John Doerr testifies at trial brought by ex-mentee Pao

SAN FRANCISCO — "Women are almost always better leaders than men."

With those words, John Doerr launched into his defense of his firm's treatment of women, and by extension, former employee Ellen Pao, after hours on the stand.

Pao is suing venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers for $16 million, citing gender discrimination and retaliation. She left as a junior partner in 2012 and is now interim CEO at Reddit, a popular news aggregation site.

Doerr hired Pao in 2005 and the two had been in a very close working relationship. In an e-mail to Doerr in 2007, Pao said, "It was a real honor to be thought of as a surrogate daughter."

On Tuesday, Doerr testified in her bias trial against the firm he's worked at for 35 years.

Doerr had been on the stand for four hours when Kleiner lawyer Lynne Hermle asked whether he supported women.

"I'm really committed to trying to get more females starting companies, succeeding at those companies, serving on boards and succeeding in the tech industry overall," he said.

DEFENSE LISTS WOMEN

Hermle went through a list of women Doerr had hired at Kleiner or at companies the venture capital firm had invested in, including partners Mary Meeker and Megan Quinn, Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures, Daphne Koller of Corsara, Kathy Savitt of Yahoo and Tracy DiNunzio of Tradesy.

Still, Doerr acknowledged that "the number of women in venture capital is pathetic."

Diverse groups make better decisions, and more than half of the customers of the companies he funds are women, "so it's crazy that there aren't more females in our industry and that we're not diverse," he said.

Having established Doerr's bona fides as a supporter of women in the field, Hermle clarified that in Pao's contract, her employment was "at will," meaning it could be terminated at any time for any reason.

In her 2012 employment review, "we said to Ellen, 'You do not possess the interpersonal skills within the partnership that make you an effective team player,'" said Doerr.

Pao's lawyer, Alan Exelrod, noted that this review came several months after Pao had filed suit against Kleiner Perkins for sex discrimination.

CHIEF OF STAFF

Doerr is a legendary venture capitalist whose early investments in firms such as Amazon, Symantec, Google and Twitter have made him, and Kleiner Perkins, very wealthy.

Pao was hired as his chief of staff in July of 2005. It is a plum, high-level position that required both a technical degree and, ideally, either a legal or business degree. Pao had all three.

The job consisted of coordinating and "leveraging" Doerr's time so he could be more productive, as well as aiding him in finding investments. Over the years the position has been held by both men and women, many of whom went on to become first junior and then senior partners at the firms.

Doerr thought highly of Pao's skills. In fact, when she wanted to transition from being his chief of staff into a junior investor position, he said it might take two staffers to replace her.

"It may take two people, i.e. a writer/editor and a technically qualified junior partner," Doerr wrote. He noted from the stand with visible pride that Pao was an "excellent writer, she was editor of the (Daily) Princetonian."

Doerr has been characterized as a strong promoter of women by Kleiner staff on the stand during the trial.

However on multiple occasions Exelrod tried to paint the firm as a workplace where women could not succeed because they were women.

PARTNER, MOTHER

Exelrod noted that in an e-mail, Doerr described Tina Ju, on the firm's China team, as "a highly respected female senior partner with proven venture experience. Patient, firm, savvy, founder of firms, venture capital investor and mother with two young kids."

However, a male partner merely got, "considered by many to be 'the best.'"

When Exelrod asked Doerr if the male partner had children, he replied, "Yes."

Under cross examination, Doerr told Hermle that he wrote those words only because he was proud of Ju's work/life balance. "She worked 7 by 24, she was always on the ball," he said.

ALL ABOUT THE WORK

The trial offered an interesting peek into the all-encompassing nature of working at Kleiner Perkins, where staff were expected to do whatever it took to make sure that their work, and therefore the investing, went smoothly.

In a review of Pao's work that Doerr wrote in 2007, he noted she'd had some friction with another junior partner, Trae Vassallo, a woman.

He wrote that it was a top priority for Pao to build a relationship of "trust and cordiality" with Vassallo and that it could take spending their free time together.

To do that, he suggested she "challenge Trae in a tennis match. Cycle till you both are exhausted. Road trips, travel together, to China, other places may help."

MORE ON THE PAO-KLEINER PERKINS TRIAL