May 18, 2017

After stepping down from his position of chief executive officer with GV, the venture capital unit launched out of Google in August of last year, Bill Maris has announced his next project – the launching of a new fund to be called Section 32.

Maris’ departure from GV took many in the venture capital space by surprise, but Maris told the New York Times that it was the next step in a natural progression.

“I looked around at how well GV has done and said mission accomplished,” Maris said in an interview. “If you’re a chef and you have the finest ingredients and work in a beautiful kitchen and bake the cake, it’s time to go cook something else.”

Initially upon leaving GV, Maris reportedly was gearing up to raise $230 million for a healthcare-related fund with expectation of a close in December 2016, however he decided to scrap the project in favor of a smaller $150 million venture.

“There was something about it that didn’t feel entirely right,” he said. “People sometimes make the mistake of judging funds by size,” Maris told the New York Times.

Maris will be the sole general partner of Section 32, named in reference to Section 31, an intelligence unit from the Star Trek series, which will be run from his home in San Diego instead of Silicon Valley.

With a war chest of approximately $150 million on hand, Section 32 will invest in a wide range of sectors from healthcare to agtech technologies.

Interestingly enough, the change in plans comes only months after Maris stated that he thought there is a “huge bubble” in the investment world in an interview with Bloomberg in December 2016.

“I think that there is almost too much capital available to investors, making too much capital available to entrepreneurs; which raises prices, which raises expectations, and there are a lot of people working on what I would think of as trivial problems as opposed to the real problems that the country faces,” Maris said during the interview.

Indeed, the New York Times reports that there is $121 billion of capital being held for deployment to venture capital investments, according to Goldman Sachs. But in the end, Maris said that worthy potential investment opportunities are still out there.

“We’re looking at unprecedented opportunities that can have impact and can be at a scale that were not totally imaginable in the past,” Maris said.

-Lynda Kiernan

Lynda Kiernan is Editor with GAI Media and daily contributor to GAI News. If you would like to submit a contribution for consideration, please contact Ms. Kiernan at lkiernan@globalaginvesting.com.