Sun Microsystems chief researcher John Gage will leave the company and join venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. Gage, who joined Sun in 1982, will focus on "green" investments. Meanwhile, Sun wilts. After corporate clients slowed their tech infrastructure investments, Sun reported second quarter losses and Gage is the second top executive to leave the company in the last two weeks. Rival Hewlett-Packard poached Sun's top salesman Don Grantham. Sun says as many as another 2,500 could follow the pair out the door, though executive suites HP and Kleiner Perkins do not await them all.

Speaking to young graduates, including eight new Amazon.com hires, at Carnegie Mellon University's commencement ceremonies on Sunday, Jeff Bezos admitted that he's a nerd who does "a mean interpretation of Captain Picard," but is not a sexless monk. That classification was suggested by Amazon board member John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins. Citing Bezos as an example, Doerr said the perfect founder "is undistracted because he has no sex life." Bezos intends to remind the sex-negative venture capitalist of his many children at Amazon's next board meeting. John, if you need a retort, just exclaim how "resourceful" Mackenzie Bezos is.

After reading our take on VC blogger Fred Wilson's advice that entrepreneurs need to learn how to "ask for the order," Persai cofounder Ted Dziuba commented: "Methinks Fred Wilson doth blog too much." We disagree, if only because Wilson is such a fruitful source. But at a venture capital conference in San Francisco last week, Sequoia Capital's Michael Moritz seemed to second the notion. "There's a lot of hot air and arrogance in the business that we all would be better off without," Moritz told the conference crowd. Moritz said he disapproved of "useless pontificating in front of entrepreneurs working harder than we are." Kleiner Perkins VC John Doerr concurred: "At Kleiner, we're trying to watch our language." This from the guy who said the Internet was underhyped — and then invested in Friendster. (Photo by b_d_solis)

The Castilleja School, a posh private prep school for girls in Palo Alto with an annual tuition of $29,305, received a $1 million from the Benificus foundation, which lists John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins as president and his wife, Ann Howland Doerr, as vice president and secretary. The gift was part of the school's fundraising efforts, and granted the foundation the right to name the program chair of the math department after the couple. In what I'm sure is just a coincidence, the Doerr's daughter, Mary Doerr, is set to graduate with the class of 2009. Don't work too hard, young Mary — our tipster figures you'll do quite well on your report cards, as long as you don't take leadership lessons from Jimmy Wales, who recently lectured at the school. For parents a little harder on their luck, the cost to rename the computer lab is a mere $200,000.

John Doerr has closed a half-billion dollars in capital for the new Kleiner Perkins cleantech growth fund, with buddy Al Gore kicking in some dough from his Generation Investment deal. [CNet] (Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)

Former U.S. vice president Al Gore will chair a new $683 million Climate Solutions Fund from Generation Investment Management. The money will be used to seed public and private companies in long-term investments in carbon markets, renewable energy and cleaner fossil fuel use. Generation includes Gore's BFF John Doerr, the Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist, on its advisory board, and has partnered with Doerr's firm in the past. Doerr and Gore are currently raising another $400 million late-stage investment fund for Kleiner. Preaching climate-change end-times sermons can get the creative-capitalist congregation to dig deep when the collection plate comes around.

John Doerr and Al Gore have been taking their pitch for a new $400 million environment-friendly venture fund to prospective limited partners, and have already hired a veteran investment manager from Goldman Sachs to run it. This fund, which would invest in late-stage — that is, larger — clean energy and carbon reduction projects, comes in addition to the money already reserved for cleantech in KP's $600 million early-stage investment warchest. Helping to scale electric car manufacturing comes to mind — KP just threw some money at Norway's Think Global. And existing ethanol distillers could also benefit. After all, that kind of money would certainly buy a whole lot of Brazilian slave labor. (Photo by AP/Graham Hughes)

Norwegian electronic car manufacturer Think Global will ship 50,000 units to American customers, reports Alarm Clock. How much will this cleantech toy with a top speed of 65 mph set you back? $30,000. But hey, think of all the money you won't be spending on gas when you plug the car into our coal-fired power grid. The news comes as Think also announced funding from Kleiner Perkins, which presumably set the VC firm back more than $30,000. Video of the twee coupe zipping around Paris and London after the jump.

The New York Times reported earlier today that local electric car manufacturer Tesla Motors is suing Fisker Automotive, alleging breach of contract by a designer who took his trade secrets to the upstart rival. Earth2Tech pointed out that the two startup automakers are the pet projects of rival VCs, including Draper Fisher Jurvetson on Tesla's side and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers on Fisker's, making for a classic Valley catfight. But that's not the only case bedeviling Tesla.

Between 1970 and 2005, U.S. venture-backed companies created 10 million jobs and produced almost 17 percent of the country's GNP, and according to BusinessWeek editor Spencer Ante, one man is largely responsible for all of that. He is former Harvard Business School professor and "founder of the modern VC industry" Georges Doriot, the subject of Ante's new book Creative Capital. "[Doriot] was the first one to believe there was a future in financing entrepreneurs in an organized way," Lehman Brothers banker Arnold Kroll told Ante. Doriot's disciples went on to found or help run Greylock Partners, Fidelity Ventures and Kleiner Perkins. So now we know whom to blame. Photos from the Creative Capital book launch party held in New York last night, below.

