DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar: Brook Byers - Partner, KPCB

Brook Byers has been a venture capital investor since 1972. He has been closely involved with more than forty new technology based ventures, over half of which have already become public companies. He formed the first Life Sciences practice group in the venture capital profession in 1984 and led KPCB to become a premier venture capital firm in the medical, healthcare, and biotechnology sectors. KPCB has invested in and helped build over 90 Life Sciences companies which are developing hundreds of products to treat major underserved medical needs representing huge markets in the nearly two trillion dollar healthcare sector.

Brook was the founding President and then Chairman of four biotechnology companies which were incubated in KPCB's offices and went on to become public companies with an aggregate market value over $8 Billion. He is currently on the Board of Directors of six companies, most recently joining Genomic Health Incorporated, Five Prime Therapeutics, Nanofluidics and XDx, Inc.. He was formerly a Director of Idec Pharmaceuticals (Chairman), Athena Neurosciences (Chairman), Signal Pharmaceuticals, Arris Pharmaceuticals, Pharmacopeia, Ligand Pharmaceuticals (Chairman), Hybritech (Chairman), Genprobe, Nanogen, and others. These companies have pioneered the medical uses of molecular biology, monoclonal antibodies, molecular diagnostics and genomics.

Brook was President and a Director of the Western Association of Venture Capitalists and is a contributing author to the book “Guide to Venture Capital”. He is currently a Board member of the University of California at San Francisco Medical Foundation, the California Healthcare Institute, the New Schools Foundation, Stanford's Bio-X Advisory Council, the Stanford Eye Council and TechNet. He is Co-Chair of the current five year, $1.4 billion, UCSF Capital Campaign. He was formerly a Director of the Entrepreneurs Foundation, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco , the Stanford Graduate School of Business Advisory Council, That Man May See (UCSF) Vision Research Foundation (Chairman) and the Georgia Tech Advisory Board.

Raised in Atlanta , Georgia , Brook graduated in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech and received an MBA from Stanford.

What is ETL?

The DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar (ETL) is a weekly seminar series on entrepreneurship, co-sponsored by BASES (a student entrepreneurship group), Stanford Technology Ventures Program, and the Department of Management Science and Engineering.

The seminar is free and open to public. It also functions as a class called "Management Science and Engineering 472".