goal is to help the Mark Pincuses of the world build their businesses into Internet treasures, and there has been no greater finder of Internet treasures than Mary Meeker,” said KP’s John Doerr in an early morning call with TechCrunch, just after Meeker broke the news to Morgan Stanley’s technology and Internet practice– a force on Wall Street where she’s made her name over the last 20 years.

As an analyst, Mary Meeker was as famous in the dot com glory days as Doerr was as a VC, so it’s appropriate and seemingly a long time coming that the two would wind up as partners. Meeker said she’d thought about making the change “from the skybox to coaching down on the field,” as Doerr described it, for years. Meeker has been in talks with the firm since late September and made the firm decision to leave Morgan Stanley and join KP the Monday before Thanksgiving. She was swayed finally by a combination of factors including confidence that Morgan Stanley’s tech practice was in a strong place, the opportunity with Kleiner specifically and the stage the Internet is in right now.

It’s a tough market with huge spoils. She spoke about the heady combination of the mobile innovation being built on the iPhone and Android platforms with the surging billion-person-plus worldwide Internet audience, combined with a savvier class of entrepreneurs than the industry has seen before and CEOs of companies like Google, Amazon and Apple who are smart, paranoid, and not willingly going to cede any ground to upstarts.

For Kleiner, it marks another stake in its reinvigorated Web franchise: First it was the hire of Bing Gordon who did KP’s most brag-worthy Web deal with Zynga, then the iFund, then the sFund and now the addition of Meeker. A few years ago, Kleiner seemed to be deemphasizing the Web to focus more on opportunities in cleantech, but the news today is just another signal of how serious Kleiner is about this market opportunity. “This third wave of disruption of social and mobile has meant that digital investing has taken on a new prominence in Kleiner,” Doerr says.

Meeker will be based in Silicon Valley, but will travel between the Valley and New York and Asia. We spoke a bit about the role Meeker will play between the United States and Asia– given that many venture firms keep their Valley and China franchises pretty distinct from one another. Meeker first dug into China in the early 2000s and was stunned by the deep cultural changes the Web was having in the massive country. “You could take the Internet enthusiasm that was happening in 1999 and 2000 here in the US and China was three to five times more ebullient,” she says. “I thought, ‘My gosh, this is not about a garden variety technology change, this is about cultural change.’” Meeker noted that Chinese Web giants and Valley entrepreneurs have their hands full in their home markets, but in the next five to ten years the two will be colliding– or potentially merging– more.

It’s not that Kleiner hasn’t been serious about Asia before. It has an eight-partner team in China. But when DNA Sciences acquired ngmoco and returned the whole iFund, the importance of Asia was certainly hammered home, Doerr says. “Mary is the most eloquent in saying this market isn’t just about social meets local meets mobile, but meets global as well,” he said.

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Authors: Sarah Lacy

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