Mary Meeker
Encyclopedia
Mary Meeker is an American venture capitalist and former Wall Street
Wall Street
Wall Street refers to the financial district of New York City, named after and centered on the eight-block-long street running from Broadway to South Street on the East River in Lower Manhattan. Over time, the term has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, or...

 securities analyst primarily associated with the Internet. She is a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Meeker became known as "Queen of the Net" after being dubbed so by Barron's Magazine
Barron's Magazine
Barron's is an American weekly newspaper covering U.S. financial information, market developments, and relevant statistics. Each issue provides a wrap-up of the previous week's market activity, news reports, and an informative outlook on the week to come....

in 1998.

Meeker was born in Portland
Portland, Indiana
-Demographics:As of the census of 2000, there were 6,437 people, 2,739 households, and 1,750 families residing in the city. The population density was 1,566.8 people per square mile . There were 2,928 housing units at an average density of 712.7 per square mile...

, Indiana
Indiana
Indiana is a US state, admitted to the United States as the 19th on December 11, 1816. It is located in the Midwestern United States and Great Lakes Region. With 6,483,802 residents, the state is ranked 15th in population and 16th in population density. Indiana is ranked 38th in land area and is...

, and holds a B.A.
Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...

 in psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...

 from DePauw University
DePauw University
DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, USA, is a private, national liberal arts college with an enrollment of approximately 2,400 students. The school has a Methodist heritage and was originally known as Indiana Asbury University. DePauw is a member of both the Great Lakes Colleges Association...

 (1981) and an M.B.A. in finance
Finance
"Finance" is often defined simply as the management of money or “funds” management Modern finance, however, is a family of business activity that includes the origination, marketing, and management of cash and money surrogates through a variety of capital accounts, instruments, and markets created...

 from Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

 (1986). In addition, she received an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from DePauw University.

Career

In 1982, Meeker joined Merrill Lynch
Merrill Lynch
Merrill Lynch is the wealth management division of Bank of America. With over 15,000 financial advisors and $2.2 trillion in client assets it is the world's largest brokerage. Formerly known as Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc., prior to 2009 the firm was publicly owned and traded on the New York...

 as a stockbroker. After graduate school, she began as an analyst covering the technology sector at Salomon Brothers
Salomon Brothers
Salomon Brothers was a bulge bracket, Wall Street investment bank. Founded in 1910 by three brothers along with a clerk named Ben Levy, it remained a partnership until the early 1980s, when it was acquired by the commodity trading firm Phibro Corporation and then became Salomon Inc. Eventually...

 in 1986. She worked for Cowen during 1990-1991 before moving to Morgan Stanley
Morgan Stanley
Morgan Stanley is a global financial services firm headquartered in New York City serving a diversified group of corporations, governments, financial institutions, and individuals. Morgan Stanley also operates in 36 countries around the world, with over 600 offices and a workforce of over 60,000....

 to specialize in covering the personal computer
Personal computer
A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...

 and consumer software industries.

In the early 1990s, while spending time with Ray Ozzie
Ray Ozzie
Raymond "Ray" Ozzie is an American software industry entrepreneur who held the positions of Chief Technical Officer and Chief Software Architect at Microsoft between 2005 and 2010...

 and Jim Manzi of Lotus Notes
Lotus Notes
Lotus Notes is the client of a collaborative platform originally created by Lotus Development Corp. in 1989. In 1995 Lotus was acquired by IBM and became known as the Lotus Development division of IBM and is now part of the IBM Software Group...

 and Steve Case
Steve Case
Stephen McConnell "Steve" Case is an American businessman best known as the co-founder and former chief executive officer and chairman of America Online . Since his retirement as chairman of AOL Time Warner in 2003, he has gone on to build a variety of new businesses through his investment...

 of America Online and watching a demo by John Gage
John Gage
John Burdette Gage was the 21st employee of Sun Microsystems, where he is credited with creating the phrase "the network is the computer." He served as Chief Researcher and Vice President of the Science Office for Sun, until leaving on June 9, 2008 to join Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as a...

 of Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...

, Meeker began to appreciate that online connectivity could transform the way people communicate as well as the operation of all industries. She became known as an early Wall Street champion of the Internet.

