Silicon Valley Gets Potomac Fever

Some of the Gore-Doerr agenda is already being translated into action. In late June, at a Gore-sponsored conference on the campus of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, Doerr announced the creation of a $2 million venture-capital fund to help subsidize the startup costs of charter schools. The near-term goal, Doerr said, is to have the fund reach $5 million.

Kim Polese followed Doerr's announcement with a demonstration of a prototype of the group's second initiative: the Education Dashboard, a Net tool that would allow parents to download real-time information about their childrens' schools. With Gore at her side, Polese confidently unveiled the Dashboard with the kind of patter usually reserved for product announcements at trade shows. She walked the enthusiastic audience through the opening image of a school front and into a classroom where parents can access information on their children's attendance records, test scores, or grades as well as copies of homework assignments, lesson plans, and reading lists. The software also lets parents join chat rooms with other parents, seek tutoring help, and exchange email with teachers and school administrators -- opening up the home-school connection. Two firms in the Network have already committed to providing free email to students and teachers in California schools.

The venture fund puts real money on the line. And the Education Dashboard makes the promise of Web-based connectivity seem relevant and plausible. At the same time, some of this agenda sounds trivial -- how much value would really come from handing out cell-phones? And none of it directly addresses questions of unequal resources between rich and poor districts. But the insights are genuinely powerful: Gore has already begun using the group's lens in making his case for reinventing education. "The gridlock of traditional politics," says Andreessen, "is opening an opportunity for the issues that we're raising."

The Valley of Politics

Intriguing as these ideas may be, Doerr and his allies will be only a fleeting force if they can't overcome their high-tech colleagues' disdain for politics. "The conceit of Silicon Valley is that we think that what we are doing is more important than Washington, so historically people have chosen not to engage," says Paul Lippe, vice president for business development at Synopsys Inc., a design-automation software company in Mountain View, California.

That sentiment is starting to erode. Proposition 211's legacy is that it politically motivated an entire generation of Silicon Valley leaders who had earlier been indifferent -- none more important than Doerr. The son of Republican parents, Doerr grew up in St. Louis and went to Rice University and Harvard Business School during the Vietnam era. In general, says Doerr, he didn't "have any strong political bearings." After college he joined Intel, first as project manager, then as a frenetically successful sales representative. In 1980 he jumped to Kleiner Perkins; since then he's funded companies that have changed the face of the economy: Compaq, Lotus, Sun Microsystems, Netscape, Amazon.com, and more.

Throughout all this, Doerr's experience with politics was little more than glancing. Yet when he turned to politics in the battle against Proposition 211, Doerr proved a natural: he had extraordinary energy and focus, and, just as important, a unique position to reach out across the industry. It was during the fight against 211 that Doerr and his allies first conceived the idea of a permanent organization. To plot strategy, the group would gather at 7 AM Monday morning "dawn patrol" meetings at Kleiner Perkins. One of Doerr's early realizations: the campaign was teaching them an expensive lesson. They needed an ongoing political presence. "We realized that spending $40 million to keep a bad thing from happening was kind of the way that Silicon Valley had always done politics,'' he says.

Doerr did not seem at all daunted by the prospect of building a political organization in a community famous for its hostility to both politics and organization. According to Wade Randlett, a Democratic political operative who worked against 211 and is now helping to organize the new group, Doerr's attitude was, "I start companies. This is a crappy little $2 million-a-year organization. Why wouldn't I be able to start that?''

"Organizing" may be the wrong word for the structure they are assembling. Doerr and Randlett are insistent that the Technology Network fit the fluid model of the best new companies. The model, says Doerr, is "shared information but individual action." If one member of the group in Texas likes Gov. George W. Bush, for example, he or she would be free to canvass for contributions and endorsements for him by email or fax throughout the membership. If another Texas member wanted to canvass for Bush's opponent in next year's gubernatorial race, he or she would be free to do that.