How Silicon Valley’s Elites Hatched Their MultiBillion-Dollar Scheme to Cure Death
Google, Kleiner Perkins, and some of biotech’s biggest players aligned to create Calico, a company that wants to halt aging
The evening of October 18, 2012 was warm and cloudless the way Silicon Valley evenings often are. Apple chairman Art Levinson had just departed Laurene Jobs’ home and was motoring along in his aging Lexus to see Google’s then-CEO Larry Page and a few others, for dinner at his house in Palo Alto. Laurene was Steve Jobs’ widow, and Levinson had driven down earlier from San Francisco to review a few matters with her.
On and off, Levinson had been thinking about the get-together with Page. He was skeptical, but that wasn’t unusual for him. He was always skeptical. But this particular idea… well, it was intriguing. Very intriguing.
A few weeks earlier, Bill Maris had contacted him, and that had led to the dinner. Maris was the head of Google Ventures, a fund that since 2008 had thrown hundreds of millions of dollars at startups like Uber, Nest, 23andMe, and a long catalog of others. Together, those businesses had made Maris one of the most successful venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.
