The Ledger
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Peter Thiel Called Tesla a Bankrupt Idea Before Model S Shipped
“So like Tesla, I remember famously Peter Thiel's are saying it's a bankrupt idea. The battery technology will never scale. Batteries will never improve. UVs will never work. And I was like, wow, that was just before the Model S. I mean, literally a week before…”
Jurvetson Has Never Sold a Single Share of Any VC Investment
“In fact, I've never sold a single share of anything I've invested in as a venture capitalist.”
Venture Funds With Over Seven Partners See Returns Plummet
“I don't think venture firms scale at all at headcount. One of the biggest things I've learned in the last 25 years is that team size is essential between two and five partners max. If you get to seven, you're at your limit. If you had more than seven partners,…”
Jurvetson Predicts VC Market Unraveling and Capital Scarcity by 2021
“I expect that we'll see that again, where things will feel just like you see in the public markets this time, as if nothing's happening. And then slowly but surely over the next year, this will all unravel and you'll have a period of scarcity.”
Founders Perform Better After Taking 10% Secondary Liquidity
“You can do a better job as a manager if you're not operating from a place of fear, and if you can take 10% or so off the table and sort of cover your nest egg, if you will, or your ability to live in Silicon Valley, if that's where you're based, for example, a…”
VC Industry Suffers From Severe Herd Mentality in Consumer Internet
“The venture industry has an abundance of herd mentality investors in what I call the crack of.com investing consumer internet enterprise software, where everyone has the same strategy and they don't seem to scratch their heads that they all have the same strat…”
Single-Sector Specialization Is a Fragile Long-Term Strategy for VCs
“Anyone who's in the venture business saying, I'm a domain expert, I'm only investing in X as an industry sector, I think that's a very fragile and brittle strategy over the time span of decades.”
Over 360 VC Firms Funded 200 Identical Small-Satellite Launch Startups
“There have now been over 360 venture firms that invested in space. They've invested in 200 nearly identical small site launch companies, for example.”
Entry Price Is Irrelevant When Backing Power-Law Winners
“If you made a routine error of entering two X too high, but you pick the right companies, then that two X too high doesn't matter, right? The entry price is irrelevant. What's much more important is betting on remarkable people and picking the right industry s…”
DFJ's Total Dot-Com Losses Were Less Than SoftBank's Buy.com Loss
“If you aggregate all of our losses from every loser that we did in the internet, it was much less than soft bank lost in a single investment with buy.com.”
Maximizing Shareholder Value Paradoxically Minimizes It in Tech Companies
“They're just kind of maximizing shareholder value. That's like the worst goal for a company. That's like almost paradoxically guaranteed to minimize shareholder value in technology, the business for sure.”
85% of Jurvetson's VC Hires Over 15 Years Were Women
“For example, of all the people I've hired into the venture industry over the last 15 years, and there's been a lot of them, about 85% have been women. The other was people of color, and all the people that I promoted on a venture track have been women.”
VC Investors Should Be More Risk-Seeking Than Startup Founders
“An investor should be more risk seeking than the entrepreneur. In other words, I can withstand the complete loss of an investment more easily than they can withstand the complete loss of their baby, right?”
Jurvetson Asks Founders for 20-Year Vision to Weed Out Opportunists
“I like to ask every entrepreneur somewhere towards the end of the first pitch meeting, what does the company look like in 20 years? And I got to tell you, I get responses all over the map. The worst is they look at me with incredulous eyes or even laugh at the…”
Jurvetson Evaluates His Market Timing on SpaceX and Planet Labs
“I think I was also early in synthetic biology, but I was probably just right on electric vehicles, probably just right on space with both SpaceX and Planet Labs and smallsats in general. And with what I call seller agriculture again, like growing meat in a bat…”
Jurvetson Avoided Nuclear Fusion for 25 Years Before Investing
“For 24 years now, actually 25 years, I've been waiting on the sidelines to invest in nuclear fusion because it was a science project... And we finally found one at MIT that turned it into a pure engineering exercise.”
A Fund's Top Company Equals All Other Returns Combined
“If you look at the power laws of portfolio returns in an early stage venture fund, both within the fund and across multiple funds, it is unbelievably consistent from Across firms. So you can aggregate all early stage venture. You can do all the early stage ven…”
90% of Enterprise Software Startups Pursue Trivial Improvements
“You can't be looking at pluggers that are just trying to make some middleware more efficient or Make ad matching a little better for Google, or what 90% of startups, frankly, are doing in the enterprise software space.”
Most Value in Tesla and SpaceX Was Created After Year 10
“At the 10 year mark was some of the greatest gains. If you look at, okay, at the 10 year mark, where it was Tesla, where it was SpaceX. And there were many, many billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars of value creation still to come.”
DFJ Completed 33% of All 1995–1996 Internet Venture Deals
“Strangely in 95 to 96, we did a third of all internet investments for the entire venture industry. Not in dollar amounts, but just sheer number of deals. So we literally were a third of the market.”
Steve Jurvetson Lost 90% of His Net Worth in Dot-Com Crash
“Lost about 90% of my net worth in the dot com crash.”
Two-Thirds of Dow Jones Companies Were Founded During Recessions
“For example, two thirds of the Dow Jones Industrial Average companies were founded during a recession, right? Or major recession or depression.”
Capital Scarcity Builds Healthier Startups by Forcing Customer Focus
“It's a healthier environment when capital is scarce and you iterate with customers, not chasing the next financing round.”
Great Founders Prioritize Mission Over Short-Term Financial Logic
“You want someone who's so deeply tied to their mission that they don't think about sort of the common logic of what's the best financial decision in the moment. And so that's why we look for that personality type in founders, because it correlates to this exac…”
SpaceX and Planet's 2015 Fundraising Doubled All Prior Space VC
“So we invested in two, exactly two space companies, Planet and SpaceX. They raised 1.1 billion dollars in 2015, and that alone was double all venture capital in the space sector combined forever, meaning prior.”
Jurvetson Structured Future Ventures as a 15-Year Venture Fund
“We took that into account when we were forming Future Ventures. We made it a fifteen-year fund instead of 10 years.”
Every Venture Fund at DFJ Extended to 15 to 17 Years
“Every venture fund I've ever been involved with back in my former employer went out to a full. 15 to 17 years. And when it's still going at 17 years, it's like none of them were done at 10.”
Jurvetson Has Pledged 99% of His Personal Wealth to Charity
“And then as wealth has accumulated now, it's like 99% of everything I own is pledged to charity in my will.”
In 20 Years Hardware Value Will Reside Entirely in Software
“You know, 20 years from now, it's all going to be about the software layer, and minimizing the physical thing is what gets you there.”
Elon Musk Never Loses Conviction Despite Catastrophic Rocket Failures
“Has no lapse whatsoever in the conviction that this will work in the face of catastrophic failures, and ultimately is vindicated.”
Jurvetson Names Antonio Gracias as Most Value-Add Board Member
“On the positive vector, I'd say Antonio Gracias of Valor. Certainly the most value-added board member I've sat with”
Synthetic Lymph Nodes Will Enable Full 3D-Printed Organ Transplants
“That is just the stepping stone, we believe, to the whole field of organ transplants and organ enhancements over time.”