he knows personally, or who come recommended by people he knows well.
No doubt hundreds of entrepreneurs in San Diego and beyond are now lining up to be his friend. Close to 700 people attended the summit in a harbor-front hotel in downtown San Diego.
As a speaker, Maris comes across as a regular guy—affable and disarming. “Despite the fact that I’m on stage, I’m an introvert,” he said. “I prefer to listen than to talk.”
He likes to weave science fiction throughout his presentation, salting his talk with allusions to Star Wars and Star Trek. He began his talk with a popular quote from the science fiction author William Gibson: “The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed,” and he even offered a few examples. As an investor who bets on the technologies that will become ubiquitous, he said, “One way to think about the future is to think about the present [and to ask], ‘how did we get here?’”
“One of the reasons I’m a big Star Trek fan,” he told the audience, “is because it has an optimistic vision of the future.”
On the other hand, I’ve been told that Maris wanted to name his new venture firm Section 31 as an homage to Star Trek’s officially non-existent intelligence and defense security organization, which operates outside the constraints of Starfleet’s usual ethical protocols. (Section 32 was deemed to be non-infringing.)
Such stealthiness also seems to suit him. His presentation included endearing photos of his dorm rooms at Middlebury and of his original office (where he slept on the floor) at Burlee.com, the Web-hosting service he founded in Burlington, VT. But by the time everything was said and done, Maris had provided few specifics about Section 32 and his investment strategy.
As it turns out, Maris has been living for many years in the San Diego area. The reason was easy to explain, Maris said. “My wife [the singer-songwriter Tristan Prettyman] is from Del Mar, and she said if you want to marry me than move to Del Mar.” They married in 2014.
When he started working on his ideas for a corporate venture arm in 2007 and 2008, Maris said “it was just me. No team.” Under his leadership, though, GV expanded to more than 70 employees in seven offices around the world. By the time he left a year ago, Maris said GV had invested about $2.5 billion in roughly 400 companies, including Uber, Nest, Slack, Silver Springs Networks, and 23andme.
[Corrected to show Flatiron was not one of the last GV investments made under Maris] Maris singled out one investment that GV made under his leadership in 2011—Flatiron Health, a New York healthtech company developing a technology platform that enables cancer researchers and caregivers to gain new insights from every patient’s treatment. It was right at the intersection of data and life sciences, Maris said, and that’s just what he’s looking for.
