In the venture community and at Google Ventures, do you think you can help with these problems?

I hope so. If you don't know someone with cancer, you probably will eventually, sadly. We have this powerful lever at Google Ventures, which is to invest $200 million a year. This is a huge lever. It's not all going into one place, it's going into lots of start ups and founders and entrepreneurs, all of which are levers to try and change the world in one way or another. One way we can try and improve our existence on earth as it spins around the sun is to try and help people live longer, healthier, happier lives, have more time with their loved ones.

For you, why venture as opposed to, say, working for the NIH or for the White House?

I contemplated a career at NIH at one point. I have a neuroscience background. Lots of people are making a difference in the academic world doing government-funded research. So there are lots of ways to do it. I find this path I'm on to be a particularly leveraged way. Commercial enterprises, when they're successful, tend to make really big impacts and scale in a way that non-profits sometimes have a more difficult time doing.

Do you even consider yourself a venture capitalist in the traditional sense? For one thing, you don't have lots of limited partners that invest in your fund.

We have just one, Google. We really tried to reinvent what it means to be a venture capitalist. We're interested in smaller companies with a potential upside and with creating large, scalable companies. And we have this really risk-leaning LP (Limited Partner), Google, that always says: "We don't want to do what everyone else is doing." So do I think of myself as a venture capitalist? Not really. I think of myself as an entrepreneur.

What makes you so confident that what happens here in Silicon Valley is going to change the world?

For one, you can certainly point to a long list of companies and innovations that have come out of the Valley. There's a different mindset here than in other places. Silicon Valley has been a technology capital like New York is a financial capital. Here it's about the future and inventing new things. I'm super optimistic about that because I see the hundreds of entrepreneurs a year that come in here, some that we fund, that are going to do amazing things.

You mentioned the impact of poverty and malnutrition in the health space. Does that optimism you have extend to solving some of these problems?

Sure. I think as a human you have to be. Otherwise you'd just kind of give up. One of my aunts had polio. She's in a wheelchair, and now polio in this country is unheard of. We live in a world now where smallpox doesn't exist. There are bacteria that would have killed you years ago, and now you take antibiotics, and you're going to be fine. Is that available broadly enough in the world? No. But if you think about how we define poverty in this country compared to a hundred years ago, I'm incredibly optimistic that the sweep of things over time is in the right direction.