"It's an Addictive Life"

Earnest, hard driving and highly motivated, the rising young stars of venture capitalism aim for big personal and financial rewards. A look at four achievers:

John Doerr. On a clear day, Doerr can look down from his 35th-floor corner office in Embarcadero Center on the sailboats plying San Francisco Bay. Taking in the view may be the only truly restful thing that Doerr, 34, normally ever does. He has been a relentless overachiever since he joined the blue-chip San Francisco venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 1980. Three years later Doerr became one of five general partners (there are seven today). Among the companies that he has spotted for investment are Cypress Semiconductor, Sun Microsystems and Businessland, all Silicon Valley firms involved in various aspects of the computer field. Doerr's choices have earned an estimated $260 million in venture profits. Nonetheless, Doerr insists, "money is not a goal. I enjoy building things with other people."

Doerr has shown talent at that ever since his days at Rice University in Houston, where he earned a master's degree in electrical engineering. He started a computer-software company during his sophomore year. While picking up an M.B.A. at Harvard, Doerr worked 20 hours a week at Intel, the & semiconductor firm. When he has time, Doerr relaxes with his wife Ann in their fashionable Pacific Heights home, and he declares himself "more interested in making new technology successful than in the technology itself."

Jennifer Lobo. By all rights, Lobo should be a microbiologist. "I fell in love with the field in high school," she says, after reading The Double Helix by Nobel Laureate James Watson. Lobo majored in microbiology at the University of California, Berkeley, and took advanced courses in bacteriology and immunology. Says she: "I was really quite a good laboratory scientist." The experience stands her in good stead as she crisscrosses the continent, working 14-to-18-hour days. Lobo, 31, keeps tabs on a handful of health-care firms for Domain Associates, the Princeton, N.J., venture capital firm that she helped found in 1985.

Lobo was working at a biomedical laboratory in her native Maryland when she decided in 1976 that she could make more money by using her scientific background in a business career. After earning an M.B.A. at the University of Chicago, she was recruited by Ohio's Standard Oil to help found Vista Ventures, a venture capital firm with headquarters in New Canaan, Conn. She helped finance the Liposome Co., an enterprise specializing in the production of small membranes used to assist in administering medications and one of the biotechnology industry's hottest success stories. One of Lobo's current favored companies is Biomagnetic Technologies in San Diego, which has developed diagnostic imaging equipment to read brain functions. Nonetheless, she predicts that "it will probably be another three to five years before I can say this or that company was a big hit."

Bryan Cressey. When Cressey, 36, was growing up in Seattle, he developed a deep admiration for professional risk takers. "I always heard about these successful entrepreneurs who went to Harvard Business School," he says, "so I wanted to go too." After graduating from Harvard in 1976 with both an M.B.A. and a law degree, he decided to become a venture capitalist, but "there were no jobs in the field and no prospects of getting any." Then a professor introduced him to Stanley Golder, president of First Chicago's venture capital arm.

That encounter eventually led to the formation of Golder, Thoma & Cressey, a Chicago venture capital firm that started business in 1980 with $60 million. Now the partnership manages two funds worth $160 million. Cressey rides herd on nine companies, primarily in the health-care industry, including his most promising current venture, Continental Medical Systems, a nursing-home operator. "In the office, we spend all our time juggling phone calls from CEOs, dealing with problems from hiring to firing," he says. "You've got to change your mind-set quickly from one company to another." Cressey spends his free time on a five-acre suburban spread 40 miles northwest of Chicago with his wife Christy and three children. But even at home, Cressey says, "I'm always thinking about a company's problems. It's an addictive life."

David Croll. The most important ingredient in venture capitalism, says Croll, 38, is "backing the right people." So far, he has proved to be remarkably good at that. A managing partner of Boston's TA Associates, a firm that currently handles more than $500 million in venture funds, Croll teamed up in 1979 with a young Boston entrepreneur named Steven Dodge, who wanted to make a mark in the cable-television industry. With TA's money and strategic guidance, Dodge became founder and chairman of American Cablesystems, an enterprise now worth more than $200 million. For his part, Croll became the communications specialist within TA. Of the 45 fledgling companies he has nursed along, he says, only one, a cable-television firm, has ever gone sour.

Raised in Darien, Conn., Croll earned an engineering degree from Cornell University in 1970 and a Harvard M.B.A. in 1973. His first job was with the Bank of Boston, but he left after three years to join TA, where he felt he could "have an impact." Now Croll, who is married with one child, works ten- and twelve-hour days and spends one of every four weeks on the road, a pace that he calls "deliberate." A fervent advocate of free enterprise, Croll believes that "most of the job creation in this country is coming from small growth companies. That is why America is doing as well as it's doing."