In August 1995, Morgan Stanley (with Meeker as research analyst) served as lead manager for the initial public offering
Initial public offering
An initial public offering or stock market launch, is the first sale of stock by a private company to the public. It can be used by either small or large companies to raise expansion capital and become publicly traded enterprises...

 of Netscape Communications. Later that year, Meeker and Chris DePuy at Morgan Stanley, published "The Internet Report," a landmark Morgan Stanley industry report which became known as "the bible" for investors in the dot com boom and went into popular circulation - as a book, and on the web.

Over the years, Morgan Stanley published similar landmark reports led by Meeker on online advertising, e-commerce, evolution of search, the Internet in China, and the mobile Internet. In August, 2004, Morgan Stanley (with Meeker as research analyst) served as lead manager for the initial public offering of Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

.

Meeker was characterized by Andy Serwer in Fortune magazine in 2006 as "absolutely first rate when it comes to spotting big-picture trends before they come into focus. She gathers massive amounts of data and assembles it into voluminous reports that, while sometimes rambling and overambitious, are stuffed with a million jumping-off points." Meeker is often credited for her comprehensive, rapid fire, annual Internet industry overviews at the Web 2.0 conferences in San Francisco each Autumn.

In February 2011, Meeker created and compiled 'USA Inc.,' a non-partisan report that looked at the U.S. government (and its financials) from a business perspective.

Successful stocks Meeker championed early on included Dell, Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

, Intuit, Netscape
Netscape
Netscape Communications is a US computer services company, best known for Netscape Navigator, its web browser. When it was an independent company, its headquarters were in Mountain View, California...

, AOL
AOL
AOL Inc. is an American global Internet services and media company. AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York. Founded in 1983 as Control Video Corporation, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services...

, Amazon.com
Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...

, Yahoo!
Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...

, eBay
EBay
eBay Inc. is an American internet consumer-to-consumer corporation that manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a broad variety of goods and services worldwide...

 and Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

. Failed picks included AOL
AOL
AOL Inc. is an American global Internet services and media company. AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York. Founded in 1983 as Control Video Corporation, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services...

 after its takeover
Takeover
In business, a takeover is the purchase of one company by another . In the UK, the term refers to the acquisition of a public company whose shares are listed on a stock exchange, in contrast to the acquisition of a private company.- Friendly takeovers :Before a bidder makes an offer for another...

 of Time Warner
Time Warner
Time Warner is one of the world's largest media companies, headquartered in the Time Warner Center in New York City. Formerly two separate companies, Warner Communications, Inc...

, Excite@Home, and drugstore.com
Drugstore.com
Drugstore.com is an Internet retailer in health and beauty care products headquartered in Bellevue, Washington. Its web operations were launched on February 24, 1999....

.

Meeker was vilified in the press as one of a number of star analysts who were questioned in fraud investigations after the bursting of the dotcom bubble in 2000. Meeker was not charged with any wrongdoing. Morgan Stanley and nine other investment firms were compelled to participate in a global legal settlement
Global settlement
The Global Settlement was an enforcement agreement reached on April 28, 2003 between the SEC, NASD, NYSE, and ten of the United States's largest investment firms to address issues of conflict of interest within their businesses-Settlement Decision:...

.

During Morgan Stanley's tumultuous period in April, 2005, when CEO Phil Purcell's management decisions were being intensely scrutinized, Meeker, along with colleagues Steve Roach, Byron Wien, and Henry McVey wrote a letter to then co-presidents Zoe Cruz
Zoe Cruz
Zoe Cruz is a Greek-born American senior banking executive and former co-president of Morgan Stanley. In 2006, she was on the list of Forbes' 100 Most Powerful Women of the World and ranked the #10 spot. She was known as the highest paid and most powerful woman on Wall Street.-Early life:Cruz was...

 and Steve Crawford that expressed their concerns about the damage to the culture of the firm. Randy Smith brought the basics of the letter to the public in "The Wall Street Journal" in May, 2005. In turn, the letter served as an important catalyst in increasing the focus of the board of directors on the depth of challenges facing Morgan Stanley at the time. In June, 2005, John Mack was named CEO of Morgan Stanley, replacing Phil Purcell. A copy of the letter is included in Patricia Beard's book "Blue Blood & Mutiny" published by HarperCollins, 2007.

Meeker was named "one of the ten smartest people in tech" by "Fortune" magazine in 2010.

In December, 2010 Meeker left her position as a managing director at Morgan Stanley and head of the bank's global technology research team to become a partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

External links

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