Quotes from Bill Maris

The reality is the technology exists now to extend life and have people live healthier, happier lives. Not to be kind of immortal - that's not what I'm talking about.

I sign off not only every investment, but every dollar that goes out the door - I'm aware of it.

I would draw a really big distinction between competition, or potential competition, and a conflict of interest. A conflict of interest implies wrongdoing, whereas competition is really healthy.

We have this powerful lever at Google Ventures, which is to invest $200 million a year. This is a huge lever. It's not all going into one place; it's going into lots of start ups and founders and entrepreneurs, all of which are levers to try and change the world in one way or another.

I'm interested in the ideas that sound a little crazy, such as radical life extension, curing cancer, being able to create a simulation of the human brain and map every neuron.

Silicon Valley has been a technology capital like New York is a financial capital.

As computer intelligence gets better, what will be possible when we interface our brains with computers? It might sound scary, but early evidence suggests otherwise: interfacing brains with machines can be helpful in treating traumatic brain injury, repairing spinal cord damage, and countless other applications.

I used to be a health-care investor a long time ago in the public markets. One thing I learned that we tried to apply here is that investing in small molecules, trying to invest in the next treatment, there's an element of gambling to that.

To create exponential growth in health care, we need to put tremendous resources and focus behind the best human minds working in this field.

I can make it very clear: I get paid if we make good investments. And if we don't, I don't get paid. I have no incentive to sell our companies to Google; the entrepreneurs get to decide that. We are minority shareholders.

You want to work with people you are excited about and they are excited about you. It's a two-way street.

Humans are terrible at predicting the future. We really overestimate what we can do in the short term and underestimate what we can do in the long term... If we can glimpse even a couple of years into the future, even that's difficult to do.

I contemplated a career at NIH at one point. I have a neuroscience background.

All the information in the world has been pretty dispersed, but Google's mission has been to organize it and make it universally accessible.

Say you have cancer - you have this broad thing we call cancer; we're going to irradiate you and pump this poisonous material into you and hope more of the bad stuff dies than the good. That is going to seem so medieval when we can fix it on a genetic level, and Foundation Medicine is the first step to diagnosing it on a genetic level.

You make a great investment in the consumer Internet, maybe you make a lot of money and create something useful, interesting, or fun. But in life sciences, you have a chance to be part of something that lets people live longer and healthier and not lose the people they care about. That is really profound.

There are a lot of billionaires in Silicon Valley, but in the end, we are all heading to the same place. If given the choice between making a lot of money or finding a way to make people live longer, what do you choose?

If you want to invest in early-stage technologies, putting a timeframe on it does behold you to Silicon Valley economics. You've got a certain time period where you have to make the money. And you have to invest that money whether you find good companies or not.

As life expectancy extends beyond 80 years in some parts of the world, more people are struggling with brain diseases. For older people, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and other conditions become a major impediment to quality of life.

We can get much better outcomes from people if we understand the genetic basis of the exact cancer that they have, what interventions might be most effective against it, what's worked in the past and what hasn't.

If I were to leave and raise a venture fund, I would have to find 10 or 100 LPs. They would all give me a bunch of money, and I would take a percentage of that to pay myself. They would expect me to invest that over the next three years, and they want that money back in seven or eight years.

With a regular venture fund, you raise, let's say, a billion dollars, and then over the next three or four years, you've got to invest that money; otherwise, the people who invested with you will say, 'What are you doing? You're just collecting fees on our money.'

Venture funds get beaten up for not investing in important things. Okay, if you want venture funds to invest in important things, then don't penalize or make fun of them when those important things don't work.

Google Ventures has a direct financial incentive to ensure the companies we invest in succeed.