interested in macro trends that are five or ten years out, cryogenics nanotechnology, and then there are sort of trends that are occurring sooner, there's a company called foundation medicine that we're invested in, that's created cancer diagnostic, the euro cancer so we know what cancer you have and treat that -- personalized medicine. exactly. before our time but it's already happening in certain instances.correct. it's the way medicine is going to go. i wondered do we hit a wall, it's all media, isn't it? this social is somehow getting to people to advertise something but eventually you need something that you're actually selling them, right? we are invested in over 100 companies now, some of which are in social media, many of which make things. media in general seems like it's all we're going to have left. the media talks a lot about media. it's not jockeying but there are other things in the world, too. cryogenics, that's going to be a feasible thing and how many years? like Walt Disney type? part of my job is to discern the fine line between crazy and genius. did you see the article in the New York Times today, one in five kidneys get thrown out. we have a kidney supply of transplant items. you're touching on another trend. i didn't see the article. lead story, one in five kidneys get wasted. there's another trend we're interested in, organ replacement. the technology exists to do these things. to make your own organ. grow them? to grow them in a lab. which would not be subject to an immune response if it was your own. if it was from a pleuripotent deduced from your own stem cells. how realistic is cryogenics? to discern between crazy, realistic and impossible, we're looking for entrepreneurs that have a healthy disregard for the impossible. if i start from a place by saying that's not realistic or not possible we won't make any investments. so i think it's very realistic. Do you think of your mission differently than the other venture capitalists in the valley in terms of return, in terms of time horizon? I think so. significantly different. We have a much broader and deep at a larger picture, we're investing for return first, but -- return first is -- return first is a venture fund, we get paid on our returns but there's a bigger picture here, the reason that i'm doing this job, that we're looking for entrepreneurs that want to change the world for the better. and that's important. so i do think our values are a little bit different than the typical sort of venture capitalist you might meet. when you say you have a deeper team, you have a lot of experts that you can call on to help people and mentor them through? typical venture fund is a confederation of eight or ten partners responsible for t full life cycle of a company. we have over 50 people on the team who are recruiters and engineers and designers and entrepreneurs, people that have built things before to try and help founders solve problems they encounter as they grow their businesses.sorry to harp on this, cryogenics, i want to know if this is a reality we could see sometime in my lifetime. it's a reality now. there are companies that specialize in cryogenics, alcore, if there is a leading company in this space, i think it would be them. it's going to sound crazy again but if you want, after you die, they'll freeze your body in the hopes that someday medicine will be able to kind of reconstitute your consciousness. oh, great, how much is that going to cost when we do that for every person? didn't walt disney? it's not end of life we're capping in buying our own policies. we have to buy our own policies to come back alive. you immediately cut the cost, making our lives better. that is something we have to think about. that's an amazing idea.we still have Einstein's brain,don't with he? i wouldn't know. i think we do. all right. are you rich yet? that's not really a goal.that's not really -- i mean -- we're three or four years into the found, had a bunch of exits but these are long cycles and you asked about our time horizon, we think sort of longer term than most VCs. any exits to google itself,