Joe Kraus

Joe Kraus is a two-time founder turned venture investor. He graduated from Stanford University in 1993 with a BA in political science and, that same year, co-founded the pioneering internet company Excite with Graham Spencer and five engineering friends. Excite became one of the earliest and largest web portals, going public in 1996 before collapsing in the dot-com bust (the company declared bankruptcy in 2001). Kraus also co-founded the nonprofit DigitalConsumer.org in 2000 to advocate for digital fair-use rights.

In 2004 he co-founded JotSpot, an early "application wiki" company, and served as its CEO. Google acquired JotSpot in 2006, and Kraus joined Google as a Director of Product Management (2006–2009), where he led OpenSocial, Google's effort to create open API standards for social networking platforms.

In 2009, Kraus became a partner at GV (Google Ventures), where he spent roughly nine years (2009–2018) as a General Partner focused largely on transportation/logistics, marketplaces, and consumer companies. In November 2018 he left full-time investing to become the first Chief Operating Officer of Lime, the micromobility (e-scooter/e-bike) company, later serving as its President overseeing product, technology, hardware engineering, supply chain, and software. He has continued to be affiliated with GV as a Venture Partner, and has long been active as an angel investor in early-stage technology companies. He also served on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (joining in 2006).

• Invests at seed through early growth stages, historically concentrated in transportation tech, marketplaces, and consumer internet — sectors where he has operating depth.
• Backs strong technical founding teams building products with potential to define or reshape a category, consistent with his own path founding Excite and JotSpot.
• As a GV partner he led mobility/logistics bets (most notably Lime, which he later joined operationally), reflecting a thesis that the movement of people and goods is a durable, large-market opportunity.
• Personally writes small angel checks into early consumer and platform companies (e.g., LinkedIn, Kongregate), favoring founders solving problems he understands as a builder.