Ordinarily, this would be good news: Vinod Khosla, the former Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist, and his wife Neeru Khosla, have donated $500,000 to Wikipedia's nonprofit parent, the Wikimedia Foundation. But founder Jimmy Wales's dalliances with other VCs — chiefly Roger McNamee and Marc Bodnick of Elevation Partners — have cast a shadow over every dollar the organization receives. Is this one of the $500,000 donations McNamee recently said he helped broker? And if so, what do he and Khosla expect to get in return? For starters, keep a close eye on Wikipedia's articles on ethanol, a major business interest of Khosla's. Wales, ordinarily Wikipedia's front man, makes no appearance in the press release, quoted below:

At Apple's iPhone SDK announcement today, Steve Jobs had "one more thing..." to reveal. Venture capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins came onstage to announce a $100,000,000 "iFund" to help "young developers with funding." This is a huge amount of money for developers, but no details on how it will be invested or allocated. Compare this to the $10 million Android programming contest that Google introduced with its Android mobile phone platform. Thanks to the dedicated gadget-hounds at Gizmodo for the pic and info.

BusinessWeek's Spencer Ante has another interview outtake with former Hewlett-Packard board member and Kleiner Perkins cofounder Tom Perkins. In it, Perkins explains how he helped turn around HP. Here's the 100-word version of the harrowing tale of board committees, patent policies and microprocessors oh my!

We already knew that David Cheriton, the Stanford professor who introduced Larry Page and Sergey Brin to the venture capitalists at Kleiner Perkins and who subsequently became a billionaire, was cheap. But we didn't fully realize the depths of his frugality. A Forbes piece on penny-pinching billionaires reveals that Cheriton not only refuses to pay for a Stanford parking permit, but he also reuses teabags. Gross. Furthermore, he still cuts his own hair. Doesn't Cheriton realize that Larry and Sergey will gladly provide their former college professor a free trim? (Photo courtesy of David Cheriton via Forbes)

When Kleiner Perkins announced former Vice President Al Gore would join the VC firm as a partner, there was a sweet little tidbit: Gore would be donating all of his VC salary to some envirohippie charity. But, as PE Week points out, VCs don't make most of their money off their salaries, making their fortunes instead on "carried interest" — a share in the profits from their investments — and management fees. So will the wedding-skipping future Sand Hill denizen be donating those monies, too? Keep in mind, he's not hurting for cash. A Kleiner spokesperson dodged the question, and Gore's office has yet to weigh in.

Does Al Gore's accountant choose the site of his magazine photo shoots? As we noted, Gore should be making much more use of his San Francisco condo now that he's a partner at Kleiner Perkins. But the Fortune article which broke the news of his hire lensed him in his Nashville, Tennessee home. Granted, I'm sure the Nashville manse is more filled with greenery than the St. Regis highrise, making it a better backdrop for Gore's new career as an environmental profiteer. That's not the only reason it's good for his image, though.

Anyone remember "Gore and Doerr"? That was Silicon Valley's dream presidential ticket in the late '90s, long before the Supreme Court nixed Al Gore's presidential career and John Doerr, the Kleiner Perkins VC, torpedoed his own golden reputation by missing out on all the hot Internet companies of this millennium. Gore and Doerr are teaming up again, with Gore joining Kleiner Perkins as a partner specializing in greentech startups. Finally, he has a real excuse for buying that condo in San Francisco's St. Regis tower: His previous Valley gigs, as an Apple board member and a senior advisor to Google, were thoroughly part-time, if incredibly lucrative.

Kleiner Perkins partner Randy Komisar freaked you out a little when he said the firm was done with Web 2.0, didn't he? ""We have absolutely no interest in funding Web 2.0 companies," he told Silicon Valley Watcher. Well, don't worry. Kleiner Perkins, which backed Amazon.com, Google, AOL, and, um, Friendster, remains in the game.

"... Kleiner Perkins has halted investments in Web 2.0. This would mean a lot more to me if I knew exactly what Web 2.0 was — I've been reading about it for years now, have co-organized two conferences on it, and I still don't know." — Canadian lawyer Rob Hyndman, who hasn't read Valleywag's Web 2.0 crib sheet. [Rob Hyndman]

Can you believe that last week's Web 2.0 Summit was the fourth such conference? Its humble beginnings were barely in evidence, as venture capitalists, corporate biz-dev types, and M&A scouts seemed to outnumber the startup founders they were trying to hunt down. Friday afternoon was a return to the old school, however, with Flickr cofounder Stewart Butterfield and LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick among the presenters. Sadly, John Doerr, the expert inflater of the first dotcom bubble, did not cry. Check the photo gallery for the conference's final, terrifying orgy of schmoozing. Some participants were so exhausted that, by the closing cocktail party, they were making deals with their eyes closed.