How ambitious can a guy get?

Not content with picking winners and losers in the volatile world of high-tech, John Doerr thinks he can re-engineer society too. His agenda is simple. First he'll fix the schools, then upgrade the skills of American workers and-who knows? -maybe finish off by bringing racial harmony to the land. And he won't even break a sweat because his ideas compute. Or so he beeps.

Only those out of radio contact with the digital world need an introduction to Doerr, a partner in the top-drawer venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins, based in Menlo Park, Calif. Doerr is arguably the shrewdest, quickest and most celebrated venture capitalist alive. He's the Bill Gates of high-tech finance, or so say a stream of cheerleaders, from The New Yorker to Wired to The San Jose Mercury News, his local rag. Doerr doesn't just write checks, his fans insist; he actually concocts strategies and tactics, gazes into the future of technology, even hand-picks the executive team for his new ventures. While he has had his share of misses, his hits are tremendous. They include Sun Microsystems and Netscape.