Mary Meeker and three partners are leaving Kleiner Perkins to form a new firm; sources describe clashes between early and late stage groups at Kleiner Perkins
Meeker is leading an exodus in a huge split at one of Silicon Valley's most famous firms. — Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins …
Context & Ripple Effects
Mary Meeker's exit is the second time in two years Kleiner Perkins has lost an entire investing team: in 2017 it shut down its $4M KPCB Edge seed program after all three of that program's partners departed. Sources now describe the same fault line running through the firm itself — a clash between the early-stage and late-stage groups — with Meeker and three partners taking the growth side out the door.
The move matters because Meeker is the firm's most famous name, and because her new firm is aimed squarely at the growth-stage business she ran at Kleiner. Within weeks she was reportedly raising around $1.25B for a new growth fund, putting her in direct competition with her former employer for the same deals and the same limited partners.
First-order effects
- Kleiner Perkins loses its marquee investor and its entire late-stage partnership overnight, leaving the firm without a growth franchise while Meeker's team starts fundraising as a rival.
- Limited partners who backed Kleiner's growth strategy must now choose between re-upping with a diminished Kleiner or following Meeker into an unproven vehicle.
Second-order effects
- Kleiner's response, per later coverage, was to double down on early stage — raising a $600M fund focused on seed through Series B as its first vehicle after the departure — effectively ceding the growth-stage lane to Meeker's firm.
- Growth-stage founders and their existing investors gain a fresh source of large checks, but face a bidding dynamic where two firms with shared history compete for the same late-stage rounds.
Third-order effects
- The pattern — KPCB Edge's collapse, then Matt Murphy's earlier departure after the Pao case, then this split — points toward multi-stage firms breaking apart along stage lines, with star partners spinning out stage-specialized funds rather than coexisting inside one partnership.
- If the split holds, Silicon Valley's brand-name firms increasingly compete not as full-lifecycle investors but as specialists, forcing LPs to assemble stage coverage across multiple firms instead of one relationship.
The trend: Venture capital's largest partnerships are splintering into stage-specialized firms, as marquee investors like Meeker take their franchises out rather than share economics across early and late stage.